We left beautiful Klag Bay, Alaska on a Thursday morning, (August 4, 2016).
In Pelican the day prior, a regular named Bill at Rose’s Bar told us about a place called Radioville, on a small unnamed island on the outside of Chichagof Island. Bill kinda sorta pointed it out on the chart for us, and told us there was once a radio station run by a retired signal corps operator named Joe Bauer who delivered messages from the outside world to the gold and silver mining operations in that area during the early 1900s. Apparently this retired signal corps operator drank quite a bit, and Bill said that the beach where we’d find his old radio shack was covered in glass from this guy’s broken booze bottles, and for us to look for a red metal roof and the blue and purple sparkling beach in front of it.
In the old Evergreen map book we had onboard, we managed to find one reference to Radioville with a line from the description box to an island (left middle of the image above).
The Douglass guide “Exploring Southeast Alaska” in the section about Klag Bay, just says “On a nearby small island (Radioville)…” and a random post in Active Captain simply says “Also nearby, on an island referred to as ‘Radioville”…”
After a little bit of comparing islands in real life with our charts and the old map books, we found it!
Klag Bay (where we were anchored the prior night) is in the upper right of the chart screenshot, and Radioville is on the island marked with the green marker near the lower left. The shack is on the northernmost shore.
Once we were sure we’d found it, we anchored out and took the dinghies to shore.
The “glittering blue and purple glass beach that you can see as you approach” was a bit of an exaggeration. There were only occasional brown and green bits of glass on the beach. But, after a bit of digging, we did find a few blue, clear, and purple pieces.
The little shack was filled with mostly junk and was a bit creepy, actually (due mostly to the soggy dolls).
After we’d successfully explored the area, we said goodbye to Radioville (feeling pretty cool that we found it!) and headed off for our cruise down the outside to Kalinin Bay on the northern tip of Baranof Island. The weather (and the sea conditions) were just lovely.
