June27. It was a bit cloudy earlier in the day but the forecast was for clearing in the afternoon. We left on flat seas at 7am. Pretty much as soon as we left Reid Inlet we started seeing ice in the water in the shape of small icebergs an chunks of ice. They call them bergies, I’m told. The bergies got thicker as we progressed up the Tarr Inlet with the calving Margerie Glacier out goal. At times it was a bit of a slalom course through the bergies and even the odd larger icebergs. A more experienced sailor told me it was bad for a fiberglass hull to run into even the smaller bergies (even at 6mph) so; avoid hitting them I tried to do. Hit a couple much to Laurence’s displeasure. “Are we going to sink?!” This glacier is also the goal of two large cruise ships and several other smaller ( hard to be bigger) cruise, tour and expedition ships as well as other pleasurecrafts. It took us about two and a half hours to get to the glacier and there was already two large cruise ships and multiple other boats there. The cruise ships typically just hang out there for an hour or so and move on. It was a bit cloudy so we pulled in close to shore, just past the glacier face and had lunch and a quick ding to shore. With engine off you could really hear the sounds of an active calving glacier. The sounds were anywhere between a dull thumping to a loud gunshot like sound sometimes followed by the crashing sound as large chunks of the glacier fell into the sea. We met a couple from Seattle that were camping on the shore near where we anchored. They had rented a canoe and were dropped off halfway into Glacier Bay for a two week camping adventure. They were half way into it and they appreciated hooking into our StarLink connection which they could do from the shore. About 3 pm after the large cruise ships had left and the skies had cleared we moved in closer to the glacier where we took some pictures and cracked a bottle of bubbly to celebrate this milestone. After that we again wended our way through the bergies on our way back to the nice anchorage in Reid Inlet for the night. We did stop amongst the bergies to gather some ice from a celebratory “Glacier Cuba Libre” for my HH cocktail. A good day.
