We spent the day in Petersburg and gained an appreciation for life in a small fishing town in SE Alaska. Petersburg was founded in by a Norwegian settler who values the combination of available fish (largely salmon but also halibut, rockfish, crab and shellfish) and fresh ice from nearby glaciers. The town retains its reliance on fishing and treasures its Norwegian heritage.
We went for a walk in a muskeg (peat bog) forest. The bog had many of the same attributes as an Irish peat bog, including plants and trees adapted to the extreme acidic conditions. One such plant is the sundew, a lovely little carnivorous flower that lures small insects to their doom.
Our guide was a young woman who moved here from Nome (she quipped that she moved south for warmer weather) and worked in a purse seiner fishing boat for four years. She was able to give us a deep understanding of the mechanics and hard work involved in such fishing. Most families in Petersburg have a fishing boat, even if just for subsistence fishing. She also spoke about the isolation of towns like Petersburg, where a student might miss a week of classes in order to travel to and from another town for a sports event. She described the way she and her partner live off the land, fishing, hunting, gathering plants and berries—- as she said “there’s nothing to do here but we are always doing something” and she clearly loves it.
As we left the Petersburg harbor, we saw a Stellar’s Sea Lion swimming across the channel— and then saw eight more dozing on the bases of two marker buoys at the entrance to Frederick Sound.
As about 9pm, as we were composing this blog, an announcement over the speaker system mentioned some humpbacks off the port bow. Of course we rushed up to see, and were rewarded with three whales, one of them quite small, who “pectoral flapped”, spun and breached for over 45 minutes as the sun set and the light faded.
Pictures: sundew bog plant, stellar’s sea lions on the bell buoy, Petersburg harbor with coastal mountains behind, humpback breaching in the twilight
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