We left Sandborn Channel on Tuesday morning in the fog.  We had pretty thick fog up most of Port Houghton but no traffic so it wasn’t a problem.  When we got to Stephens Passage it opened up for our trip to Tracy Arm.  Entering Tracy Arm is a little tricky so they have some range markers that you line up with so that you can cross the bar safely into the Arm.

Along with the range markers are some buoys but there are warnings that ice may move the buoys so be sure to use the range markers along with the buoys to be safe.

Once in the Arm we saw our first glacier, Sundum Glacier.

Tracy Arm Cove is just inside the bar and on our way to anchor we saw two big brown bears browsing on the beach.  We saw these bears frequently in the two nights we spent in the cove.

After anchoring it was amazing to watch the amount of traffic going up the arm from small cruising boats like ours to huge cruise ships.

Wednesday morning we started our journey up Tracy Arm.  There are a multitude of waterfalls in the arm and we took pictures of a lot of them.  Here are a few for your viewing pleasure.

Believe it or not, there were also multitudes of icebergs.  Some with seals, some with birds and some just plain old ice.  Here are a selection of my favorites.

 

When we got up to the head of the Arm you could go south to South Sawyer Glacier or north to North Sawyer Glacier.  I had read that South Sawyer Glacier was the more active of the two so we went up there first.  The bay in front of the glacier was really clogged with ice and  Bill did a great job of navigating through as much as possible so that I could take pictures of the glacier.

On our way back we decided to go up the North arm and found it totally free of ice so we could get up close and personal with the North Sawyer Glacier.  We saw a little bit of ice calve and heard lots of popping and cracking.  The sun even came out for a bit so that we could take some nice photos.

We anchored up in Tracy Arm Cove again on Wednesday night and took off Thursday morning for Juneau!  We knew we were getting close when we hit latitude 58.

We decided that we would go downtown for one night because it would be too far to go to Auke Bay in one day.

On the way into town we passed this Sandy Beach landmark and I couldn’t resist taking a picture.

We arrived downtown in the early afternoon, tied up and now Bill is washing the boat and I’m trying to get caught up on the blog.  There are fireworks tonight so we can either watch them from the boat or we might walk up to the bridge to see them depending on the weather.  We’ll head for home tomorrow morning and hopefully be able to find a spot to tie up in Auke Bay.  It’s been an amazing trip and it’s kind of sad that it’s almost over.  Must be time to start planning the next one…