Friday evening we went back to the house with Ann after dinner to do some laundry. There was a beautiful sunset and Billy got this picture from the deck off their house!

Saturday morning was really nice again, too bad we had to spend much of the day fixing the toilet!  Billy spent about 6 hours crawling around below decks taking things apart and cleaning things up.  Nothing was obviously clogged or broken but when he put it all back together, it worked. 🙂  Happy day!

While we were working on the boat I saw this ‘boat cat’ on the sail of one of the sailboats in the harbor.

Later that afternoon, I went with Ann to the local artesian well to get water.  This well is in the Starrigavan Campground and lot of people from Sitka go there to get their drinking water.  I gathered up some jugs from the boat and now we have a few gallons of artesian well water.

We spent the rest of the day going for a walk, doing laundry, going to dinner and watching some Olympics.  A pretty good day for me, Billy was just glad it was over.

Sunday we just took things pretty easy.  We went for a hike with Ann and Andrew back at Starrigavan.  There is both muskeg,

And coastal wetlands in the park along the trail.

Here are Ann and Andrew on the boardwalk.

When we returned to the Vallions, we finished up our laundry and Ann made us another really good dinner.  She is an amazing cook!  After watching some of the closing ceremony of the Olympics, Andrew gave us a ride back to the boat.  The plan is to leave tomorrow mid-day to start our journey back home.  It will probably take a week or so, I’ll keep you posted.

Monday started out as another nice day, we have really lucked out with the weather so far.  We tidied up the boat in the morning and then went to lunch with Andrew before taking off from the Sitka harbor.  We had a really good time in Sitka, it is a beautiful place and we will definitely be back.

We had a fairly short trip up to DeGroff Bay, just a little north of Sitka.  Here is the entrance channel which was pretty narrow.

The entrance to the inner bay was even worse and there were a bunch of big rocks out in the middle!  I was too busy watching to take a picture.  We made it safe and sound and now we’re anchored up in the bay which should be a really protected place but it’s kind of windy so Billy’s not very happy.  Oh well, it should be fine and it seems to be settling down a bit.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  We do have some cell signal so I’m going to get caught up on the blog.

We have been asked how we navigate into some of these really tight spots.  We use some amazing electronic charts that are connected to our position using gps and a depth sounder along with a radar system for back up.  It looks kind of complicated but once you get the hang of it, it’s really pretty easy and totally indispensable.  You just follow the green line!  Billy works diligently to put the routes, which show up as green lines, into the system before we ever take off. I don’t know how it was done before all these electronics were available.

Now it’s raining and it’s supposed to get pretty nasty tonight.  Luckily we’re tucked back in this bay and should be just fine.  Next stop is Kalinin Bay and then we’ll have to decide whether to retrace our steps back to Juneau through Peril Strait or go up the outside coast which we’ll need really good weather to even try.