Petersburg, AK

Location: Petersburg, AK
Lat/Lon: 56.8096°N 132.9672°W
Weather: Low 41°, Hi 50° F, Steady constant rain, Winds 5-10 kts

Hooray! We have wifi in Petersburg so I uploaded some new photos to the Web Album.

We left Goose Bay early Wednesday morning and cruised 10 ½ hours for 70 NM all the way to Petersburg arriving around 5:30 PM. After a rather dicey docking, not my best effort, we went to a Mexican restaurant/bar and Linda had a burrito and I had a enchilada. It's an odd little place, the restaurant and bar are two different companies but share the same building and space, they're only separated by the fact that the bar floor is one step higher than the restaurant. The food is served on paper plates with plastic forks and knives and if you want a beer you have to get up and walk into the bar and get it yourself. They still smoke in the bars up here. Alaska is big on individual rights and part of that is they don't prevent people from smoking in bars, and most people seem to smoke up here. There are limits though, there is a sign on the bar door that says -

No Dogs Allowed in the Bar. No exceptions!

Petersburg is a small town in a remote area of SE Alaska but it's fishing industry has the largest fishing catch, by dollar value, of any port in the US including the lower 48 states. That's a lot of fish. Things are busy around the port this week, the Dungeness crab season opens Sunday at 12:00 and the boats are busy loading pots and filling up on ice. Most of the people working on the boats are young men although some of the boats are family businesses with up to 3 generations working on them including the women. The young people that work the fishing boats live a very different life than young people down south.

Seems summer might be over. There was a lot of sun in May and now we're in a rainy windy pattern that is driving us south. We're tired of being cold and wet so were heading south two weeks earlier than planned. We still plan on spending two weeks around Anacortes and then heading down the coast the first of August rather than mid August.

We plan to leave here on Saturday and be in Ketchikan Wednesday and spend 3 days there before crossing into Canada.