Down in the lower 48 if it’s blueberry season you just pick your own at a local blueberry farm, right? That’s what we always did while we lived known PA, but there are absolutely no pick your own blueberry farms up here in our area – you pick them in the wild.
Which all sounds well and good, but sometimes finding said blueberries in the wild can be rather hard. The last two years the ones on our property didn’t produce blueberries so we had to range farther and farther to find them with little success.
This year we were determined to try Tutka Bay. We kept hearing stories about big fat blueberries over there and really wanted to go see for ourselves. The problem was, we had to go 7-8 miles over open ocean to get there and depending on how big the waves are it just isn’t smart in our little 16 foot boat.
But the forecast looked good for yesterday (2 foot seas) so we packed up children and gear and like the hopefuls we are took a five gallon bucket for the blueberries.
The ocean was really calm on the way over and we made good time. It was gorgeous back in the bay, but as we viewed the cliffs rising from the water with tall evergreens going straight up the mountainside we looked at ourselves and wondered if maybe we should have done a bit more homework before coming. Where exactly do you pick blueberries back in this wild place?
Even the power line looked like an impossible hike with three small children. That had been the original plan – “Oh, we’ll just walk the power line and pick blueberries.”
Finally we decided to just explore a bit and motored over to a small island to check it out. There was also a peninsula jutting out into the bay with a nice beach to stop at.
Andy hopped out and went to make sure there weren’t any bears nearby while I got the children’s life jackets off.
Soon Andy returned. “No bears, lots of blueberries,” he said, and soon we all piled out of the boat and went to investigate for ourselves. Sure enough! There were high bush blueberries everywhere just loaded with berries. We all set to work picking and the children quickly got blue faces and hands from eating.
After picking there for almost two hours there were still lots of blueberries left but we decided to try some other spots in the bay to see if we could find bigger berries.
We ate our picnic lunch on a gravel bar and Andy scouted around more for a bear. He had brought his gun hoping we could bring home a blueberry bear.
After checking out the waterfall falling from a nearby cliff we once again went berry hunting. The first place we stopped was a no go – too steep and covered in Devils club that has prickers – but the second place had even more blueberries than the first and they were bigger. We began to bemoan that we had to be home at four o’clock and picked as fast as possible, but it was past nap time and the children began to cry more and more until Oscar wouldn’t stop crying at all.
I took the littles back to the boat and we got all our life jackets on and had a snack while Andy quickly picked a few more berries. Then we pulled up the anchor and headed for home!
The seas were really rough at one spot on the way back (two tides colliding?) but praise God we got back to the harbor safe and sound. In all we got about a gallon and a half of blueberries. We ate at least that many and left a lot there! Sometime next week maybe we can go back and camp overnight.
Glad your adventures were fruitful!