Our Last Class

Thursday, June 7, 2007
While at the dock in Ketchikan we attended the Friday night hamburger feed at the Yacht Club. Always fun to meet new boating folks. This time we met Jon Cornforth, photographer extraordinair. He and his dad had arrived in Ketchikan on their little Sea Dory. To provide extra room they had a Yakima cartop carrier mounted on their hardtop. Check out Jon's pics at cornforthimages.com I am the proud owner of one of his prints that he gave me! Leaving Ketchikan we crossed a well-behaved Clarence Strait to the tiny village of Kassan on Prince of Wales Island (the third largest island in the U.S.) As we pulled into the dock to raft onto DX the ferry, Prince of Wales, caused a large wake that rocked both boats crashing them together. Our rail hit Ernie's antenna and broke the outer PVC pipe. We were thankful that the sending and receiving functions still worked, and Ernie was even more thankful. The next day Ernie took us through the village and onto a nice trail that took us to a totem pole park and an old cemetary. We wouldn't have even known that it was there without his guidance. 5-28-29 Continuing our exploration of new spots on POW we traveled on up Kassan Bay to Karta Bay where we found a buoy to tie to. In a bay that was supposed to provide protection, we found that the wind followed us in and rocked us for two days. We were able to watch a bear on the beach for most of the time we were there. Our next spot, Troller's Cove, was blissfully quiet and calm. We had another buoy to tie to and a forest service cabin to explore. Our next stop was Dora Bay in Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumlee???) Sound. We made a stop there to see the hosts of the NW Boaters' Ham Net, Darlene and Floyd. They have built themselves a very comfortable small home on a tiny island and seem to enjoy their isolated living conditions as they live there year around. On the way into their place, Ernie had a warning sound for an overheated engine. We stood by in glassy calm water while he checked on the problem. He seemed to be losing water in his engine as fast as he could put more in. He tried starting up again, but overheated within a few minutes. We tied alongside and gave DX her first tow. Darlene directed us to a neighboring dock where we tied up and had a good spot to work on the boat. It took about 2 hours to diagnose the problem and then not much time to fix it. It was a heater hose that had disintegrated. We acted as gophers for Ernie as he crawled around the tight quarters of his engine room to make repairs. Our plans as we left Dora Bay were to explore new bays and inlets on the east side of POW, but as we headed south we kept hearing weather warnings with that four letter word, gale, mentioned in the forecast. Because we were heading for the southern most point of Alaska and an open ocean rounding of Cape Chacon, we decided to forego our explorations and make the turn around the cape while the perfect weather gave us smooth water. Looking ahead several miles in the distance I could see what looked like a boat and then a very large splash of white. The thought crosed my mind that it was a submarine, but as we neared the cape we saw that it was a HUGE scary looking breaker over the rock that sits off the cape. We followed Ernie's lead and went between that and the shore, but that breaker still looked too close... After a fairly long run and the bad weather forecast predicted to hit in another day, we decided to stop in Nichols Bay just after rounding the Cape. We spent some time in the dinghies beachcombing on the warm, sunny afternoon. Found a sunken boat and managed to salvage some fenders and such. Our son, Greg, called it piracy; we call it salvage rights... 6-2 We moved up through the Barrier Islands and stopped at a little niche called Seth Cove, but then moved on to a new anchorage for both of us, Ruth Island. The next night we anchored up in Kassa to avoid SE gale winds. Well, the winds followed us again and we had gusts of almost 30 overnight keeping me up on anchor watch for a few hours. Our Bruce anchor did well and held both boats without any dragging. As we finished pulling our prawn traps just outside the bay, I spotted a bear on the beach and two little black dots nearby. As we ran over to take a second look, mamma ran her twins back into the woods. She continued to graze in the green grass and they soon wandered into sight again, our first sighting of twin bear cubs. On to Soda Bay. Only nine prawns in the trap overnight and Ernie had only a small cod. After 10 days in the almost complete isolation of the southern end of POW, we pulled into the delightful little no cruise ship town of Craig. We stayed two days to get laundry done, eat a burger and fries, get my hair cut, do some shopping and get lots of exercise as we had a half-mile walk to get off the dock. Beautiful 70 degree weather the first day, but then gray skies and 40 degree weather arrived.
Last Class crew Judy Bob Mac Dinghy Dock