Day 6, 6/26/2002 Sunrise 4:06am - Sunset 9:47pm Temp @ Noon: 64º partly sunny skies
Ketchikan
We awoke this morning to find ourselves in the port of Ketchikan. Overnight we had re-entered The US (no customs check), boarded a Southeastern Alaskan pilot and gained an hour (Alaska has its own time zone one hour behind Pacific Time). Here we took our first shore excursions, The Totem & Town Tour and The Great American Lumberjack Show. On our way to the first tour I was surprised to see two other large cruise ships in port (a third would arrive before we left). The Totem & Town Tour took us around town where we learned that Ketchikan is the rain capital of Alaska and maybe of the United States, measuring their annual rainfall in feet rather than inches, averaging 13.5 feet. It generally rains on over 240 days in each year. We heard that it had rained for 72 hours straight before we got there, they were glad for the arrival of the Sun. We also learned that Ketchikan is in the Guinness Book of Records for having the only tunnel you can go through, around and/or over!
After going through the tunnel (we went around on the way back) we headed out to Totem Bight State Park where we were introduced to native Alaskan culture through an exhibit of Tlingit artifacts including totem poles and early mobile homes - no really, their timber frame lodge houses were made to be disassembled , moved and reassembled. On the way back from Totem Bight we were reminded that Ketchikan had named itself "The Salmon Capital of the World" in the 1930s when it produced 1.5 million cases of salmon a year. Above the current salmon packing plant, opportunistic Bald Eagles dot the tree tops.
The Great American Lumberjack Show was an introduction to non-native Alaskan culture celebrating the exploitation for profit of the area's natural resources. It was a live version of the Stihl® Timbersports series that you may have seen on ESPN. This show pitted a Canadian team against a U.S. team and was staged for show rather than being the real competition of the Stihl® series. Still, it was good entertainment and the Bald Eagle flyovers were a real treat!
Between two & three o'clock we cast off and slipped sideways, without a tug, out of our parallel parking space with the other two ships thanks to the two bow and two stern thrusters pushing at 90º to the axis of the ship. As we cruised through Clarence Strait during the afternoon, we went to a presentation about bears by the ship's on-board naturalist, Tom Johnson, a wonderful adjunct to our cruise. We turned into Summer Strait about dinner time, rounded Cape Decision and headed into Chatham Strait toward Juneau just before sunset.
Created on ... July 11, 2002