Ideal Cove and Petersburg
This morning, National Geographic Sea Bird anchored at Ideal Cove on Mitkof Island. Aerobic and Naturalist hikes were offered. All hikes on these trails were on boardwalks made of wooden planks, most of the them are netted for better traction. The scenic trails take us through forest of hemlock and spruce, streams, and lake with an elevation change from 50 to 100 feet, depending on the hike.
Just after lunch, we docked in Petersburg. This town has a Norwegian heritage and a population of 3,100. Petersburg is a fishing town where approximately $22 million in seafood is processed annually. We were free to explore the town on foot or by bicycle. Three walks were offered, a dock walk with stories about the fishing boats, a bog walk on nearby Kupreanof Island across the channel, and a photographic walk led by Cotton Coulson, our National Geographic Photographer. A number of guests took the option of flight seeing around the surrounding wildlife areas via floatplanes.
For dinner, we enjoyed a feast of Dungeness crab fresh from Petersburg. We concluded the evening with dessert in the Lounge, and a preview screening of the first few days of our voyage captured by our video chronicler, Nancy Sanders. Nancy will have the final DVD edited and available to take home at the end of our expedition.
