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I’m under way on the first trip of the Alaska season now. It was an interesting and at times exciting adventure on the way up from Baja. We made it, though.

I’ll begin regular posts from here on out, but here’s some pictures from the trip up to get it going.

I’ve been trying to get the time to write up the story of the trip up, but things have been so crazy lately. I should have time today.

It’s nice to be here, Alaska sure is a beautiful place.

We are back up and running, so the posts will be coming again really soon.

I’m in British Columbia now, heading to Alaska for the summer.

All is well and good.

Yesterday my daughter turned 7 years old! She had a really good day, and I’m glad to say that she is perfectly happy and healthy.

Her mom is taking her to boomtown tomorrow, and I’m taking her camping next week. I’m sure she’s going to have fun with both!

Ah, how the time flies!

I got to go out on a Ponga ride yesterday, for the first time. I don’t think that I’ve talked about Ponga’s here yet, so let me give you some info on them. Ponga is a type of boat used mostly by fisherman, but fisherman who offer whale watching trips in Mag Bay use them as well. A Ponga is a fiberglass boat made in La Paz with varying lengths from 8 feet up to 18 feet painted white with a light blue trim. These boats are the standard out here, they handle the conditions very well and are long lasting. A “Pongero” is the pilot of the Ponga.

We headed out and quickly came up on a cow and calf that were being chased by a bull. The calf was very young, our Pongero says probably only weeks or a month old, and the bull was hoping to mate with the cow. We hung out with them as he chased them around in circles for an hour, we were essentially baby sitting while this was going on. The calf would come over and want to play with us, then the cow would get side tracked for a while, but after a little bit she would come over and get the baby. The bull would follow closely behind her.

No one on our boat got to touch them, but a couple people got to touch the cow from a zodiac right next to us. I did get some decent pictures, though.

It appears that we won’t be headed up to La Boca for a few trips. I’m OK with this, the whales down here in the La Entrada seem to be quite a bit more active. We have to go where the whales are!

The last couple of days I’ve been training with my boss/mentor Perry and we’ve been going along pretty good. I’ve got about as good of a handle on how this new boat works as you can get in just a couple of days. Now I just have to hope that the National Geographic Sea Bird is kind to me for the next six weeks.

One of the things we’ve been doing to get a bit ahead of the game has been to go through and rebuild a bunch of pumps that we got in shipyard so that we would have good spares on board. The pump above is an all bronze bodied sewage pump. We got kinda silly with it and decided that it would be funny to have a shiny poop pump and the above picture shows the fruits of our labor. It’s probably an engineer joke at best, but I had to show the world anyways.

The trips going great, we’ve had some great weather and the whales have been pretty good. One grey whale put on quite a show earlier breaching twenty something times and putting on a pretty good show. Now we are headed over to the Sea of Cortez, so we should get to see some other cool wild life, too.

I hope to get a little fishing in the next few days. I’ve finally got a pretty good set up, and after pick up a couple small things in Cabo tomorrow I should be set. Hopefully I’ll have pics soon….

On my way back to work, I decided to take the train to Utah to drop my son off at his mothers house, then catch a flight out of Salt Lake International to Cabo. I gave myself a five and a half hour window, between when the train got to Provo and when my flight left SLC. The week before the train ride a series of winter storms pounded the area, dropping a ton of snow over the Sierra Nevada’s. This made me worry quite a bit about the train being delayed, so I kept a close eye on arrival times of the trains through out the week. If need be, I could move the train ride up a day and get a hotel for the night in Salt Lake. By Wednesday I came to the conlusion that I should be OK taking the train on the scheduled day, it was never more than an hour late, even on the thickest snow days.

Then the day came. Still it was never more than an hour late, to this point. I figured that everything would be ok, right? As the train pulled up, I got a strange feeling. Like one of those feelings you get when you go to fly and you feel like the plane is going to crash. What was I to do? We had to take the train, my son needed to get home and I needed to get to work. So we got on the train and headed up the mountain.

The trip over the Sierras was beautiful, there was so much snow! I took hundreds of pictures and saw some amazing views.

