On To Whittier

During our last day in Ninilchik we woke up early in the morning to go out fishing. After catching our quota of halibut for the day, we headed back to shore, filleted the halibut, and then started packing up camp. I cannot explain how identical Mr. Clooten and my dad are! Mr. Clooten had his whole process for packing ironed out to a tee! He basically emptied the U-Haul and we all stood by with the gear waiting for what he would call next to pack into the U-Haul. Hilarious!

After packing up camp, we all headed to Whittier, a small town known best for it's shrimping out in the Passage Canal, the gateway to the Gulf of Alaska. Mr. and Mrs. Clooten drove in the motorhome; Alana and I rode with Nate in his truck; and Chip rode with Lucas who drove his boat. The goal is to stay in Whittier for a few nights and go out on Lucas's boat to try our hands at shrimping!

Whittier is a super small town with a population of 170! That's less than my small high school graduation class of 200! The majority of Whittier's residents live in a high-rise condominium at the back of the town, right up against the mountains, with waterfalls all around it. Quite beautiful! Most of those who live in Whittier are shrimpers or fisherman, and the rest operate small businesses, like restaurants, cafes, and gifts shops for the small number of tourists willing to make the trip to Whittier. 



Whittier is further isolated by a five-mile long tunnel through a mountain. The tunnel is one-way, and also includes railroad tracks! Hence, the use of this tunnel is highly regulated, and of course, comes with a price. The tunnel releases once an hour from either side, and when you drive through, there are rocks walls right next to both sides of the car, and the car is straddling railroad tracks. Pretty cool, but it was somewhat annoying to deal with "catching a tunnel" into Whittier, but really only because it was an unexpected delay in our plans.

So we had read that Whittier was beautiful, but that is not quite the impression we got when we arrived. We emerged from the tunnel around 11pm, but there was no campground in Whittier to camp with the motorhome, or even to park the cars. After caravanning through the small sleeping city for a while, a policeman (probably the only one in Wittier) allowed us to park in an empty parking lot on the other side of town. Nice. 


The next morning we woke up to rain. And clouds. And rain. And wind. And fog. And rain. And rain. And horizontal rain. And cold. Welcome to Whittier, where the weather couldn't get shittier! Did you know that Whittier gets an average of 190 inches of rainfall a year?!?! To put this in perspective, Seattle, our perceived nation's rainiest city, gets a mere 65 inches of rainfall a year. Whittier gets triple this amount!

We spent almost our entire first day in Whittier working on the boat. Lucas bought it about a year ago, and it still needs some fixing up in terms of the engine, steering, etc. So the boys stood outside in the rain and watched Lucas and Mr. Clooten argue about the boat, while Alana, Mrs, Clooten, and I sat inside the motorhome and talked about how we should've just stayed in Ninilchik and caught more halibut. Alana and I still had some hopes that we would get the boat out and catch some shrimp, but even our enthusiasm was dwindling.

That evening, Mr. and Mrs. Clooten headed back to Fairbanks while Alana and I stayed with Lucas, Chip, and Nate to do some shrimping. By 6 pm we were finally taking the boat to the ramp to put it into the water. By this point, the rain was off and on, whereas in the morning it was a constant horizontal menace. We were relatively dry during the launch, and then huddled inside the boat's cabin to wait out the rain and determine our shrimping strategy.