Turnagain Arm near Girdwood, AK

Monday, July 24, 2017

Today we move from Homer to Portage Valley RV Park for the purpose of watching the bore tide this evening.

 Along our drive was Tern Lake.  We pulled into the day use area and saw this small boardwalk along a creek flowing from Tern Lake.

We could see the bridge crossing the creek we drove on as we drove into the day use area.

Amazing how clear the water is.

To our surprise we see a lone Red/Sockeye salmon.  We learned they are usually silver skinned and that when they turn this red they are close to death after spawning. We did not see any other salmon in the creek.  Curious.

 This is Tern Lake as you are looking towards the mountains.

 We saw lots of gulls on the lake, but we also saw this mother duck with her 3 babies.

We got to our RV site about 1pm. Had lunch and just hung-out until it was time to go watch the bore tide.

Today's bore tide was to be the largest of this month.  It was very windy. I read on the internet that if it is windy it could delay the tide as much as 15 minutes. I think it was delayed about 25 minutes and it did not seem as dramatic as we saw about 10 days ago. I can't help but wonder if the strong winds affected it.

We moved down the way and watched as the surfers sat waiting for the wave to reach them. There was this narrow band of sun light for a little bit.  Cool picture.

WOW the wave is bigger than it looks. You can see one person made it onto the wave, but the other did not.Whoops!

Here are 2 more that caught the wave here.

 Look at the turbulence behind the wave as the water rushes into Turnagain Arm. Here it is flowing over a sandbar causing this swirling motion.

We moved about 9 miles further down the road to watch again. Shortly after we stopped a van with 3 surfers that rode the wave earlier came and went into the water here waiting for the wave again.  It took about 30 mins and it came again.
 

Above the 3 of them caught the wave again. Below Tic zoomed in on one of them.  You can see the wave does not look as big here.

We met a Mom and her 3 kids that had stopped to watch this also.  They had been fishing that day and ended up giving us 2 large filets of red salmon they had just caught.  We've already had dinner so that will be tomorrow night.  Another blessing from God!