The time and date dependent destination I mentioned in the blog post about Whittier was Turnagain Arm. It was only a short distance away from Whittier.

I feel obligated to insert a geography lesson at this point. My apologies, but I think it will help explain what is going on.

We had driven along Turnagain Arm three times at this point. The first trip was with Janelle when she visited and we went down to Seward.




It was this trip along the arm with Janelle in early June that clued us into the fact that Turnagain Arm can have a Tidal Bore. Note, there only approximately 60 locations in the world that experience a bore tide.
Borrowing from Wikipedia, a bore is….
…a tidal phenomenon in which the leading edge of the incoming tide forms a wave (or waves) of water that travels up a river or narrow bay, reversing the direction of the river or bay’s current. It is a strong tide that pushes up the river, against the current.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_bore
So, Turnagain Arm is such a narrow bay. We realized during our visit with Janelle in early June, that we would be in the vicinity of the Arm during a time (late June) when the incoming tide would be larger than normal. There would create a bore tidal wave! And people SURF that wave!!!!! So we could witness not just a bore tide, but the surfers. This we had to see, so we arranged our various excursions to put us at Turnagain Arm at the appropriate time.

Things were quiet at first, but closer to 5:00 and the start of the bore tide, the pulloff started filling up with bore tide spectators. A lot of them, all waiting for the tide to come in. My closest analogy to this whole experience is waiting for a solar eclipse, there was lots of excited anticipation.









We were truly amazed at the number of people that showed up to watch and surf the bore tide. If felt like it was over in an instant, but I would say it took about 15 minutes to go past us. Once it passed, the parking lot emptied out immediately of spectators (just like a solar eclipse event). The surfers hung around a while longer to strip off their wetsuits and discuss the how it went.
It was such a cool experience to view this event. We are very glad we planned around it. After a peaceful nice in the pull off, we headed out towards Anchorage and saw a few morning surfers out, even though the tide wasn’t as big. They are true diehards!
Once again, I’m giving you some YouTube videos to see how this all works. Video does a better job than pictures to show you what is going on.
What is a bore tide, 2 minutes long: https://youtu.be/C_g4KCRcz-s?si=oYLEwS5uo0leJ3dB
Surfers talking about riding the bore tide, 5 minutes long: https://youtu.be/PM3y6gVKSEs?si=a8TJ_XSKMiOAb-8N