Red Bluff, Saginaw, Kake, and Portage

Day 62 – July 11

This place is amazingly beautiful. Tall rock walls up both sides of the channel, and a big river delta at the head of the bay. It was on that delta that Tom, Chris, and Debbie saw a momma bear and her yearly sized cub last night. The girls were in kayaks and Tom in his dinghy. They got some photos. The Magic crew did not participate in this ashore outing as we were sequestered in the galley making a Halibut and wild rice dinner.

There are waterfalls all along the rock walls, some small, some big, and one huge. On the way into the bay last night Glen nosed Magic up to the huge one for a photo op.


It was more like a boat wash. Deb was on the bow and all she needed was the shampoo and a towel. With Magic’s bow in the spray (never directly under the falling water), we still had over 110 feet of water under us… Pretty amazing.




This was another partly sunny and overcast morning. Glen went kayaking up the creek while everyone else stayed back and did morning stuff. Crab pots were checked and empty as were all the other pots pulled by other boats in the bay. Pulled anchor and headed out, stopping to pull Magic’s Shrimp pot which was out near the entrance to the bay. Whoo Hooo, about two dozen little critters. Cocktails and Prawn tails tonight! No bear sightings this morning.

We stopped in Saginaw Bay to do a bit of fishing. Immediately Glen has a Halibut on the line and into the boat. Yippee. He’s (the fish) not nearly as big as Nicole’s, but he’ll still make a nice meal or two for the crew. Now that we have a scale onboard, we can stop guessing; this one is 12 lbs. Glen also caught three Rock Cod but released those to go grow up. He claimed that they were too much work for the amount of ‘meat’. Whatever, he is really picky these days.



Okay enough fishing for now, we’re off to Kake, for our Cake oh I mean Kake walk. Kake is known for having the tallest totem pole. We will likely stay in Portage Bay tonight.

We made an unscheduled stop out in the big water to do some generator repair on Miner’s Debt. They should really plan these repair stops for areas where there is fishing to be had. Tom has had a few problems with keeping his generator working. But today he lost his batteries went dead because of the lack of generator. The guys tried to put a ‘bandaid’ on the system but couldn’t find the right size. We’ve decided to skip by Kake and we are heading directly to Portage bay for the night. No Kake walk for us on this trip. Heading down the channel and encountered several whale sightings. Most off in the distance i.e. just out of camera range, but one pair surfaced about 400 feet off our bow. Glen called the alert and the camera crew went into action. The whales surfaced a couple more times about 100 feet off our port. Deb and Noble are in heaven – Waterfalls, Bears, Halibut, Cod, Eagles, Otter, and Whale all in 24 hours.

We had perfect ‘Liz water’ all day long. For those of you who don’t understand this, it means very flat, calm water. No special jewelry today. We entered Portage Bay and found it to be quite large and outlined by a very wide green grassy shoreline. There are quite a few boats here so it must be a popular spot. Looks like a good place for dinghy and kayak rides. There is a large snow capped mountain standing seemingly by itself at the far end of the bay. We set anchor for the night at about 8pm.

The guys kept themselves busy into the evening with Tom’s generator. They think the problem is an electrical connection on the pump. They rewired it, and it started working again, or at least it’s working for now.