We finally left Alaska!

   
     Wow, after a month of travel, we finally made it out of Alaska, ironically on America's Independence Day. So, while all our friends back home were watching the fireworks and taking part in the Fourth of July festivities, we were getting ready to cross Dixon Entrance and clear through Canadian customs. Before that, though, we were awash in seafood!

This is just one of the fillets from the
halibut caught by SV Pacific
Wonder's crew.  Yummy!

      We stopped just outside the entrance to Boca de Quadra to try some fishing. No luck for the Kyrie crew, but our friends on SV Pacific Wonder hit the jackpot. We could hear them whooping it up and then the radio hollered out the good news: Kari had just hauled a nice big one aboard, estimated weight at around 80 pounds. Much to our delight, she announced they would give us half the meat. There was enough I was worried it wouldn't all fit in our freezer. However, it all fit and we'll be eating halibut for the next month!

What a quandary! How to
decide which ones to keep?

        The next seafood fest came the next morning. Joe used the head from the halibut carcass to bait our crab pot and checked it before we left Bullhead Bay. Oh my goodness, we lucked out. Joe came back with a pot with twelve crabs in it--our biggest haul   ever. One was a small rock crab and two were females, so those three went back in the water, plus a couple others--we can only eat so many. It took Joe and me three hours to shell all that crab!
                 We spent the night in a little nook off Tongass Island, only a few miles from the U.S.-Canada border. The weather report for Dixon Entrance was beautiful, so we eagerly left the next morning. We enjoyed a lovely spinnaker sail across Dixon Entrance, cruising along with Pacific Wonder, as well as another sailboat, SV Wings and Strings, and arriving in Prince Rupert around 2:30.
            Joe and I had read in the Waggoner Guide about the North Pacific Cannery Museum and were curious about taking a tour, so we decided to make that our plan for today. It involved getting on a bus at 9:00 and traveling about 40 minutes away to the old cannery, which lies slightly southeast of Prince Rupert, on Inverness Passage.
That was an incredible field trip! It has been extremely well-preserved and a lot of the machinery used in the cannery is still in working order. Our tour guide Greg is also the site handyman and gleefully fired up the motor that powered the various machines used in gutting, cleaning, and canning the thousands of salmon that passed through the lines. One aspect I thought fascinating was the way the different groups of people--the European management, the Chinese workers, the Japanese, and the First Nations people--were segregated, but not out of any form of racism. Rather, it was for expediency and safety on the job. They were kept in separate groups because otherwise, these diverse people couldn't have understood each other and safely worked as a team--an idea whose importance hadn't occurred to me. However, seeing the machines and hearing how quickly these lines worked, I realized how dangerous a language barrier could have been. I think I learned more today than the Kyrie kids did!

This building held the machine shop
on the bottom floor and the First
Nations' net loft on the top.

Inside the First Nations' net loft. NPC
use a fleet of gill netters.

Another view inside the First Nations'
net loft. Those are all gill nets hanging
from the ceiling.

          Tomorrow, we leave Prince Rupert, bound for the wilds of British Columbia's outer coast. When we brought Kyrie up to Juneau three years, we ran up the inside route because the weather was nasty and we were in a hurry. However, we aren't in any sort of hurry this time, so it's hie for the coast! I'm not sure how much internet access we'll have for the next week or so until we reach Bella Bella, but I'm sure we'll have plenty more to share once we can upload photos again.

           Keep checking in to see our position reports and see where we are! Kyrie's crew is ready to move on again!