Hoonah

Hoonah is a little secluded town, with a large population of Tglint (say CLING-it) locals. The houses are mostly derelict, but enough are painted in bright cheerful colours that makes the town look happy on the surface. Not that we got too deep into the local vibe here. The natives are reserved, not necessarily unfriendly, but indifferent to us.  We met one family from Oregon that comes here for the summer to fish and we ended up having dinner in their cabin, salmon of course! The fishermen were hauling in all sorts of salmon, mostly pinks and silvers and heaps of halibut. We asked a bunch of questions to everyone who was filleting halibut until we felt like we had a pretty good idea of how to go about catching these monsters. Our helpful Oregon family gave us their salmon carcasses for bait. It ended up slicing off the meat left behind and using it to make salmon burgers. It felt weird but we hadn’t caught any salmon and were craving some fish so… The burgers were delicious. Most of our time in Hoonah was eaten up with groceries (we had to stock up for two weeks with Kolby’s parents), laundry, internet and securing our permit for Glacier Bay. This turned out to be a bit of a gong show and Kolby had to twice go up at midnight to the local bar to get on line and apply for the permit. Guess he got a bit of local flavour up there! Hoonah is basically a cruise ship town, where people either a) don’t work b) work only on days when the cruise ship is in town or c) work regular hours. I would say the majority fall into categories a and b. We were pretty knackered when we rolled off the dock and headed to Flynn cove, 10 nm away.