Southeast Sojourn

It’s the 30th of August as I write this, and we are sitting on the hook in Egg Harbor, Coronation Island, just southwest of the aptly-named Cape Decision. We are waiting to make the jump offshore for the trip down to the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Port Townsend, having had an aborted and somewhat comic (in retrospect) attempt to get started yesterday.

We ended up motoring all the way from Haines to Port Alexander, 180 miles down the massive fjord that is first known as Lynn Canal, then as Chatham Strait. The winds were light or contrary the whole way. I’m ready to sail again, as sailing brings crew and ship alive in a way that simple motoring never will. But there were compensations to the days of motoring, notably the chance for hours and hours of reading and occasional games of crib from behind the wheel.

Here’s a shot of the late-night solar panel installation in Haines, the night before our departure. I was wiring until 1 AM (0100 in our new lexicon) and then updating the blog and downloading tidal data until 0300.

A big milestone from Haines that I failed to mention in earlier posts was Eli’s first birthday, which we celebrated with Kelly, on the big day, August 5th. Alisa produced our first-ever cake from the ship’s oven for the event.

Two days south of Haines we came to Funter Bay, a good anchorage surrounded by a little cluster of recreational cabins. We spent the night at the state dock and listened to the conversation of the Juneau people whose sportfishing boats were tied up around us. Funter Bay was the site of an internment camp for Aleuts from St. Paul Island (in the Pribilof Islands) during WWII. The community was evacuated with two days notice and held captive in Funter Bay without adequate food, heating, clothing, sanitation or medical care. A short walk from the dock is the graveyard from that time. Lots of graves for the tiny size of the community of prisoners. Lots of them from 1943. All dug under the trees, in a foreign land for people whose entire world and history lies in the treeless islands of the Bering Sea.

The next day took us to the dock at Tenakee Springs, a beautiful, historic little settlement, a long double row of houses cheek by jowl on the glorified 4-wheeler trailer that serves as the main street, all set along the shores of Tenakee Inlet (another humbly named, mighty fjord), just north of Peril Strait. On our first walk through town, at seven PM (1900…) we saw no people about and only one full-sized vehicle, the old pickup operated by the city. Tenakee is famous as far away as Juneau and Sitka for the public bath house fed by water from the warm springs. Alternate men’s and women’s hours are posted on the door. It was women’s hours when we walked through town in the evening, so Alisa peeked in for a reccee. “No way I’m taking a bath in there!” she said. “There’s a big cement tank in the middle and it’s deep and creepy.”

We had heard that Tenakee had largely become a retirement community, and we suspected that many of the retirees were from somewhere else, based on the abundance of low-hanging ripe blueberries along the main drag. No group of Alaskan grandmothers would leave blueberries in such an under-utilized state. Glen confirmed that the town was largely the home of retirees, many from Outside, and that things get pretty quiet in the winter. Alisa and I agreed that we would be delighted to spend the summers of our Autumn there, and the five acres of waterfront that the city of Tenakee Springs was auctioning off, minimum bid one hundred thousand dollars, was the subject of much “what-if” discussion for the next day or two on board.

Eli just liked the berries.

Our friend Jamie, who has been all over Southeast in his field work on Steller sea lions, had told us that Baranof Warm Springs was not to be missed, and we were happy to see that Warm Springs Bay was a short day south from Tenakee. We began motoring down the east shore of Baranof Island, which is full of the kind of terrain that you see in this photo.

There was, happily, room at the state dock when we pulled in. Here’s Pelagic tied up in front of the Republic, one of the storied fleet of halibut schooners that are the romantic heart and soul of Alaskan commercial fishing. The crew of the Republic takes the waters at Baranof every year after their longline season is finished. Salty fellows, those Republics. Baranof, by the way, is the community, Warm Springs Bay the locale.

Baranof got something like 34 feet of snow last year – a modern-era record. Catastrophic results for the foundations of the cabins in the background.





Below are Eli and self on the way to take the waters, with more or less the whole of Baranof in the background. Note the great boardwalk, which runs all the way to the hot springs and Baranof Lake beyond – feels like a third of a mile or so. Note also the waterfall contributing to the situation of idyllic beauty.




After a brisk walk up the boardwalk we came to this payoff – the hotsprings piped into three consecutive pools – super-hot, hot, and big enough for one person, sequentially – that overlook the rushing torrent that joins Baranof Lake to the waterfalls below. Go ahead, try to beat this for tranquility, natural beauty and northern-style outdoor nudity and decadence. I will bet that you cannot.







The water was too hot for el squirto, so he had to watch as Alisa and I took turns soaking.



After the soak we continued up to the lake, a sub-alpine oligotrophic vision, complete (and apparently replete) with cutthroat trout lazily rising to take bugs from the mirrored surface.

And finally, for the piece of resistance, Baranof features three public baths fed by the hot springs and overlooking the harbor. One of them is this handmade wooden beauty from Japan.

Eli and I took a dip in one of the galvanized versions.

And then we bid a hearty fare well to Baranof… so long, we hardly knew ye!



We met Joe and April Smith when they tied up in Warm Springs Bay on board the Kesia Dawn with baby Ocean and pit bull Monkey on board. Joe and April cruised to Baja and Hawaii on their 34 foot steel gaff-rigged schooner, and we hit it off talking about boats and babies, and the salty-stinky intersection of those two worlds. Joe told me that it was great we were cruising with a baby, and April said to Alisa, “You’re a brave woman.” Joe grew up in Port Alexander, at the southern tip of Baranof Island, and the Kesia Dawn made the trip down from Warm Springs Bay on the same day we did.

On the way we passed yet more spectacular Baranof Island terrain. This brief visit really opened our eyes to Southeast Alaska. I hope we’re lucky enough to spend more time here in years to come.

