Day 14 ~ Ketchikan, Alaska

Work, work, work!  Both Dad and I spent hours working trying to get caught up before our guest arrived. Around noon, Gene McIntyre, a friend of Dads from Arizona flew in to join us on our adventure. He was greeted with typical Ketchikan weather…rain. After Gene got his gear stowed, we decided to wait for a break in the weather and then we scurried up the dock to Safeway for provisions.

Before we left Seattle, I provisioned the boat with all the canned goods that I thought we might need and filled the freezers. The advanced provisioning limited our port shopping to fresh fruits and vegetables, snacks, liquor and whatever else got tossed into the cart. While shopping, Dad found a box made by one of his competitors for one of his client’s, he broke the box down and put it into our cart so he could take it back to the boat for further inspection. Dad was much happier when we got to the seafood department and he found one of his boxes for sale.

Unfortunately, the $5.00 dock delivery that we read about in our book no longer existed. However, Dad had his handy dandy cart so we loaded it up and off we went down the ramp towards the dock. Dad was wheeling the cart and Gene was walking along side keeping the load from falling over, so they looked pretty funny. Things got really interesting when they got to the top of the ramp and realized how far down the tide had gone. Ever so gingerly they slid the cart down and then came a major squall and got everything soaked!

When we got back to the boat we tried our best to dry everything out before we put it away and then fixed dinner which consisted of Swedish Meatballs, corn on the cob and slaw.

After dinner I walked around the dock to take some pictures and a man on the dock told me that there were two humpback whales in the harbor right in front of our boat. We didn’t get to see them but I did get some cool pictures of two eagles. I also started taking pictures of boats that had the same name as our friends, which I thought might be fun.

We spent the remainder of the evening in servicing our new crew member, teaching him where the charts were stored, how they were folded, how to create a float plan and most importantly where the printer was in Dad’s stateroom so he could be the new ‘gofer’. We had already decided that our next adventure would be Misty Fjords, which is a National Monument that was established in 1978 and encompasses 2.2 million acres. We were expecting to be in the Fjords 4 or 5 days. We were planning on going crabbing and hopefully, salmon fishing.