A Flat Dixon Entrance, Yes!

0400 comes mighty early.   Blink, rub, blink, stretch, blink...  Why do favorable tides and currents have to occur at the wee hours of the morning?   How uncivilized is that?   We've got 85 miles to go to get to Ketchikan, AK and we are "burnin daylight".

Do you remember the John Wayne movie, The Cowboys?   I watched it with my sister and Papa (my Mom's Dad) in Bartlesville, OK when it first came out; lots of fond memories around that.   Anyway, in the movie, the character, Nightlinger, says this line throughout the movie to roust the boys out of their beds and to start driving the cattle at o'dark thirty.   Great line, "burnin daylight".

It was not raining when we departed and in fact it only sprinkled a few times on today's journey.  Here is Karen putting the docking fenders and lines away as we depart at o'dark thirty.

Having been through Venn Passage a few times, we scooted right through with only one potentially disastrous micro-moment.  

I was using the autopilot to drive when I hit the wrong button, and the boat abruptly did a 90 degree turn right into a shallow area.   I immediately disengaged it and swung the wheel the other direction and corrected, but not before my blood pressure spiked and my pulse raced.   I'm fully awake now!!!   The most embarrassing detail of this story is that I know better!   Always hand steer through narrow channels, always!   Doh!

Surprisingly, we encountered no whales today.  Every other time we have crossed Dixon Entrance we've seen whales, lots of whales.

This is the Green Island lighthouse on the south side of Dixon Entrance.   Like Cape Caution, Dixon Entrance is open to the North Pacific Ocean and frequently sports large uncomfortable seas. 

But not today.   This was Dixon Entrance today at about noon.

Perfect, this was he weather window and conditions we had hoped and planned for.

BTW, when entering Alaska, we went from Pacific Time to Alaska Time, 1 hour earlier.

Entering Ketchikan; back in cruise ship country.

Not in this picture is another Princess Cruise Lines ship that had just passed us, heading south.

I'd forgotten just how much Starlink bandwidth the cruise ships consume...   We essentially went dark until they all departed this evening.   So much for my Starlink Global Priority plan...

This time, the Harbormaster put us in the Thomas Harbor, just south of the cruise ship terminals.   Cool, we get to explore Ketchikan from a different direction as we've never been down here before.

Our new home for three days.   Note the snowcapped mountains in the background.

We hiked along the old hooker's row which is a boardwalk of colorful tourist traps on either side of a rushing salmon stream.  It's actually quite an attractive area and the little stream was really rushing with the snowmelt, though it looks completely placid in this picture.

Not many salmon yet.   Give it another month and it will be choked with salmon.

Just in case the salmon were unaware that this is a salmon stream, the Ketchikanians put a salmon sculpture here.  Actually, that is a beautiful piece of native art honoring the salmon.

The creek looks a bit more rush-like in this picture.

A quick dinner of Spaghetti Bolognese again and off to bed for us.   We are tired, for some reason.

K'idén natá...