Day 5 Ketchikan to Juneau

DAY 5

Neil was up at 5am again and met a fellow who saw the mx5 symbol on Neil’s coat. He races mx5s so they talked for a while about cars. Then an announcement came over the loud speaker asking for Neil from Brisbane Australia to go to the purser’s office. We were worried but it turned out that the fellow Neil had been chatting to was the captain of the ship (without uniform) and he asked Neil to go up to the bridge to watch the crew in action and he now has both Neil’s and the club’s email addresses. The people you meet!!

At breakfast we watched a massive , black, multi-level ocean going cruiser (330 ft long) cruise back and forth near us. It is owned by a Vodka baron with more money than sense. It had come from Russia originally but the flag on the back said Georgetown, Jamaica. Either way, it was a long way from home and all of the travel would have been by motor. Maybe he owns an oil well as well.

We docked at Ketchikan at 7am for 3 hours so we took a taxi to the main area of town which was crowded because 2 cruise ships were in dock. The expensive cruise ships don’t go through the inside passage (too big) so they just enter in a few places where the water is deep enough. What a rip off!!!.

The taxi lady took us to historical Creek St where the entry passed over a creek and a waterfall and on the run out tide the salmon can be seen jumping upstream. We saw the ones “John West rejects” dead on the rocks on the side of the creek. Some of them were quite big but they had died trying to get up the waterfall. Ketchikan means stinky fish town for the locals so there must be lots that die trying. In the waterways the salmon are plentiful this year so the town is known as a small drinking town with a large fishing problem.

The Creek St area was the red light district and the hotel area in the prohibition era and the 2 main madams, Kitty and Dolly still offered services until old age. The taxi driver used to clean Miss Dolly’s house when she was a young girl and she said that when Miss Dolly died recently, they turned her house into a museum and Neil experienced how welcoming the bordello must have been in the past. A lovely mature lady dressed in her bordello finery on the front steps of Miss Dolly’s house offered him a Senior’s discount of only $5. I think it was for a tour but who can be sure. He quickly responded that he was in a hurry so she offered him a quickie and all of this happened on a Sunday morning.!!!

There were lots of stores with traditional crafts and souvenirs. The people were very friendly and we could have stayed for ages just reading the funny statements on Tshirts but we had to be back at the boat by 9.45. The taxi driver had said she would try to get back to pick us up at 9.15 but by 9.25 there was no sign of her . Luckily Neil spotted a bus which was going the right way and we made it back to the boat with 3 mins to spare- no stress at all!! (Well, less that when we were at Creek St with no taxi in sight)

We continued along the inside passage looking at spectacular tree-covered mountain scenery. We had blue skies, green mountains with pencil line top profiles, narrow cream waterline areas and the blue of the Marine Highway. There were miles of picture postcard landscapes.

We saw:

·         Many tugboats like scuffy pulling barges with huge loads of earth moving equipment and containers from ships

·         Small town of Wrangell which was originally a fur trading station but the Russians claimed it back until the Americans bought the whole of Alaska from them. It now relies on tourist activities for survival

·         The Wrangell Narrows: 1.5 hours after leaving Wrangell, the channel narrows and becomes shallow. The MV Commodore is the largest boat allowed to go through the narrow channel and it needs 27 ft of water at least under it so they only go through at high tide

·         Logs being held together in the water waiting to be transported by barge

·         Small town of Petersberg named after a Norwegian fisherman who was looking for a place with excellent fishing areas, good boat harbour, flat land to build houses, plenty of Cyprus fir trees for building and nearby glaciers to supply free ice for shipping the fish for export. He decided on Petersberg and invited his friends from Norway to come over to build the town and the business

·         Some small whale spouts, a river otter, a seal and some ocean otters

Tomorrow we have to be up and off the ship at 4.45 am so I’ll leave you for now