Sitka

We were told that Sitka gets about 90 inches of rain a year but no snow.  In fact, it doesn’t storm there.  That is, they don’t get the thunder storms with high winds, hail, drenching downpours and worse that we’re used to, or so we’re told.  No, that 90 inches comes in the form of drizzle.  Apparently we were lucky the day we were there  was dry.  It was still cloudy but it didn’t drizzle.  Our guide/bus driver was Anna, a transplanted Texan married to a Tlingit fellow.  She took us to a bear preserve.  Brown bears are present on the island and there was the occasional sign reminding people of that fact.  Anna told about several encounters some member of her family had had with bears in town, none resulting in harm but exciting nonetheless.  It was the standard practice to shoot orphan cubs, orphaned because the mother had been shot usually, because there was no way to care for them.  A man and his wife decided a few years ago to do something about that.  They acquired a couple of wood pulp vats a paper company had stopped using and made them into bear sanctuaries.  The vats are made of masonry, have walls maybe 12 feet high and enclose about three fourths of an acre each.  Water was diverted from a nearby stream and voila, they had bear enclosures.  It took them years of jumping through hoops to get the state approval for their project but within weeks of getting that approval they rescued their first bear cubs.  They are huge adult bears now and I think there were five of them, or maybe six.  They are two groups of siblings, a group in each vat.  Recently they built a corridor between the two vats which are only twenty feet or so apart and they allow the bears to visit each other from time to time.  They opened the corridor while we were there and there is a definite protocol the bears observe in passing from one vat to the other.  As I said these guys are huge and some are huger than others.  Those got to cross first.   I don’t know how they get the bears to go back to their own vat after one of these visits.

We also visited a bald eagle preserve in Sitka.  The eagles they have there have been injured and can’t be released back into the wild because the injuries that brought them to the facility left them unable to survive in the wild.  A young volunteer gave us a talk on eagles accompanied by one tolerant of crowds and would perch on the volunteers arm during the presentation.  We were told that bald eagles aren’t overly burdened with brains and what they have is 80% devoted to finding food.  We were also told their eyesight is nonpareil, that they could read a newspaper from 100 yards away, if they could read.  It seems bald eagles are as common in some parts of Alaska as pigeons are in some cities in the lower 48.  There is an Alaskan Airlines plane dubbed the Salmon Thirty Salmon because an eagle flying above the plane on takeoff from the Sitka airport dropped a salmon it had in its talons and the salmon smacked into the windshield of the plane causing it to have to return to the airport so the plane could be checked for damage.

We didn’t dock in Sitka.  It is one of a bunch of islands in the area and the ship just anchored in the vicinity.  During the obligatory lifeboat drill before we set sail, we mustered by groups, each group underneath a lifeboat suspended above the deck.  There were six on each side of the ship.  While standing there underneath a lifeboat when I was supposed to be listening to instructions I noticed a seventh boat of similar size but different hull design and wondered why the difference.  Turns out those two boats, or tenders as they are called, are used to ferry people back and forth to places like Sitka where the ship can’t dock.