I am writing this post because a) it was an interesting experience for us and b) in case any other ignorant boaters are googling the area, maybe they will happen to come upon this post. I was at the helm on route to Sitka and entered a place with a lot of whirlpools all around us…uh oh. As we learned with Hole in the Wall, these whirlpools are not usually a friendly welcome. They may look like calm, swirly pools, but they can throw our boat around. Paul took over (I decided to let him to make him feel good…haha) and we teased our way through, rocking side to side, until we came upon a narrow channel. Paul called down that he didn’t think we could do this, and I came back up to the pilot house to see rapids rushing out of the channel and one of the channel buoys knocked on its side. Nope; I don’t think we can. We start googling the channel – this caught us completely unaware. I could not find anything about the dangerous currents/tides and it being an area that had to be timed to the current (not the tide in this circumstance; the current turns at a different time than the tide, so the current must be timed). We decided that we had no choice but to wait for the current to changet at 3:19p.m. Paul didn’t think that we could anchor; it was too deep and the current was too strong. Luckily, because it was a channel, one of the buoys had a current reading on it and we could look at the tide and current in the channel. Indeed, it was reading about 7.5 knots when we got there; way too strong for our boat to navigate through. Around 3:10, the current slowed to 1.5 knots, and we successfully made it through, to find several other boats on the other side waiting to navigate through as well; apparently some people knew about it!
We made it to Sitka around 7p.m. and rushed to get ready to go to dinner (Mike and Christine kindly offered to treat us to dinner, and I was tired of cooking!) We found a small, cute restaurant and my black cod tips were delicious. We then hit up the Mean Queen for some delicious drinks and crawled back to the boat close to midnight. We had to say goodbye to Mike and Christine the next day, so we went all went to the WildFlour Cafe and Bakery for an amazing sandwich (the avocado toast was scrumptious!) before they hailed a cab to the airport, and I found a scavenger hunt of Sitka for our family. While the scavenger hunt did not lead us from one place to the next, it offered points and trivia questions for various destinations around Sitka. We visited the Russian Bishop’s House – a free museum that gave great information about the Russian occupation of Alaska; we took a lot of silly pictures for points; we visited a fun playground (that was not part of the hunt but was a fun playground); we did a totem walk at Sitka National Historical Park; and probably everyone’s favorite, we visited the Sound Science Center, which offered an incredible touch tank and an extremely interesting tour of the salmon hatchery. We were pretty dead after all the walking and found a great place to get burgers and local beers before heading back to the boat.
