Yakutat and beyond

Survey time...

Today I flew to Yakutat to meet the boat, the Northwest Explorer.  It’s a 160-something foot commercial trawler, and Ray is the Captain.  He’s a really great guy.  The boat can’t dock in Yakutat – not because it’s too shallow of a dock, I think the captain just doesn’t want to pay to dock and we don’t need to take on fuel or provisions.  So, he’s anchored off shore a bit, and they lower the smaller vessel with the crane and use that to ferry people to shore.  That is a first for me.  Since the doors we enter the big boat from are so high off the water, they actually lift the whole small boat with us in it to get us on and off the big boat.

From the airport we made a couple of quick stops at the hardware store to pick up a few items, then on to the boat so I could get an orientation of my sciency duties for the next 10 days from Wes, the guy I am replacing.  Then we all got off the boat and went to explore the Yakutat area (in the most disgusting, broken rental minivan I’ve ever seen, and there’s a lot of bad ones in Alaska…).  

The boat, with a photobomb by Kevin (a friend who's also one of the scientists on board for the survey).

Yakutat is known for its surfing.  There a big long beach on the Gulf of Alaska that gets big crashing waves, all year long.  We went to the surf shop for souvenirs, which feels a bit like cheating since we weren’t going to surf.  We did drive out to Cannon beach and watch the waves crash and do some beach combing.  There’s giant trees piled up on the beach out here, such an amazing amount of wave energy.  We walked along the beach for a bit, looking for glass balls (found none), then headed back to the car.  We wanted to check out one more thing before we had to be back at the boat…the Situk River.  We stopped at a native fish camp on the Situk river, and also drove to where the Situk River meets the ocean.  

Back on the boat, I got the most thorough boat safety orientation that I’ve ever had.  It was good to get though – we were heading out into some pretty yucky weather.

Our first sampling station wasn’t until the next morning, and it was close by, so the Captain decided to head into Yakutat Bay towards Desolation Bay.  Desolation Bay is where the Hubbard and three other glaciers meet the water.  It was very foggy, cloudy, and rainy for most of the trip up the bay, but we did eventually get some clearance and saw the glaciers, and lots of icebergs too.  We headed back to sea around sunset.