Around-the-world Circumnavigation
Tag: Glacier Bay
In June my youngest daughter Louise travelled out to Alaska to join me onboard Sänna. To meet up with her I sailed Sänna the forty miles or so from Hoonah to Auke Bay just north of Juneau, all the way there worried about docking solo in the absolute chaos that is Auke Bay’s Edward Statten Harbour…
All photography Copyright ©️Louise Ungless
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Our latest VIDEO production details our voyage deep into the Glacier Bay National Park from Hoonah in Southeast Alaska during 2016. Crossing the Icy Straits in gale force winds of thirty-five knots made a splendid change from endless engine work… all three of us relished the challenge of intense sailing to seek shelter in Bartlett Cove, where we needed to validate our permits with Park Rangers who vigorously restrict the number of vessels allowed into the immense Glacier Bay area. With over 3.3 million acres of rugged mountains, frozen glaciers, temperate rainforest and exceptionally wild coastlines of the St Elias Mountain Range, Glacier Bay is an undoubted challenge for any sailing vessel.
We transported photographic and video equipment ashore to find and film Alaskan wildlife at its most extreme. Please take time to view this ten minute film production expertly produced by www.davidungless.com. Continue reading “Wild Alaska”
“If you do go there, and I really don’t think you should, if you do find the old mine and perhaps the young girl in the ragged white dress, if she begs you to take her with you, keep walking. Don’t listen or turn to look back, just keep walking…
That’s all I’m gonna tell you about that.”
Chichagof Island in southeast Alaska is huge, the second largest island in US territory. It’s a remote and wild place in a wilderness that is itself spectacular and largely unexplored; all of these mountainous islands create the fabled Inside Passage, the sheltered thousand-mile sea route stretching southwards from the Glacier Bay National Park and Skagway in the north to beautiful Vancouver and mighty Seattle in the south. Together with close-by Baranoff Island, almost impenetrable Admiralty Island, the more sedate Prince of Wales Island and numerous other islands, a small sailing vessel like Sänna could spend years exploring this region using the countless anchorages and remote fishing harbours hiding amongst the Sounds, fast flowing Straits and deep fjords.
Rugged Hoonah is much the largest settlement on Chichagof but not the remotest. There’s the infamous whiskey-watering-hole of Pelican… which is incredibly difficult to reach, the small hippie community of Elfin Cove and the rusting remains of the Chichagof Gold Mine, a ghostly camp hidden in the mists which many in Hoonah beg you not to visit, to not go there for a very good reason…
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“We have been repeatedly warned about the temperamental nature of grizzly bears and so it proved. Our grizzly project, which has been an incredible adventure so far, is on hold after a daunting encounter which Henry and myself are arguably lucky to survive… and Marie isn’t particularly amused either.” Dave.
Of course, at this time, as luck would have it, we weren’t filming anything. We’d anchored in Reid Inlet in extremely remote Glacier Bay, at the foot of the Reid Glacier which comes right down into the sea. We were totally alone, tucked nicely inside the shelter of a small headland spit with no other vessels in the vicinity. We’d only seen a small group of camping kayakers over the other side of the inlet and that was all. The location was about as perfect as we could ever imagine. This is what happened…
“The general rule is, if it’s a black bear try to fight back but if it’s a brown bear then hit the ground and play dead. So, remember this if attacked by a bear… ‘Brown go down, black fight back’. Of course, the chances are that you won’t survive in either case but bears are rarely predatory, you’re in their territory and they see you as the threat. Which in most cases is true, in many instances bears are simply shot dead for being where they at the wrong time – as a wrongly perceived threat.” Bear Attacks of Canada
Henry has now joined us onboard Sänna whilst in Sitka and he’s so pleased to be finally out of school for the summer. Braden, our good friend from the fishing boat Icy Queen also stopped by in Sitka to stock us with fresh halibut and he told us the Coho salmon were now arriving in large numbers before heading up the creeks. So Henry and I fished with a fly reel off the head of the Baranoff River and caught ourselves a large Coho for dinner. The bears are gathering beside the creeks for their annual salmon feast so our exciting project can finally get underway…
“Our good friend Ken onboard Island Rover said we’d need to penetrate the ice-flows calving from the John Hopkins Glacier if we wanted to somehow reach the huge Marjorie Glacier. He said it wouldn’t be easy. It wasn’t easy, but we did it, we did it by following the National Geographic vessel Sea Bird which cut a convenient path for us through the pack-ice. Once through this frozen barrier an incredible world opened up; we were all alone in this wild wilderness.”
Dave
We’ve produced a five minute video trailer of our sailing adventure from Hoonah on remote Chigacoff Island to the depths of Glacier Bay. We were joined by our best friend and step-brother Gary Cole who assisted in the filming of our amazing voyage… it’s a fascinating insight into wild Alaska.
Our full thirty minute long production will be released shortly. Please view our trailer for ‘FINDING ALASKA’… and please don’t forget to add your YouTube ‘Like’. You can also subscribe (free) to our newly launched SV Sänna YouTube Channel.
We have a series of video productions in the making, each detailing our liveaboard experience whilst in Alaska and British Columbia. These include ‘Bear Hunters of Alaska’, our planned filming this coming year of the extensive grizzly bear population on Chichagof Island and ‘Finding the Aleutians’, recording our anticipated voyage to the extremely remote Alaskan Aleutian Islands as we head north to the Arctics’ Northwest Passage.
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