We woke up to the sound of our boat’s fog horn. I don’t think I’ve ever been in fog this thick – the visibility was perhaps 15 feet. We couldn’t see a thing, but my phone was working and I could see from Google Maps that we were close to land. Captain Ron was somehow negotiating the ship into the dock in the town of Wrangell. The view from our window:
Ron said later that he wasn’t proud of his landing on the dock, but I was pretty impressed that we were moving at all.
The fog started burning off as we disembarked.
A large group of us trouped through the town of Wrangell.
We were on our way to Chief Shakes’ house (below), where we watched a slightly corny presentation by a group of Tlingit (pronounced Klink-it), one of the native tribes of Southeast Alaska. The best part was watching the 6 year old following his dad’s dance steps.
Below, some totem poles, no longer upright.
Meandering back to the ship, we stopped at the Wrangell Museum, which was quaint but quite good for a little museum. Based on the old photographs we concluded that Wrangell is decidedly more pleasant now that its sidewalks are no longer wooden planks on top of mud. In fact, some of the sidewalks appeared to have chips of garnet in them, a nod to the nearby hillsides where garnets abound. A cool fact about Wrangell is that children are allowed to mine as much of the garnets as they want and to sell them.
Aside from Chief Shakes’ house, Wrangell was not the least bit touristy, largely because it is not a cruise ship destination. It consisted of one main commercial street, some boat yards and commercial fishing operations, and several little harbors, all filled with fishing boats.
While we ate lunch the ship cruised to Thom’s Place, a large cove at the south end of Wrangell Island. The sun was out for real now, and I was extremely content to bask. After all the days of pretty iffy weather, and a few days of downright terrible conditions, I for one was thrilled with the sunshine. Also, truth be told, I was rather sore from the Cascade Creek hike the day before and needed to remain immobile as much as possible.
Dave tried stand-up paddle boarding – a little risky when the water is cold enough that one truly does not want to fall in. I came on deck as he was paddling out to sea, and I wasn’t quite sure it was him. But who else would go that far?
Dave (the dot in the center) getting farther and farther from the ship.
Finally, they sent a boat out after him. Here he is being mildly scolded for going out so far (taken with my extreme telephoto). Actually, they were very nice about it, explaining that the currents could get very strong as he got to the mouth of the cove.
That night we were already in bed when there was an announcement that the Northern Lights were visible on deck. I scurried up the stairs to see but it’s pretty hard to get Dave out of his bed once he’s there. The photo below was taken by the professional photographer on board, who had the right equipment for a night shot. To be absolutely honest, it was not quite this spectacular with the naked eye. But even so, the sky was amazing. We don’t get skies like this in New Jersey.
