Swing baby Swing

One of the realities we deal with living in costal AK is the phenomal tide swings. Glacier Bay, Alaksa is home to the 3rd largest tide swing in the world, and the 2nd largest in Alaska. On a typical day these swings are anywhere from 12 to 18 vertical feet. (This means that our floating town dock will rise and lower by that height twice a day).

Today however, we are having the largest swing we'll probably see all summer. The Low tide this morning was a -4.4 and this afternoon it will be coming up to 15.5. This means our total swing will be 20.9 vertical feet. To serve as a comparison here are some tide swings for today for other US Cities:

Savannah, GA- 8 ft

Boston, MA- 11 ft

Seattle, WA- 13 ft

I took some pictures too! Here's the Gustavus town dock at low tide:

And here's the dock at High tide later in the afternoon:

Naturally, Duane, Sig and I went down to the beach to do some exploring, and Sig had a fantastic time chasing ravens and looking for clams. We also are watching the progress on our new town dock! I'll update with pictures, but for now here's the sign from the ground breaking.

Skies Break Open

I'll be honest, I was dreading today when I woke up this morning. It was raining again, (which is typical for this part of AK, but rare for this season) and I was headed out the door to go and guide a trip at Pt. Adolphus. Now, I do love being out at Adolphus, the whales out there are wonderful, and the sea lions are very entertaining, but I really wasn't in the mood to trying to convince people that beingout in the cold rain all day really was the most entertaining thing they could have done today.

As soon as we got over to Pt Adolphus though the skies totally broke open and it turned out to be a beautiful day! We had a whole group of sea lions that followed us around for a while and then we saw so many whales! One pair of the humpbacks got a bit closer to us than I was really ok with, but so it goes! We also saw a humpback breech 8 times in a row!

It's another one of those days that makes me fall even harder for Alaska!

Return of the Rain

It's been absolutely amazing how beautiful May and June have been up here in AK. Typically you can expect South East Alaska to be cold and wet most days, and having the weeks just puctuated with the occasional day of sunshine. However, in the last 6 weeks or so I've had to water my plants almost daily just to keep them from drying out.

Today however, I woke up to the ever so familiar sound of drizzle on the roof of the house. Sig and I went for a walk in the rain this morning and now I'm nustled down in the quiet office catching up after last week's chaos.

Gotta go prep for a day trip tomorrow. Let's hope we get some more of those sunny skies!

I'm afraid of June

Wow, I'm not being very good about this. Let's see, since the last post my brother has come and gone, my dad was here for a visit, Sig has shot up like a weed and chaos has erupted at the Gustavus office.

I knew that June was going to be crazy, but didn't think that crazy was going to be this crazy. For the last few weeks I've been running boat transfers, chasing squirrels out of the office, having staff coming and going, and the trip schedule has been completely stacked. One of the staff here joked that I should paint "Rachel's Taxi Service" on the side of the company van, because I've spent so much time just shuttling people around lately.

In other news: The ground breaking for the new Gustavus Dock is tomorrow! Everyone around town is pretty excited that part of the state stimulus money is coming here so that we can get a new dock. Ours is really old and is so small that we can't be on the state ferry system. A new dock will mean that it's going to be so much easier to get too and from Gustavus. Plus all the workers coming to town are just going to help bump the economy a bit in our small town here.

Ok, thats all for now, hoepfully more soon!