Gale warnings

July 13th to July 17th 2012

We stayed one night at Tracy Arm and woke up to more rain and poor visibility but decided to keep going to Petersburg. Left at 8AM and had fog and rain all the way till we arrived at 3:30

This cruise ship stopped just outside of Tracy Arm to transfer passengers to a tour boat

The passengers will enjoy a tour of the glaciers then rejoin their ship in Juneau

We saw a small pod of Orcas (Killer whales) on the way down, the first we have seen this year. All the other whales we saw so far have been Humpbacks.
We stayed one night in Petersburg. The forecast had some small craft warnings for the next morning but we decided to leave anyway as there are several safe anchorages along the way and we figured that if it got too bad we could stop in one of them.

Beacon in Wrangell Narrows

It's hard to tell where the channel zig zags around all the buoys and beacons

 As it turned out it was a beautiful sunny day, the wind was behind us and we even sat up top on the flybridge for a couple of hours for the first time this year. We also had some close encounters with whales en route.

Got the spash, missed the whale!

Big fluke

Humpback

More tail, he was close

It was a long day to Ketchikan,  8am to 6pm, 110 miles, our longest one day run ever.
We had only planned to stay overnight in Ketchikan but Sunday morning brought 3 days of gale warnings for Dixon Entrance, the open ocean crossing between here and Canada ,so we had to wait it out.