Taku Harbor and Auke Bay

Our plan, after leaving Sawyer Glacier, was to spend the night in Tracy Arm Cove, but our guide book (In anything stronger than light southerlies, Tracy Arm Cove receives quiet a chop and the icebergs enter it on a flood tide with gusto! ) and the weather forecast (15-20 southerlies overnight ...our favorite time for the winds to increase...) caused  of a change of plans.  We headed north in the late afternoon sunshine for Taku Harbor, nineteen miles south of Juneau, with its secure Alaska State Park float.

We’d been in Taku twice in 2007 and had fond memories.   Now we have more.  A number of local boats from Juneau and one other cruising powerboat were tied up at the float with kids and dogs in the water and folding chairs for the adults on the dock.  More locals who had been out fishing, joined us before, and after, dark.  It doesn’t get better than an 80 degree Saturday in Southeast.

We were advised to take care if we walked to the nearby Forest Service cabin; there was fresh bear scat on the trail.  Allie loved running on the dock with the kids, but every once in a while, I had to call her back from going on an unauthorized, unaccompanied Explore.

We met an Alaska native!!!  No, not an Alaskan Native.  Like "a Seattle native". Her husband has lived in Juneau for thirty years, so he considers himself a resident.  Most of the people we’ve met have moved here from somewhere else.  

The family that own this water-dog moved to Juneau from Lake City; I don’t think they’ll be going back.  The whole family loves to fish.  They gave us the two salmon their daughter had caught.  

There were two small open boats tied up at the dock.  In the morning, a man (carrying a rifle) and woman, who had camped on shore, appeared and fixed their breakfast on the dock.  Apparently, they didn’t want to share it with the brown bears.  Before they left (to go halibut fishing), they gave us a jar of smoked salmon.  Their boat was a typical aluminum skiff with an outboard.

The other boat was fiberglass and looked like it should be on a lake: a jet ski with two places to sit. Doug and I could not figure out who, what, why and how.  Who turned out to be two men who pilot whale watching boats out of Auke Bay.  (Listen to VHF Channel 68 for whale sightings.)  They had spent the night in a friend’s cabin.  Jeff told us that when he got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night (a.k.a. the porch) a brown bear was staring up at him.  That might have kept me awake for a while...

I don’t remember what make of boat it was, a small pickle fork hydroplane, 12 ft long at the most.  I believe it had a 14,234.8 horsepower engine.  They said that when they came down from Juneau on Saturday, they decided not to put on their wet suits; it didn’t seem like a macho thing to do (their words).  They were carefully zipped and Velcroed into those suits before they left Taku Harbor.

The why? The weather made them do it. They were re-thinking the how (and maybe the why) of traveling at 45mph.  They agreed that was a bit too much of an adrenaline rush and they’d take it slower (40?) going back.   FYI, the pictures do not adequately show the vastness of the open water they had to cross to get back to Juneau.

The cabin where they spent the night is never locked.  The owners decided that locking it might lead to someone breaking in.  Uninvited “guests” use it and leave notes and sometimes food.  Jeff and the boat’s owner found a $10 bill and a note on the counter: “Thanks for the vodka.”  There has never been any vandalism.

Mary Jane’s owners moved to Southeast from Burien.

We stayed until late in the morning, enjoying the sunshine and the opportunity to talk to someone other than our spouse. Greywolf  then headed for Funter Bay on Admiralty Island, which we had determined was about 35 miles away.  After we’d been underway for two or three hours, we looked at the chart again.  Funter Bay on Admiralty Island was about 35 miles away.  A Mistake Had Been Made.  We changed course and headed for Auke Bay.

Auke Bay, with the Mendenhall Glacier as a back-drop, is the favored transient moorage for Juneau although it is twelve miles out of town.  With “7,672 lineal feet (no individual slips) of open moorage”, you’d think it would be easy to find a place to put a chunky 40 foot boat.

“Open moorage” translates to NO ONE IS IN CHARGE. Except for boats over 50 feet (and there were a lot of them), all moorage is on a first-come, first-served basis. Boats come and go on the long docks, leaving various sizes of openings, only a few of which fit Greywolf.  Additionally, we need a “starboard tie”, since she only has a gate on the starboard side, through which I daintily step onto the dock with a line in my teeth.

We found a spot that required more than a little fancy helms-man-ship from Doug.  Greywolf came to us equipped with a bow thruster, an electric motor and propeller that allows the skipper to push the bow to port or starboard while docking.  In theory, if you push the bow to port, the stern will swing to starboard.  Try to dock using a theory.   And no part of Greywolf  “swings”.  She weights more than 50,000 pounds.  She may lumber, but swing...no.  It soon became apparent, that since she is now crewed by a short, non-athleteic  person, we needed more mechanical advantage.   

We had a stern thruster (That sounds almost lewd, or at least a bit tartish.  I guess it’s no worse than bow thruster.) installed last spring and give thanks for it every time we dock.  Doug can actually make the boat go sideways, when required.  

Greywolf’s stern thruster in the boat yard...before it became a home for sea grass.   The fancy guard it to protect it.

Boats over 50 feet.  ‘Way over.

We went for walkies, followed by a disgustingly unhealthy delicious dinner outside at a renowned (in the boating community) fast food establishment.  In the morning, we headed for Funter Bay (again), this time in the rain.