From Reno on it got stupid. We were about halfway between Reno and Lovelock in the middle of BFE Nevada and the lights went out. The train stopped and we sat in the dark. It took three and half hours and much gallant effort on the part of the crew, but they tracked down the problem and got us going again. By that time I was so worried, I couldn’t sleep a wink for fear of missing my flight.

Luckily the rest of the trip went smooth and I only had to alter my plan a little bit. Instead of delivering my son all the way to Provo, we had to get off in Salt Lake and meet his mom at the airport. It worked out OK. Baby is with his momma, and I’m on my way to Cabo. All that stress! I hate it when I do that to myself.

My son, during sugar high:

And After:

It’s beginning to be time to think about what I want to do on my next vacation now and it’s already pretty clear. I’ll be in Baja for only one rotation this year, so it would be foolish of me to do not hang out for a little while after I’m done. I’ve wanted to rent a car in La Paz for quite some time now and go on a little road trip, so I think that’s what I should plan on doing. Part of what I have wanted to do was go to a town called Todos Santos, a quite little surf town on the Pacific coast and hang out. I’m not quite sure how the Mexican police feel about people just camping out at random, but from the stories I’ve heard it shouldn’t be too hard to get away with. Renting an suv and sleeping in my sleeping bag in the back would probably work out just fine, I’d just have to get food where I could along the way. From Todos Santos I would probably just make a loop down to Cabo and back up to La Paz, Checking out all of the beaches and cool little towns along the way. It would be nice to sneak in some 4 wheeling as well, I’d just have to be real careful not to break the rental car.

My next vacation falls in the middle of March, and goes through the month of April, so it’s going to be storming really hard at home when I return. I’m hoping to get at least one snow camping trip in this year, and two or even three would be ideal. I hope to get one in at the end of this vacation, then probably a couple more in the month of April. This kind of makes me realize that I’m slacking a bit on plans for that! Maybe just a little 4×4 trip up to the snow and hanging out for a couple of days would suffice? I’ll have to think about that one a bit more.

Unfortunately an extra trip to Utah in the middle of this vacation and a little bit too much money spent on presents has eaten up a good my travel and adventure budget for this vacation, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun! I just need to get the holidays out of the way.

Well, I hope that everyone is having a great time, where ever you are in the world!

I got the one thing I really, really needed. A new camera! Its pretty nice 10 mega pixel Nikon point and shoot. Now I won’t have any reason to not have good pictures here, and I’m really happy about it. Thanks, Dad!

The kids are well fed and very spoiled as well. It’s been great being able to spend time with them, and for them to spend time with my family. This is the first time for my son, so it’s an extra special treat. I sure am grateful that I have all of these great people in my life.

Today we made it through the village of Alert Bay and on through British Columbia. This trip is going by really fast and we are not stopping a whole lot in Canada. I’m kind of sad that we aren’t getting to see some of the cool things out here, but I’m really just ready to get home at this point. I miss my kids.

The cruising is going well, we’ve been seeing great wild life the last few days. Today a bunch of Orcas popped up about 20 feet away from the ship. I was taking a breather on the “fantail” or the aft deck and all of the sudden there they were. Too bad they came and went without anyone even really noticing, I wasn’t complaining.

Tomorrow we are back to the Lower 48 with a stop off in Friday Harbor. I’ve only been out there one time, and I really don’t remember much about it. Maybe I’ll get some time to check things out a bit.

The picture above is some un-named waterfall that we happened upon. It was a good thing to see.

Well….I’m on the way south now. We cleared Canadian customs this morning and it’s been a little different since. Actually it was a little different yesterday too, we don’t usually go past Petersburg on an average trip. We went south from there through Wrangell Narrows, which is beyond cool, and went over to Misty Fjords which is a pretty cool place with lots of glacier-carved mountains and pretty waterfalls.

Last night got a bit crazy, we hit our first real seas in a while leaving Alaska and coming into BC. We got up to around 8 foot seas and every steward got real green, real quick. All the stewards aboard right now are recent additions to our group, and have only been around on the really calm waters of the inside passage. They weren’t alone getting sick, apparently several guests got ill as well.

British Columbia is nice, like a toned down version of Alaska. It’s great to see some different things, I was ready to head south. I’ll put something up every day for the next couple of days about what it’s like, but for now you’ll have to be good with a picture of my dream cabin in Wrangell Narrows.