Hurricane Ian is on it’s way away from Florida and now it’s time to start the recovery. In my area we were very fortunate and suffered minimal damages, but the Sanibel Island and Ft. Myers areas weren’t as lucky. It will take some time to assess all the damage and even longer to rebuild. My heart goes out to everyone down there right now and I’m very thankful that our community was spared. Now that things are returning to normal in this area I can go back to trying to get into a normal routine. I just returned to work this week after two weeks in Alaska, and jumped into a hurricane shelter! Even though we got very lucky, it was far from the routine, and lots of extra hours, so I’m definitely ready to return to normalcy for awhile.

While we were in Alaska we visited Turnagain Arm a couple of times. It is a branch that comes off of the Cook Inlet just south of Anchorage. It is bordered by the Chugach State Park and has some beautiful scenery. It was named because Captain James Cook sailed up into it looking for the Northwest Passage and was forced to turn around once again (no such passage actually exists). Turnagain Arm is also well known as a good place to see beluga whales. We were lucky to see several of them including one mother with a calf on our first trip. Unfortunately, they were too far away to photograph without a very good long range telephoto lens. It was awesome to watch them through binoculars, though!

Turnagain Arm is also well known for it’s strong bore tide. It is the second highest in the world with the only the Bay of Fundy beating it out. When the tide is out it exposes large mud flats that many types of birds like to go out onto to hunt for crabs, insects, grounded fish, and other sea life. People are also sometimes tempted to wander out onto the flats, which can be quite dangerous. There are places in the mud where something as heavy as a human being can sink and get stuck. When the tide comes in, it comes in quickly at speeds of up to 20 mph in a wall of water that can be over six feet high. As you can image, if you are stuck in the mud when that happens, the results would be very bad. Despite their being dangerous, the flats themselves are quite pretty and watching the wild birds and the crabs wander around is pretty interesting.