Day 38 - Juneau to Tracy Arm

Shaman playing in the Bergs

Bubble Feeding Humpbacks

Photo D. Thompson

Being towed - Broken Motor (waaaaaaaahhhhh)

Photo D. Thompson

Haley Gunkholing in Ford's Terror with Mike

With the Crozier precious cargo on board (Haley), we head off back to Tracy Arm to start the trip south. There are commercial fish openings everywhere with seiners in one area, gillnetters in another area and trollers and long liners lazily inching along. We see lots of humpbacks but none very active. It’s a beautiful sunny day interspersed with a few rain showers. The seas are flat calm and we arrive in Tracy Arm in about 5 hours. We head off to Fords Terror to our favourite anchorage and everyone hops in their dinghys to go up the rapids into “Fords Terror” – we missed this particular section last time in as we simply ran out of time. I opt to stay on board and putter about. When we go out gunkholing and someone stays behind, we always leave the vhf radio on. But due to the area we are in, the radio contact is sporadic. I hear lots of yelling on the radio and wait in anticipation to hear what was going on in the inlet. One by one, they all make it back through the current driven river with Bob coming in last with something in tow. It appears that “Peaaire” (tender to Oceanaire) is peopleless and on a lengthy rope being towed in. There are some grumpy faces a missing piece of “skeg” (sp?) off of the bottom of Daves dinghy motor. And then the ribbing starts….. it appears that all of the dinghies very carefully went up river as there were large boulders to be traversed, and all but one of the dinghies when returning went slowly out. Peaaire was anxious to get back to the big boat as she lept over the waves and straight over a large boulder breaking the shaft on the bottom end of the motor. Always happy to help out a friend, we take on shore duty with Scupper with our dinghy. Surprisingly enough, I though if anyone was going to do damage to their dinghy, it would have been Mike (Crazy River Runner that he is) --- guess the calming influence of Haley was good for our dinghy!