My daughter Karen recently started a new job at the lab at our local PeaceHealth hospital.
She has made some new friends there and she invited some of them out for a harbor cruise.
Our long run of warm sunny weather is predicted to end soon so we wanted to get this trip in before that happened.
It was a short cruise, just a few hours. We went out from Bar Harbor first NW towards the shipyard and the airport ferry. Then back SE past the harbor and along the waterfront. The cruise ships look so massive when you pass by close to them on the water.
This is Justine and John, who were our guests on the harbor cruise today.
We made our way up past the cruise ships, then past the Coast Guard base to Doyon's Landing.
At this point I normally speed up a little and go around the SE end of Pennock Island to get back to town. But on this trip, something totally unexpected happened; John asked if he could jump off the boat!
At first, I thought he was joking, but then he made it clear that he really wanted to jump off the boat and go swimming. He asked if there was a way to get back on board from the water.
I have a boarding ladder on the swim step, but in the 17 years I have had the boat it has never been deployed. I looked at it recently when the boat was out of the water, but frankly, I had forgotten how it was deployed.
There was a very brisk NW wind blowing and so Tongass Narrows was quite choppy. I decided the best and safest place for him to do this was at the drive-down dock behind Madison Lumber & Hardware.
So, we pulled in there and got tied up, and sure enough, John jumped in and swam around for about 30 minutes.
When it was time to climb back aboard it took John just a couple of minutes to figure out how to deploy the boarding ladder and get himself back on board.
From there we just motored slowly over to my slip, which was just a few minutes away, and got tied up.
It was memorable trip, even though we only logged a little over 7 miles.
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