s/v hello world: Whales and prawns and bears, oh my!

June 27 - Tolstoi Bay

We finally extracted ourselves from Ketchikan though we decided against going into Misty Fjords because it was probably going to be SO misty that we couldn't really see the mountains, so we'll just have to wait until it's sunny there. Maybe next year. Or 2052. Also, we had big plans to head to Wrangell for the fourth of July and rather than hurry through MFNM, we decided to take a leisurely pace to Wrangell - we're on vacation, right? No need to hurry.

So we wandered over to Tolstoi Bay - on the way, saw our second breaching whale and watched him breach from a few miles away, towards Hello World and well past us.

Once in Tolstoi, we broke out the stand up paddleboard (SUP) for the first time and tried it out. Turns out this is a very fun toy!

Although Jason got a big nervous on my "small" board. This is about as far away from the boat as he was willing to venture.

June 29 - Santa Anna Inlet

Off to Santa Anna Inlet we went, where we did more SUPing and did a whole lot of crabbing and prawning. We attempted salmon trolling on the way with no luck. Apparently not too many other people are catching salmon either, so clearly it's the fish, not us.

July 1 - Berg Bay

Yet another spectacular anchorage. No icebergs, but the mountains were phenomenal. I was hearing highway noises as I was SUPing around the anchorage in the morning and realized that the static I was hearing couldn't have been cars - they are nowhere to be found. I was hearing waterfalls.

On our way to Berg Bay, we stopped by Anan Bear Observatory. Maybe "stopped" is a bit of an overstatement. There is almost nowhere to anchor, so Jason did circles in Hello World while I dinghied in and got to see 3 brown bears and a black bear.

I got to talking (as I do) to some other people, taking pictures and just generally enjoying myself and poor Jason ended up circling for 3 hours.

(can you see him all the way out there?)

The observatory is fantastic with a protected deck right over a river in which that salmon spawn. Sadly, the pinks are late this year and weren't running when we arrived, so the bears weren't fishing.

Apparently sometimes you get to see them up close and personal grabbing up to 40 salmon an hour out of the stream, eating the brains and then going back for more. The black bear I saw? He was eating grass.