Alaska 2021 - June 25 - June 27

 

Alaska 2021 – June 25-27

We left Gut Bay headed for Baranof Warm Springs.  It was another cold, grey day.

Baranof Warm Springs is a community built on a boardwalk next to the waterfall coming out of Baranof Lake. There is a boardwalk that takes you to a set of Hotsprings that are right by the outflow from Baranof Lake which is a beautiful lake.

We spent a great night at anchorage in Warm Springs Bay with a fantastic Salmon Dinner!

 

We left Warm Springs with much better weather.  It is 65 degrees which makes us feel guilty since we are hearing about 100 degrees in Seattle. Ugh! We stopped at a bay called Hidden Falls which is a private Not for Profit Fish Hatchery that we also stopped at in 2016. No tours available this year due to Covid but we got the chance to talk to a few of the workers about the facility.  There are always Grizzlies there this time of year waiting for the Salmon to return.  They have seen a few Kings and Coho so the Grizzly Bears are back each day looking for dinner! It is early in the season so they just got the first batch of Coho salmon from the Hatchery to the outdoor pens where they will stay for the next year growing until they are released to the sea. They had about 1 million are in the pen that is in the picture. They have about a 90% success rate of releasing them to the sea and about only 2-3% make it back to spawn.

From Warm Springs we headed over to Appleton Cove which will be our anchorage for the evening. It was full of Horseflies which are not fun but we did catch crab – only 1 keeper but Steve caught a bunch of small king crabs which we have never caught before and of course as non residents we can’t keep them anyhow but they were fun to see.

We left Appleton Cove headed to Kalinen Bay which is on the North side of Kruzof Island. To get there we went thru Peril Strait and Sergius Narrows.  We had to delay our departer from Appleton because the Narrows would have been running against us at 7 knots if we would have left before 10am. As it was we dropped from 10.1 knots to 5.6 during our transit thru the narrows and that was running at much higher rpm than of our normal 1250-1350. It was a beautiful day today.

Kalinen Bay had quite a few boats in it but was a nice overnight anchorage for us to be able to get John to Sitka for his 12:00 flight.  Steve, John and Tom went out fishing for a few hours and came back with a Ling Cod and several huge black Rockfish but no Salmon this time.  Glen, Liz, Jane and I went for a hike to a Lake above the bay and we saw a Grizzly bear and two cubs on the flats across from us. We decided Fish Tacos were a perfect choice for our last evening with John before we head to Sitka.