june 19

June 18, 2008

We stayed in a small cove north of Good Island in Gambier bay after a long run up Frederick sound from Thomas Bay. The run up was smooth until the last 10 miles then a south wind kicked up and it got a bit lumpy. Glen and Liz were about 3 hours behind us as they decided to hike up to Paterson Glacier.

We motored over to the cove at the northwest side of Tracy Arm, just inside the sand spit. It had been a fairly choppy run made interesting by the number of whales all around us. One surfaced a boat length in from of us but try as I might I could not get a decent photo of any of them playing on the surface.

We decide to go ahead and run down to the Glacier in Tracy arm. It is over 20 miles to the glacier through stunning rock walls with hundreds of waterfalls and floating ice bergs.

We reached a point about 5 miles from the Sawyer Glacier where we could go no further due to the jammed up ice floating in the water. Glen and Liz and Nichole decided to take the dinghy on up through the ice to the head of the Glacier, I could not talk my crew into doing that. They left the boat floating among the berg bits and we shut off the engines and sat for a couple hours enjoying the scenery, the thousand foot walls and just the grand nature of the place.

As we were waiting for Glen’s expedition to return we watched the Norwegian Sun, a large cruise ship come around the corner into our section of the fjord. As we looked very much like a couple of floating bergs I called them on channel 16 and advised them we were directly in front of them and one of the two boats was unmanned and unable to maneuver out of their way. The Female Captain acknowledged our location and asked that we remain together and she would go around us.

The ship passed within a few hundred feet of us and as large as it was, it dwarfed our little boats but it was dwarfed by the cliffs around it. We watched as hundreds of tourists on board took photos of us taking photos of them.

Glen returned shortly after the cruise ship passed by and we motored back out towards the head of the bay and an anchorage cove near the entrance of Tracy Arm. We took our time, stopping along the way at waterfalls and at several bergs to take photos and enjoy the day. It was a cloudy wet day with the clouds obscuring the highest parts of the cliffs but also adding to the scenery with different layers of clouds hanging low along the cliff lines.

At one point glen put the bow of the boat up against a berg and I took some video which makes it look like he is actually pushing the berg and moving it.

As we approached the anchorage I was watching the mapping software and saw that we needed to avoid two rocks at the entrance before turning into the cove. I spotted what I thought were the two rocks off to my starboard side, they were both bare and exposed and were in the right position to be the rocks on the chart and my course was taking me well to the left of the rocks when I last looked. On one of the rocks sat an eagle and Becky and Mike and Chris were all on the bridge looking at the eagle. I looked back at my mapping system and now the boat icon was sitting right on the rock symbol which got my attention and I pulled the throttles back, threw the engines in reverse and reved the engines in reverse doing an emergency stop. As we did that we all felt the boat strike something, the bow rose up with a horrible grinding noise, our momentum stopped and then the boat slid off and backwards. We were all convinced and I was certain we had just struck a rock.
We were floating free and I backed well off the spot and then shut down and ran down below to check for leaks. A quick check of the hull showed we were not taking on any water thankfully. Chris and Becky were in their life jackets by the time I got back on top and I found out later that Chris put Sophie in her life jacket first then had shown Becky where to find them.
I had just told Becky earlier that her chances of swimming to the shore here was not good, that the average swimmer has a 50% chance of surviving a 50 yard swim in 50 degree water. This water is 44 degrees. She remembered that and was thinking we were all going to perish like the people on the Titanic. Not likely because Chris had jumped on the radio and yelled to Glen that we had just hit the rock. Glen was standing by a few feet away so if we were going to sink we could have got onto his boat quickly.

I was sure I had ripped off my running gear so I was quite pleasantly surprised when I put the boat in gear and it moved forward and reverse and the rudders both worked. Hmm!
We motored on in to the cove and tied up next to Glen who had anchored. in the cove. We did a thorough check of the hull and we were completely intact. We got out the underwater camera that Chris had given me for father’s day and checked for damage under the boat. Other than what appeared to be some missing paint there were no obvious gouge marks. (Thank you Chris for the Camera)

We slept soundly that evening and early the next morning I got up and took the Dingy out to the rock to check on how much fiberglass I left behind. I was surprised to find no rock in the spot where we were sure we had run aground. The water 100 feet out from the rock the Eagle was on was 50 feet deep and dropped quickly to 170 feet. Ok, what did I hit. Theory is a clear piece of Iceberg. Many of the bergs are like ice cubes, clear and they take on the coloring of the water. There was one large piece in the area but it was not all that hard to spot.

The other theory is that when I saw the boat and rock Icon on an imminent collision course I threw the boat into such a quick emergency stop that the cavitation of the props trying to bite in the opposite direction caused the noise that everyone thought was us scrapping on rock and the boat rising up and then back down was the stern wave rolling under us.

It appears after all that we hit nothing, that the boat can go from 10 knots forward to reverse in a boat length if it needs to. Besides, the trip was getting a bit boring and we needed something to make it more exciting.