Before I knew it Dean woke me up so I could adjust my eyes and get orientated before we came into harbour. Being a clear night with a moon, we had some ambient light. It was about 0200 and it was freezing cold. There had been no aurora.
Taku Harbour is easy to come into at night. We could see on AIS that a small cruise boat was at anchor, in fact one we had seen in Glacier Bay. There is a jetty onshore you can tie up to, but we wanted to tie up to the floating jetty.
The floating jetty is quite large, and not attached to land, so boats can tie up both sides. We could see a small motor boat tied to one side so we came in on the far end of the other to try and not disturb them.
It was a very easy landing with plenty of room, so after a warm drink we were straight to bed with no reason to be up early in the morning. By the time we did wake up, all of the boats had left and we were the only ones left in the bay.
There used to be a cannery here, before the days of the use of tenders to get the fish back to the processing plant. So onshore there are the remains of that. There are also a number of cabins around the bay that you can hire.
We didn’t go to shore, we were just having a couple of lazy days to see out some bad weather before we continued on to Tracy Arm. We did go out onto the jetty though. Here is RTP docked.
It is quite funny because the only rules we could see was we had a 10 day limit, and not to store crab pots and other things on the dock. And the only thing on this pristine dock was a crab pot!
Looking onshore we could see a couple of large herons or cranes foraging. Unfortunately I was just a bit too far to get a clear photo of them. But they could see me and were definitely wary. I don’t think they would have let me get much closer.
On our second night we were joined by another yacht that tied up to the dock onshore. There were warnings not to leave any food up on deck if using that dock as the bears will climb onboard to get it! A super yacht also came in to anchor.
I took this photo as we were leaving harbour and you can see the floating dock a bit better. Nice and safe and bear free!
Just as an addition, for those who have been following our journey, you will know that our first port of call in Alaska was Adak in the Aleutians. I’d like to thank Mik from Adak for sending me this photo. Qantas was selling off some of its fleet and wherever they were going they had a rest/refuel stop as Adak!! I never thought I’d see a picture of a Qantas plane on the tarmac there.
Run to Paradise 