This summer we circumnavigated Prince William Sound 8 times with the Cathy G and Bayhawk, visiting Pink and Chum salmon spawning streams. The researchers onboard from the Prince William Sound Science Center were collecting otolith and DNA samples for straying research as well as mapping the spawning areas in the streams for the next phase of the project. For most of the cruise we had warm, sunny weather in the form of an old fashioned summer like what we used to get. The crew went swimming several times. It was a black fly year in a few locations which required head nets and gloves. Blue berries were much better this year than the last few years, with the largest ones we found being on Montague Island. Cordova was our home port for this project. Every 15 days we resupplied with produce in Cordova which has plenty of stores. The AC store in the harbor is right across the street from the dock and you can wheel your shopping cart from the store right to the boat. There is an Asian store near the harbor too that has the best fresh produce by far. They also have a large selection of gourmet cheese, chocolate and old style salami. Uptown there is the front door and back door store. The front door store has the best selection of bread in town and also has meat, fruit and vegetables. The back door store carries bulk supplies similar to Costco and Sam’s Club. Overall, Cordova has been a great town to work out of with plenty of well stocked boat supply stores and the harbor staff is great to work with. The harbor and town is very busy in the summer with the extensive fishing fleet of mostly gill netters, seiners and tenders and several fish processing plants. Driving out on the Copper River Delta during breaks was great with lots of wildlife to be seen and great hiking trails. While sampling the salmon streams we ran into plenty of bears, both black and brown. At one stream we saw 9 bears in 4 hours. We anchored in a different location almost every day sometimes clocking as much as 14.5 hours a day cruising time between the two of us. Many of our friends were following the progress of the cruise on Facebook:
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Matt
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