Days 78-80: Wrangell and Fool’s Inlet

Three days in one post! After Hole in the Wall, we had to stop in Wrangell for a couple nights to use their tidal grids. This is the first time we have ever tried this, and it was quite interesting. We have put a lot of hours on our engines, so we have frequent servicing requirements. Changing the oil in the lower unit/gear case and servicing the grease points is very hard when the boat is still in the water. To access these, we used the tidal grid to get our boat out of the water without a trailer or hoist.

We drove Wild North onto the tidal grid at high tide and tied her to the piles.

Six hours later, at low tide, the boat was out of the water and we could access to the bottom and lower engine units.

Unfortunately, the high tide was pretty low and the low tide was pretty high—giving us only about 6 feet of change—so the engines didn’t actually get above dry land and Ryan had to stand in the water while he did the servicing. In the rain. It was a pretty wet time; but with Ryan sacrificing his comfort for the engines and me assisting from the boat, we (mostly Ryan) got it done.

If you look closely, you can see Ryan standing in the water behind the boat.

Then we had to wait another six hours for the tide to come back in to refloat the boat. It was a long process. I used some of the time to get groceries and laundry, so it wasn’t all sitting in the boat waiting for the tide to turn.

With the engines happy, the refrigerator refilled, and clothes clean and fresh, we left Wrangell this morning to continue our adventures with a trip to Anan Wildlife Observatory, where we will (hopefully) see bears gathered to catch spawning salmon. Our permits are for tomorrow, so we wanted to anchor close to the observatory tonight for an early start in the morning. The trip down was all rain, fog, and low cloud.

We stopped for lunch in Berg Bay to let the opposing current we encountered in Blake Channel die down before checking out Anan Bay on the way to tonight’s anchorage. Fool’s Inlet is a pretty spot from what we can see, but clouds obscure a lot of the surroundings. For a while this afternoon the sun almost shone and I got this picture of the moment from the back of the boat.

By the time Ryan started making pizza for tonight’s dinner, the rain had started up again. Getting wet seems to be his destiny this weekend.

With all the rain, we’ll probably just lay low for the rest of the evening. Fingers crossed for good weather and lots of bears tomorrow!

This weekend’s routes (98 miles)