We have had amazing wildlife sightings every single day.  It’s easy to be spoiled by the excellent wildlife shows on television, but nothing… absolutely nothing beats the excitement of seeing wildlife from the deck of your own boat.  As we left Petersburg we saw these Stellers sea lions (bigger than California sea lions) piled on a buoy, barely lifting their heads to look at us as we passed by.Here’s a map to show the area where we’re currently cruising.We traveled through Frederick Sound on our way to Cannery Cove on Admiralty Island, and the Sound lived up to its reputation for whale sightings.  We saw whales all morning, broaching, crashing, and splashing.  Sometimes the whales were too far for camera lenses, but we saw quite a show with binoculars.  It’s amazing to see an entire humpback whale completely out of the water.  A little while later we had whales much closer to the boat, and we watched some humpbacks, including a mother and calf broaching and feeding.We headed into the anchorage at Cannery Cove, so named since it used to have a cannery on the shore though it’s gone now.  We had a long day of running so we had a quiet evening planned, but as we were fixing dinner we saw a brown (grizzly) bear on the shore, and we dropped what we were doing to watch him for a while.All that happened in just one day.  The next day we got the predicted rain and wind, but again in the evening around dinnertime the shoreline got interesting.  We saw one brown bear – he looked young – standing up and looking around.  They’re very funny looking when they stand (as long as you’re a safe distance away with binoculars).  After a while a bigger brown bear ambled along the shoreline and the younger one kept standing up to check on the bigger one.  Forget dinner… this is a great show!  Eventually the younger one loped away as the bigger one loped after him, but it looked like a half-hearted chase.

The next morning as we were leaving the anchorage, we saw several bald eagles hunting fish in the water.  Most were adults, but there was one younger bird.  It takes 4 years for an eagle to develop the white head and tail, and the younger birds look bigger because they have larger feathers – easier to learn to fly with, though less maneuverable.From Cannery Cove we headed to Red Bluff Bay on the east side of Baranof Island, hoping to see more bears and waterfalls.  I keep forgetting to mention the waterfalls – they’re everywhere.  Big ones, tiny silvery thread-like ones, small ones, loud ones… and the featured waterfall in Red Bluff Bay is really dramatic.We just loved Red Bluff Bay – I’ll post more photos in the next blog, but we enjoyed seeing a river otter, seals, trumpeter swan, harlequin ducks, and more brown bears.We had the bay all to ourselves for almost a whole day, then we were joined by another smaller cruising boat.  The next day we had two of the smaller cruise boats stop in for a few hours to visit, and the morning we left we saw the National Geographic Sea Lion come in for just an hour.  Although these smaller cruise boats are a fantastic way to see Alaska and get closer to the wildlife, I feel sorry for those people.  They come in and have to hope for a glimpse of some interesting critters during their brief stay.  They can enjoy the scenery but we have the luxury of staying in that magnificent setting for as long as we want – to see the cliffs in sunshine as well as with the moody feeling from mist or when low clouds hang on the mountains.  We can kayak and explore at all times of the day and states of the tide.  We have the time and opportunity to enjoy “dinnertime bears” and we count ourselves lucky to be able to do this.

Known as “Little Norway”, Petersburg is a fishing town on the NW corner of Mitkof Island.  Its proximity to the Le Conte Glacier made it a perfect place to establish a fishing community in the late 1800s, with the ready supply of glacial ice to keep the fish fresh for transport to Seattle and other markets. The area had been in use by native people as a summer fishing camp for 1000 years before.
As the new community grew in those early days, some of the Norwegians ended up marrying native Tlingit (pronounced “kling-get”) women, and the resulting blend is known as a “Tlingwegian” (pronounced “klingk-weegin”).  Established as a fishing community, Petersburg is still a fishing town with canneries in between the docks on the waterfront and a constant flow of boats coming in to offload their catch – halibut, salmon, crab, etc.  Everyone fishes, and we saw people of all ages on the dock jigging for herring to use as bait.  They start them young…
The fishermen are pretty friendly and they take a lot of pride in their boats. Commercial fishing boats suffer from hard use and they usually look it, but we noticed that most of the Petersburg boats were clean, tidy and very well cared for.  I hope they don’t run me out of town when they find out that I don’t eat seafood!  We’ve heard that there are a lot of pot luck dinners during the winter, and I’ll probably have to carry a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my pocket just in case.
The highlight of our visit was meeting up with a group of other cruisers, centered around Krogen friends Rolynn and Steve Anderson aboard INTREPID.  Rolynn writes suspense-romance novels and her latest book is set in Petersburg (“Lie Catcher”), so she stopped to do a book signing during their summer cruise through SE Alaska.  A number of other Krogens arranged to be in town for the festivities, and we were graciously included along with a nice couple on a Selene.  It was so nice to meet other cruisers as well as some folks who will be living aboard there for the winter – we had a lovely time, and reading Rolynn’s book in situ was great fun!
Across the Narrows from town there is a public dock and hiking trails, so we put the dinghy in the water and headed over to explore… prepared for bear, as always.
After a short hike through the forest we came out into a more open area known as “muskeg” – a bog comprised of sphagnum moss and peat, spongy and pocked with pools of water.  Trees and plants are stunted and sparse in the muskeg because of the acidic nature of the soil.  Luckily there was a narrow boardwalk to walk on, and the fishing net on the boards helps with traction – it rains a lot and wood is pretty slick when wet.  The boardwalk eventually led back into the forest and out to the edge of Petersburg Creek though there wasn’t much to see at dead low tide.  The locals like to kayak up the creek, but you have to head up an hour or two before high tide and you ride the current up, get as far as you can, and then let the flow of the creek and the outgoing tide carry you back out.  Parts of the creek are nearly dry at low tide, so you don’t want to get stuck up there – it’s a long wait.
I loved the muskeg and all the delicate little flowers so much that we came back the next morning so I could do some macro photography.  Jim came along to “keep me safe from bears”, I suspect, which is very sweet.  I was dressed in grubby clothes and knee pads since so much of what I wanted to photograph was very close to the ground.

Bog Laurel

Bog Orchid

Maidenhair Fern Fiddles