Views From Above

 Our location tonight is Shag Cove in Glacier Bay National Park

This post shares some thoughts on drones interspersed with a random selection of images saved from my drone videos; I hope you enjoy them. At the end of the post is a link to a YouTube drone video from one of our Ford's Terror anchorage.

Our anchorage in the east arm of Ford's Terror. If you look closely you can see Invictus as the tiny dot at top center.

I appreciate my drone and I fly it whenever I can, wherever I can. I enjoy the many gigabytes of mostly video on my hard-drive but I’m not sure what Brenda and Patrick will do with all that some day. I guess delete is an easy thing.

A small stream flowing into Donkey Cove.

So lush and green

I really like the different perspective that a drone provides. It lets me see places and things that I would not otherwise be able to see. As an example of this while we are boating, the drone allows me to see what lies beyond the dense forested edge of the anchorages we spend each night in. The vegetation, terrain, and the bugs make it practically impossible to know what lies just a few yards beyond the cove’s margins. The drone makes it so easy to observe the otherwise inaccessible. And the ability to so easily see everything from above is remarkable.

This shot is surreal to me. It looks like Invictus is floating on clouds.

You can see the glacial stream is mixing with clear water.

I have some drone-flying stories to share about close calls, minor crashes, and yes, full on crashes. The technology that allows an amateur to fly a four-rotor aircraft is impressive but not perfect. A software glitch is why I’m on my second drone. My first drone sits [upright] 6 fathoms deep just off the west coast of Goose Island. I know it’s upright because the water was so clear I watched it go all the way down. So sad, so devastating. The quality of the silence after an event like that is interesting – the lapping of the waves against the hull and a few gulls squawking in the distance. And then there’s the look that Roma and I gave each other when the awful truth sank (pun intended) in.

 

Erosion on this mountainside makes a beautiful pattern.

My drone has a reasonably good camera. As I am flying, the image is displayed on the controller screen, which is about the size of a large cell phone screen. Even with my glasses on, the finer details are not visible on such a small screen. Once the video is loaded onto the computer, then the full image can be appreciated. I often find really cool details in the video that were a complete surprise.

A beautiful estuary in No Name Cove, Tracy Arm.

One time I was videoing a shallow wetland. When I viewed the video on the computer monitor, I noticed a muddy trail progressing underwater. A closer view showed that it was a beaver stirring up the mud as he swam along the bottom.

The long view south from Ruth Cove.

A beautiful foreshore in Ruth Cove.

Two arms of Sawyer Glacier converge just a few hundred meters above tidewater.

 

This is the face of the Sawyer Glacier at tidewater. You can see where the river that is running underneath the glacier exits on the left margin.

Here's a close up of the river's exit. I wanted to fly the drone right inside but chickened out.

It's hard to grasp the scale of this landscape. If you look really closely you can see the pilot and his dinghy just to the left of that amazing red bluff. It was too windy to launch from Invictus so I had to go to shore.

Here's a closer view of the pilot, dinghy and Oblio. Mr O is tough to see but he is above and behind me on the rock.

Another beautiful estuary, this one at Sullivan Cove.

A different view of the same estuary. I imagine that this creek will fill with spawning salmon. That would be fun to film from above.

This is a patch of fireweed at Sullivan Cove. There were very large grizzly tracks and wolf tracks on the beach.

Here is a YouTube drone video of Ford's Terror that you might enjoy.