Kickin' it in Ketchikan

Greetings from Ketchikan! Our favorite town thus far...We've paddled a little over 400 miles in just over a month, and we're a third of the way done with our trip (and on time too boot)! Craazy! This is our last stop in Alaska before crossing the border (in a few days) into Canada. Here are a some highlights from the past week:

We enjoyed a few days in the tiny town of Wrangell. Things were stressful for a bit since every hotel/motel/B&B in town was booked (due to construction--heh), but we ended up setting up shop at the hostel run by the Presbyterian Church. We were forced into relaxation for a day since the whole town shuts down on Sundays (including grocery stores), but managed to run all of our errands and get resupplied in due time. I even got to have a pre-birthday fried feast, complete with a requisite Manhattan, before heading out of town on a foggy, misty morning.

Our first few days out were in very protected waters, which made for pretty easy paddling--low mileage, early mornings to catch favorable currents, mostly calm water, and a little rain here and there. After rounding the corner where Ernest Sound meets Clarence Strait, on the western side of the Cleveland Peninsula, things got a little more interesting. The Clarence Strait section of the paddle was full of firsts:

Our First Small Craft Advisory: Two of them actually! The first provided a welcome opportunity to sleep in until the advisory was lifted, the second led us to...

...Our First Weather Day: According to our guide book, Clarence Strait is "not bedeviled by stormy seas," and yet there we were, looking at frothy, 3 to 4-foot whitecaps racing into the rocks that we were camped above. Clarence Strait is long and wide, and even 10-15 knot winds over that much fetch could build up impressive waves. We probably could have paddled, but we certainly wouldn't have gotten anywhere with any kind of efficiency. The idea of packing up camp to spend a lot of energy paddling nowhere just didn't seem worth it. So we stayed put for a day, feeling a little annoyed, but glad to have whiskey. It was at this campsite, the night before our weather day that we had...

...Our First Bear Near Our Campsite Encounter: We had stopped at that site the afternoon before, to get out of the building wind, realized it wasn't going to abate, and decided to camp. We had just started making dinner when Mike stood up to to stretch.
Mike: "Oh. There's a bear."
Kelly (busily slicing cheese and swatting at bugs): "Huh?"
Mike: "There's a bear right there."
Kelly (turning to look, and noticing a black bear, about 30 yards away, ambling

along the beach, turning over rocks and digging for tasty morsels): "...Oh...yeah..."

It was about time, really. A month of camping in bear country without running into one (we had seen them from our kayaks) seemed to be pushing our luck. Mr. Bear hadn't noticed us at all, and it would've been pretty cool to just sit and watch it do it's thing if it weren't for the fact that it was making its way toward where we were cooking. We stood up, waved our arms, and loudly announced ourselves. The bear looked up in surprise, turned away, looked back, then scampered off into the woods. I felt a little bad for interrupting its beachcombing. We congratulated ourselves on our bear-scaring abilities, moved our kitchen to a different part of the beach, and went to bed knowing that at least the bear knew we were there and didn't really want much to do with us. Good thing, too, since we had to spend a second night...

The weather still wasn't super awesome after that, as the weather front continued to stall out. The next day we only managed 10 miles before the wind drove us off the water. With another (stronger) front forecasted to move in, we took advantage of a tiny window of early morning calm to make our way out of the Strait and across the 5-mile-wide Behm Canal. The last 10 miles down Tongass Narrows to Ketchikan was full of wind, chop, and developed waterfront. Finally, after 21-miles and a 13-hour day, we made it! We had our easiest docking/accomodation finding/gear moving yet, and now we're kickin' it in the beautiful New York Hotel, right at the entrance to Creek Street. Today was spent running errands, and tomorrow we get to play tourist.

Oh yeah, and I turned 27! Thanks for all the birthday wishes, everyone! It was a great day, and a humpback even popped by to say hell0.