July 4 - Dutch Harbour/Unalaska

 Last night was a "roll-y" night - the weather has been deteriorating and the ocean became quite "lumpy" as the Captain called it. The swells had increased to 12-15 feet and the good ship Tustumena heaved and rolled through the night hard enough to wake us up and hang on to the bunk rails a few times. I'm fortunate - I don't get motion sick - but Lynn is another matter. I thought for sure he'd be done for but amazingly, he was OK!

We woke up this morning, excited to be heading into Dutch Harbour today. We had breakfast and went out on deck to watch the boat dock. The clouds had rolled in but were still relatively high and the rain was holding off. We arrived around 9:45am and we had until 5pm to be back on the boat.

Down town Dutch Harbour

It's July 4th today - Indepedence Day in the United States. For many people this is a BIG celebration day and for the past week, we've noticed a lot of bunting going up as well as a plethora of American flags, red, white and blue shiny spinny things in yards and people blinging up their vehicles and bicycles. We heard that Dutch Harbour would be having a July 4 parade today around noon. 

Dutch Harbour has a very interesting history. It's the only place the US experienced battle during WWII on home soil (other than in Pearl Harbour). The Japanese landed in the Aleutians and took the small islands of Attu and Kiska. Hostilities ensued and Dutch Harbour quickly became an American military base after the Japanese bombed it twice in June of 1942. Today, there is still much evidence of this point in it's history. Everywhere, concrete fox holes covered in moss still sit sentry on street corners, in yards and on beaches. Bunker Hill has a gunnery tower that can still be seen from the road below and you can hike a trail up to reach it. All over the island, WWII artifacts scatter the land, left behind after the war was over and the military pulled out.

Cement foxholes that dot the community, lying innocently in yards and beside roads, quiet reminders of the violence that WWII brought not that long ago.  

From the ferry dock, we walked a mile or so down the road to the WWII Visitor's Center but alas, because of the holiday today, it was closed. We carried on down the road another mile or so and came to a part of the town where the Grand Aleutian Hotel, Safeway and the Alaska Marine Supply Company are located. It was here we started to notice the eagles - here and there, they were sitting on light stands, roofs of buildings, tops of fences... and then we started to notice signs warning people to beware of them! We looked around us a bit more carefully and realized there were dozens and dozens of them... at one point, I counted more than 25 of them sitting along the roofline of Safeway. I've never seen so many Bald Eagles in all my life! And they're ENORMOUS!!! Apparently, they nest on top of buildings and can become aggressive to passers-by who happen to walk close enough to make them feel threatened, especially when they have young still in the nest! Locals complain that they've become so numerous that they're pests and they have been known to attack both people and pets, particularly small dogs. 

Enormous bundles of rope and nets for fishing. 

We went into Alaska Marine Supply just to check it out and it's a great store that sells everything you might need if you were a fisherman or had a boat of some other kind. Everything from groceries, hardware and marine supplies to kitchen appliances, furniture and outdoor gear including Helly Hansen rain gear and X-Tra Tuff boots from here to kingdom come. A very cool place to poke around in and, in the end, we bought a couple of awesome t-shirts and ball caps...

Dutch Harbour

Freezer containers to ship seafood worldwide. Note my husband standing in front of them. They're HUGE!
This was only one of several stacks of these at this one loading dock.

For over 20 years, Dutch Harbour has been the #1 fishing port in the United States. In 2007, the community was highlighted when the show "The Deadliest Catch" shone a light on the Alaska King Crab fishery and showed the drama and perils of fishing in the Bering Sea. 

The ubiquitous Xtra-Tuff gumboots, pride and joy of Alaskans everywhere.

A skiff sitting on the side of the road.

We headed towards the residential part of town and meandered past the museum, expecting it to be closed as well BUT - what luck! - they were opened for a few limited hours. It is a great little museum that covers the multi-faceted history Unalaska/Dutch Harbour has; the Aleut people, the Russian settlements, WWII, the commercial fishing history, the natural history and volcanic evolution of the Chain... We ended up sitting and watching most of a very well done documentary of the Aleut story during WWII - the American military evacuated the Aleut people from the islands when the Japanese arrived but had made no provisions for them so they just dumped them off in a remote location south of Juneau at an abandoned cannery site. They  were left to fend for themselves and the consequences were dire. Most were there for years and the poverty, sickness and mortality rate was astronomical. It wasn't until the 1980s that the US government finally acknowledged the atrocities... a very sad (but all too familiar) story... 

Russian Orthodox church built in 1896 when the Russians came for fur trading.

From the museum, we walked another couple miles through the active cannery district, over a big bridge at Captain's Bay and up the hill and down the other side into Dutch Harbour. People were gathered in big groups on and around the old wooden footbridge watching pikers guide toy boats down the small creek - the July 4 boat race! We crossed the footbridge and came to the small but very pretty municiple park and playground. From there, there are several square blocks of old houses, most looking very run down and weather-beaten. To the left was another old Russian Orthodox church, built in 1896, with it's classic onion shaped roof and today, it was surrounded by a carpet of grass loaded with tiny pink daisy-looking flowers. We followed the beach road and could see, in the distance, a collection of flags on flagpoles and what was clearly a memorial of some kind. We wandered to that end of the cove and, indeed, it is a memorial for many things - mariners lost at sea, WWII, the Coast Guard, there is even the enormous propellor from the SS Northwestern which was bombed in the harbour during WWII. 

Memorial Park

Propellor from the SS Northwestern
that was bombed in Dutch Harbour
in 1942.

By the time we finished here, the fog was rolling in for earnest. The air was saturated with damp and suddenly, the temperate morning was turning into a bitterly cold afternoon. Our hopes to go see some of the WWII sites were dashed as everything became buried in pea soup thick fog. We were also getting tired - we'd walked over 10 kms - and the soggy weather wasn't encouraging us to go much further. We happened upon a taxi parked in a driveway so we knocked on the door and the owner drove us back to the ferry dock. 

Random WWII propellor in the grass behind the museum. 

When we got to the dock, someone had thrown a huge frozen fish head onto the side of the road and several Bald Eagles were hanging around, taking turns at it. I've never been that close to a mature eagle and I couldn't get over how HUGE they were. Unbelievable. 

We headed back onto the boat and had a short nap before the boat pulled anchor and we started our return trip back to Homer. We had dinner and went to bed early because we were, by then, heading into open water and the ocean was getting pretty rough again.