Ketchikan II

Today we awoke to poor weather and cold temps, we did wonder around the tourist trap (town) until we froze out. After a little lunch and a nap we did some flight planning. We left for our wildlife cruise, which we found out was just a crab show, at 4:30pm from the hotel and arrived at the George's Point Lodge at 40 minutes later. We were delayed because of road construction which we learned was normal as Ketchikan only has 38 miles of road to work on, so they are always tearing something up for job security.

Our guides took us to an estuary, there we found brackish water and crab pots. You can see me in the above picture pulling up a crab pot. The pot that Ray pulled up had a fresh soft shell crab and its former shell. The soft shell crab was very soft and it is simply amazing how much of the crabs shell is lost. We did not eat any of these crabs, the lodge only catches them for research and releases them immediately.

After returning to the lodge we had an "all you can eat" crab feast. I ate 1.5 crabs and was quite pleased with my dinner. (these are dungeness crabs btw) We did have a crab shell stacking competition that got quite out of hand when we started using other items to enhance our crab stack. We thought we had it "in the bag" when we used a chair on top of our table, but another person stood on the table and won. We also reminded Dad of his birthday one last time.

Tomorrow we all start the trip home. Don't expect your fellow pilots until Saturday or Sunday, we still have a long, long way to go. (I was forced to buy internet to get weather, so you get pictures)