Family Hunger Genealogy

© Copyright Todd Neel

9/17/2024 Tuesday –

Man, I saw the most fantastic thing yesterday!

I left Anchorage after my two-night stay at the Ship Creek RV Park. On the way south on Alaska Highway 1 to Seward, I witnessed the Bore Tide on Turnagain Arm of the Chickloon Bay of the Cook Inlet.  

The city of Anchorage is on the Cook Inlet, and there are places where you look across the water and cannot see land on the opposite horizon. So that’s a good exercise: How far at sea can you look without seeing land on the other side?

At sea level, the curvature of the Earth limits visibility to roughly 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) before the horizon obscures your view. However, most sea captains will tell you that you can see a ship on the ocean 12 miles away. The height of the other ship, and/or the height of the shore or mountains on the other side also affects the view. (Wikipedia)

I was moving down the highway, pulling “Joe,” the trailer, being very conscious of traffic all around me. Leaving Anchorage, the highway moved along the ocean water, which would be moving from the Cook Inlet to the Chickaloon Bay. The opposite shore changed from open sea to mountains on the other side, maybe 1 to 3 miles across. (I may be inaccurate in gauging this distance as the map shows both shores go in and out with the bay becoming narrower as I drove further south/southwest). As I drove along the highway, my eyes occasionally left the road to look at the scenery, especially the water. I began to notice waves, but they were not like ocean waves coming towards the shore. Instead, they looked more like river waves parallel to the shoreline. There was a headwind, so from the tops of the waves were large sprays of water, creating a dramatic visual distraction for this driver (me) moving in traffic. Moving at highway speed, I couldn’t believe my eyes – How did the ocean turn into a river flowing the opposite direction of what I expected? So, I safely pulled my truck and 18 ft. trailer over in a rest area and saw what looked like the moving current of a HUGE river flowing AWAY from the ocean! It was like I was driving downstream. What? How did that happen? I thought that was the ocean!

While safely stopped along the highway, I looked at the paper maps on the seat beside me and saw that I had left the Cook Inlet of the Chickaloon Bay and was now driving along the Turnagain Arm.

I was due to talk to my son, Josh, on the phone, and I had good cell phone coverage so I called him on a Video Call. This was something neither of us had ever done, which is a feature on my Android phone. I could see his face on my little phone screen, between the large earpieces on his headphones as he had been playing video games in his apartment in Eugene, Oregon. (I wanted to shout: “Wake up! Turn off that video game! Go outside! It’s a big, beautiful world out there! I wish you were here!”, but I restrained myself and just left it with: “I love you. Wish you were here.”)

I turned the phone camera towards the water and tried to show and describe what I was seeing, which wasn’t very clear to him on the little screen of his phone. I had to go to the bathroom, so I virtually took Josh into the camper trailer with me but didn’t take him into the bathroom, putting the phone down on the kitchen table. It appeared we had a good cell connection, and daylight was burning, so I returned to the truck afterward, mounted the camera on the windshield, and continued the video call with Josh as I drove off.

I don’t know what my face looked like to Josh, but my eyes were going back and forth between the highway in front of me and the ocean out the right side windows. I was darting around traffic at 65 mph trying not to be an accident. It got crazy! I saw surfers out on the water, not surfing towards land like on the ocean, but surfing “down the river” on a breaking wave! Wow!

I told Josh I had to stop again at the next pullout, take pictures, and ask questions. He and I hung up and then called each other several times during my travels along Turnagain Arm, chasing this miraculous event.

The pullouts were crowded with other gawkers, sometimes making parking hard while pulling a trailer. They answered some of my questions, and I read some signage informing me of what I saw. This was a “bore tide,” which occurs at very few locations worldwide. (I hate to say it, but you can “Google it!” and look it up on the website alaska.org.) They occur near the time of the full moon (which was tonight, in fact, a “Supermoon”) and also at the time of a new moon which affects tides. These bore tides are increased in size when there is a more significant difference between low and high tide levels, and when the water moves into narrowing, shallow bottoms, constricting their flow. The very big ones at this location can be as large as 10 feet tall, explaining why all these people are here and why that dozen surfers are trying to catch it. On this day, I guess that the largest part of the wave I saw might have been about 2 or 3 feet tall.

As the wave moved past me, I got back in the truck and drove down the highway to the next pullout to watch it pass that location and see it do more crazy things. For example, I saw the water move past obstacles like large rocks along the shore, creating eddies like on a river shore until it filled in with the incoming tide and settled down to calm water again around the rock. I also observed huge whirlpools at times, looking very dangerous to a swimmer, surfer, or boater.

Below is a 1:30 video of the Bore Tide with surfers and the water moving past a rock on the shore. In the video I inaccurately call it the “Boring Tide”.

I read signage about a 20-year-old young man killed while trying to help another person stuck in the mud as the incoming tide drowned him. Other signage in these locations stated that beluga whales sometimes follow the incoming tide when it gets deep enough, rare creatures that Fish and Game asked the public to help them count.

Eventually, I got so far “downstream,” meaning up the Turnagain Arm of the Chickaloon Bay of the Cook Inlet of the Gulf of Alaska, that the incoming tide was very shallow, only a couple of inches detectable to my eyes as opposed to a couple of feet deep that was further down the road toward Anchorage.

Oh, man, I love doing this research! What a blast! What a great trip this is!