Different From Anywhere Else — Cruising Alaska Aboard ‘Petrichor’
From the warmth of Mexico to the far north: cruisers Kate Schnippering and Sean Kolk from Oakland check in from Alaska aboard their Catalina 36 Petrichor.
At 58°52’N we find ourselves 1,300 miles from home, in a breathtaking anchorage with our own “personal” glacier.
The icefalls tower high in the distance. The land is newly carved by frozen water, raw and rocky, with shrubs starting to grow. As we’re enjoying dinner on deck, a pod of orcas ventures into the cove to take a look around. At breakfast, a moose is swimming laps near the boat.
Reid Glacier was once a tidewater glacier, and in 1899 it filled the entire anchorage. Now, a one-mile paddleboard down the inlet takes us to the silty mudflats at the base of the glacier, which no longer runs to the water. We climb off our boards into knee-high, slick quicksand, and trek along streams — eventually taking our shoes off to cross the water and investigate an ice cave at the base of the glacier. Inside, the cave is a deep blue, forming its own layer of fog. The bluer the ice, the older it is, as it is more compressed and light takes longer to travel through it. We stand in contemplation at this ancient yet fleeting, ever-changing maze, guarded by behemoth bears we are grateful not to run into today.
Scraping mud off gear for several hours while wearing winter jackets in July, it dawns on us that cruising in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, is decidedly different than in anywhere else we’ve ever been.
How did we get here?
Only a year prior, we’d shipped Petrichor up to Seattle, after a couple of seasons in the Sea of Cortez via the 2021 Ha-Ha. We wanted to get our California/Mexico cruiser ready for southeast Alaska: the cold, the wet, and the rugged anchorages.
