Taku, Dawes Glacier, and Ford’s Terror (again)

We spent the past five days with our friends Todd & Loek, visiting from Holland. They flew into Juneau and we took them down to Taku Harbor, Tracy Arm Cove, down Endicott Arm to see Dawes Glacier, and then spent two nights in Ford’s Terror before returning to Juneau on Saturday.

Here are Todd and Kevin out surveying the icebergs in Tracy Arm Cove:

For the bourbon!

We saw one small brown bear in Tracy Arm Cove:

In the morning we headed down Endicott Arm to go check out Dawes Glacier before going into Ford’s Terror for two nights. There was a pretty thick layer of fog out in Stephens Passage, but none inside:

We got a couple good closeup views of humpbacks on our way in:

We made our way through quite a few icebergs and finally got a glimpse of Dawes Glacier, past this cruise ship. (That cruise ship is still about 3 miles from the glacier.)

The two tiny boats you can see (barely) at the base of the glacier…still a half mile from it.

We continued on past the cruise ship and picked our way through many, many icebergs, and finally made it to a nice clear spot where we could watch for calving for a bit. (We saw and heard some really dramatic calving, too!)

Looking back from our clear spot:

I spent some time on the bow with the boat hook, pushing some of the smaller bergs away.

Lots of seals on icebergs:

We left the glacier with enough time to make the high slack timing at Ford’s Terror. This Dawes Glacier area isn’t very accurate on the charts, either. Example A:

Yellow on the chart, upper left window, is supposed to be land. Notice where our boat is. On land, or in 86 feet of water? (I was on the bow fending off little icebergs while this was happening, or this image on the chart would have freaked me out a bit.)

More icebergs with cool texture:

This cliff had some great texture on it, up high:

Titanic iceberg:

We were a little early at Ford’s Terror so we waited for about 30 minutes and entered around 5:15pm with pretty much no current at all. We stopped and poked the nose of Airship into the big crevice with the tall tall waterfall and gave Todd and Loek a nice view in from the bow, and then headed to our anchorage in the west arm.

We saw a black bear and cub when we first got in, and the next day we watched this big black bear eat some grass and then head to the beach to scrape and munch on some barnacles.

The four of us took the dinghy out exploring for a couple hours. We went back to the tall waterfall in the crevice, but man is that thing hard to photograph (or video). I took a vertical video of it (because that’s the only way I could capture the whole thing, so just hush).

Another waterfall:

And another waterfall:

Lines/texture along the cliff face:

We kayaked in the afternoon and took the drone up for some aerial shots. (Still not tired of this incredible place.)

We were the only ones in Ford’s Terror on Thursday night and all of Friday day. On Friday evening, our friend Sam and his mom and brother came in at the later high slack and we all had dinner together on Sam’s boat (fun!). We left Ford’s Terror early on Saturday morning and headed for Juneau. The early high slack had us transiting the narrows around 5:30am…a little late, but with no drama at all.

Back in Juneau, Todd & Loek went into town to do a hike along the Gold Creek Flume Trail and then to do a little tourist shopping. We did some work and a couple boat maintenance things, and then met them in town for dinner at The Rookery Cafe (super yum!)