Petersburg, July 27th

A long and winding trip up through the Wrangell narrows (over 60 nav aids are needed to mark the channel), we arrived in Petersburg. With a strong Norwegian history, the main industry here is still fishing and fish processing, and its probably one of the most active fishing towns I've ever been in. The processing and packaging plants operate at very capacity and fishing boats and tenders are coming and going throughout the day and night delivering their catch (mostly salmon). Despite this, it has a friendly small working class town vibe. We really liked it here:

Tidal Grid. This is how you haul your boat out for  quick maintenance and repairs here. With a 20 ft tidal range to work with, you just position your boat on the timbers at high tide and tie off to the pilings alongside. When the tide goes down you are high and dry and can work on the bottom of your boat (until the next high tide):

The best dinner joint we found in town. Not much to look at, but great rockfish tacos:

Never get tired of looking at fishing boats:

We had just finished tying our lines after arriving in Petersburg when a fellow-cruiser came over and told us about Pack Creek. Definitely worth the trip she declared. We were planning on heading to Tracy Arm and saw that Pack Creek (a 50-mile round-trip detour on our journey north) was kind of on the way. After we secured a permit (only 24 people a day are allowed) on-line for the following Tuesday we started to get excited about the prospect of seeing bears close-up in their natural habitat. The night before we set off, I checked my email confirmation and discovered we had to have a printed copy of our permit as the confirmation email would not suffice (no cell signal at Pack Creek). My job was to find a place to print out the permit on a Sunday morning in Petersburg. Not an easy task as everything was closed. Harbor office, museum, library all closed until Monday. What to do? Pete went into the one open store to get more fishing supplies. While there I wandered around & sweet talked a very nice guy into printing out our permit on his office computer. Whew, another odd cruising challenge accomplished. -SP

Next day we were on our way to look for bears...