Skagway to Juneau and Back via Boat
Today turned out to be not the best day for a run down to Juneau. We had rain almost all the way down and the whole time we were in Juneau. Coming back wasn’t so bad, but by then we were tired of being in the rain. As mentioned earlier, we decided to take the fast day trip to Juneau rather than the much more expensive ferry. We traveled on the Fjordland, a 65-ft catamaran powered by twin 600-hp diesels. The boat was great, just the weather was not the best for whale watching or standing out on the deck. Fortunately the seas were calm, and except for slowing to watch a few humpback whales, dolphins, harbor seals, and sea lions, we cruised at 27-28 knots the entire time. The layout of the boat was one large cabin with wide windows all around. The bridge, as it was, was simply a helm position right up front and center. We were free to move around at will as the ride was very smooth. Except for the time I spent out on the aft deck taking pictures, I spent most of the ride up front talking with the captain, a very personable and entertaining fellow. We were served a continental breakfast on the way down to Juneau and a light dinner of seafood chowder on the way back.
We arrived in Juneau at approximately 11:45, and were met by a bus which took us on a brief tour around the city, after which we had about three hours on our own to eat lunch and wander around the downtown area. It would have been a great time except for the rain, which, while not heavy, was steady. Thank goodness for the raincoats we bought at REI before we left – they really proved their worth today.
Our friends from Whitehorse recommended a waterfront restaurant called The Hanger, a recommendation which was seconded by the bus driver. This restaurant is located in a large, old wooden hanger-like structure which apparently at one time served as the base for commercial seaplane service back in the 1930s and 40s. It has been converted to shops and restaurants, much like the torpedo factory in Old Town Alexandria but definitely not as upscale. We had a delicious lunch of seafood lasagna. As we ate, we watched a large cruise ship come into the harbor, joining the two that were already there.
After lunch we wandered around in the rain, stopping first at a bakery to buy some fresh bagels to have with our breakfast for the next few days. Then, to get out of the rain, we took a tour of the Alaska State Capitol Building, something we probably would not have done if the weather had been better. By then it was nearly time to get back down to Marine Park on the waterfront to re-board the tour bus. When we got there we saw that a fourth cruise ship had arrived. Doing a little math, we discovered that if each cruise ship carried 2000 passengers, the population of Juneau had grown by 25 percent that day on cruise ship passengers alone. This became apparent at our next stop, the Mendenhall Glacier.
The Mendenhall Glacier is Juneau’s primary tourist attraction. It is a 12-mile long glacier that feeds off the Juneau Ice Field, a 1500-square mile area of ice that occupied the center of the Coastal Range and straddles the US-Canadian border from Juneau to Skagway. The Mendenhall is only one of many glaciers that originate from the ice field. It terminates not into the sea but rather into a lake at the northeast edge of Juneau. It is a slow-moving glacier, and being land-locked, it only calves once every three or four days. The lake, however, is filled with many large icebergs. The parking area was filled with tour buses from the cruise ships. There must have been a couple of thousand sheeple from the ships, and at least three fourths of them were crowded into the Visitor Center. By the way, that’s a new term we learned from our bus driver: “sheeple,” referring to the cruise ship people who are herded around like sheep from place to place at every stop. Somehow, even though we were on the same type of bus, our driver stroked our egos saying that because we didn’t arrive on one of the large cruise ships we were somehow different from the sheeple. I felt a lot better after he said that.
From the glacier we returned to our boat for the return trip, which was uneventful except for a couple of brief whale sightings and several pods of dolphins. My day was made when the captain had a contest to see who knew why humpback whales are considered to be a “reverse dimorphic” species. Apparently there were no biologists on board because nobody spoke up. So he gave a couple of clues as to what that meant, and I made a lucky guess so I won a company hat with a logo depicting the ship. You’ll have to tune in tomorrow to see what the answer was…or in the meantime you can Google it.
We arrived back in Skagway at 8:30 pm after a rather long 12-1/2 hour day. While we were disappointed by the weather and the scarcity of marine life sightings, we felt lucky that of all our maritime activities – fishing at Homer, the glacier and whale-watching cruise at Seward, and this trip down to Juneau – we had good weather on all but this one. Two out of three ain’t bad.
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