June 24 - 25 - Prince Rupert to Ketchikan

Fairly Calm Seas crossing from Rupert to Ketchikan

Old Lighthouse enroute to Ketchikan

Green Island Lighthouse

The winds forecast for the previous day did indeed blowup today. We have until noon to find another place to stay as the docks are again fully booked up. To the right of Prince Rupert YC is the public dock and we see that it is completely empty, so we all sidle our boats back to the public dock and we have a plan in place should all the gillnetters come in during the day. There appears to be an unwritten rule while using public docks that the Fish Boats deem to have first right of docking, regardless of who has paid or not, the danger in being on the dock is that you could be awakened in the middle of the night by a raft of six fish boats just tying to your boat and rafting out. We certainly don’t mind the rafting, but this is a very bumpy place and one teak incident on the trip was enough. We plan to raft up ourselves so that we could come and go if we wanted to. Dave & Penny head off to the museum, Wayne & Cathy head up to get some repairs done to their Auto Pilot and Mike and Betty just puttered around the boat.
As drinks and dinner time, no fish boats showed up so we stayed put until round 11:00 pm, when the first of the fishboats showed up. He was a black cod fisherman from Queen Charlottes, so we purchased some fish to have as one of our tasty meals later in the week. We decide that we cannot chance being locked in, so we pull off the public dock and sidle back over to Prince Rupert YC for the night, good thing we had lots to drink between the wind and waves rocking us all night.
We decide at 6:00 am, that there is a window of opportunity and we head out through Metlakatla Pass to head to Ketchikan. We have decided that we have seen plenty of bears and we will bypass Khutzamateen for another time.