Port Alexander is small enough that Alisa and I had never heard of it before this visit. It sits inside a tiny natural harbor that is reached through a narrow cut in the kelp and rocks that guard it from the outside. The town used to make its lifeblood on the Columbia River run of king salmon, and was bigger than Sitka until the Columbia was damned and the run failed. The town languished until the 1970s, when land grants were available and a new generation was attracted to this incredible spot. There’s a resident commercial troll fleet and a few small lodges, and some very friendly people.

Alisa and I have been looking forward to the day when we would start to meet cruisers in general, and our people among the cruising fraternity specifically. Joe and April, and Keill and Elizabeth on Shambala, from Sydney, Australia, who we met in Haines, were the first two cruising couples who we’ve met on the trip. Common experience and outlook made it very easy to talk to these people, and A. and I enjoyed their quick friendship. After the reams of useless advice that I’ve gotten from people, ashore and on boats, I found that Keill and Joe could make valuable suggestions that I could actually learn from.

Here’s team Smith.





We sat in P.A. for three days, two sunny and one pouring, all with a lovely north wind that might have blown us on our way. However, the forecast for the offshore area we planned to transit on the beginning of our hop to Port Townsend, Washington was consistently for southeast winds of 25 to 35 knots, which we generally wanted nothing to do with. In Warm Springs Bay we had thought of visiting the Queen Charlotte Islands on the way south, but talking with Joe strengthened our sense that the trip from Washington down to San Diego is the big hurdle that we have before us, and that the season for that trip is rapidly waning.

So now we’re planning a straight shot to P.T. While we were waiting in P.A. our log devolved into long lists of forecasted wind strengths as we transcribed each update from the weather service. Favorable winds were apparently not forthcoming, so we settled for waiting for light contrary weather and being a little nervous about the passage. Light weather finally came yesterday, and we made our run out of P.A. to the entrance of Chatham Strait and onto the ocean. We motored first into a swell, then into a steep swell, then into a confused swell. I went down to plot our position and got seasick. Alisa went forward to change a stinky diaper and got seasick. In the process of making sail I managed to wrap the main halyard around the radar dome, and I could not manage to unwrap it, even after a misguided attempt that involved lead fishing weights and a tag line, and which ended in the demise of our steaming light. Rather than go up the mast at sea, we decided that it was best to return to land and anchor up. So we ran back here to Egg Harbor, part of the way sailing a beam reach under genoa only on the tail-end of the lovely northerly breeze. By this time it was sunny and the ocean was flat and I was in a foul mood to be heading back to land. We were heading for Cape Decision and Decision Pass, which gives on to Sumner Strait and then Clarence Strait, which would take us in protected waters to Ketchikan and Metlakatla and southernmost Southeast Alaska. We talked about taking those inside waters with the hope that we would find better offshore weather at the other end. But a reading of the Coast Pilot revealed a story of tidal currents and anchorages with tricky entrances. We lack the large-scale charts needed for navigating those anchorages, so decided to stick with our offshore plan. Cape Decision, indeed.

The updated forecast was for 25 knots southeast, which meant our short window was closing. The Coast Pilot warns of williwaws in Egg Harbor with southeast weather, so we anchored proper, laying out our 35 pound CQR made fast to the 45 pound CQR with two fathoms of 5/16” triple-B chain, the whole affair at the end of our full 240 feet of 3/8” triple-B in 35 to 45 feet of water, depending on the tide.

After messing around with all that ground tackle I got ready to go up the mast belayed on the topping lift, and in the process found that I could retrieve the halyard with a little creative pulling on the topping lift. So we needn’t of returned to land to free the halyard. We reassured ourselves that we would have run into the southeasterly if we had kept going. I went up the mast anyway to check on the steaming light (totaled) and to reassure myself that I at least didn’t manage to bugger up the radar dome.

And so here we sit, the next day, letting the southeasterly blow through. The wind is singing in the rigging. Violent rain spells crystalline sunshine. When the wind gusts off the mountains around us we blow in circles around the anchor, but with all that gear out we’re happy in the knowledge that we won’t drag a foot. We’ve spent a number of days like this on the barky in deserted Alaskan anchorages, sailing circles around the anchor in the rain, and there is a good chance that this will be our last Alaskan anchorage for a few years to come.

Elias now has five words that are apparent to our ears, if not to a stranger’s: dog, ball, book, momma and dadda. He also has a beautiful, rolling personal vocabulary that is trill- and vowel-rich, like the singing of a stream, that he mutters and shouts throughout the happier hours of his day. I am sorry that those sounds have no place in English, and will soon disappear. To Alisa’s occasional exasperation Elias has also mastered the sign for milk, which he uses demandingly and with no regards for the patience of his audience. Last night he had a screaming fit from 0330 until God knows when, 0430 or 0500. Cause unknown. I used language that no one-year-old should have to hear, to no benefit. Alisa took over for me after a fruitless forty five minutes of trying to get him to sleep and I raided the chart table for ear plugs. There is nowhere to hide from a screaming baby on a 37 foot sailboat. I have had few second thoughts about our trip, but I had one then. It took the form of a nearly sensuous vision of fitting the key into the ignition of my happy green Toyota pickup in the driveway of our house and driving away up the hill. Such easy escape, compared with what seemed like a mad vision of traveling down the coast of North America with a sub-toddler in tow. How alone we are, how trapped within the world of this dream come mysteriously to life! How distant our past life on land, how impossible to return!

Our quiet day on the hook has renewed my faith. Alisa has baked bread and fixed the thermocouple on the oven. I have written. The radio interface for the ipod that Alisa got me for my birthday has provided us with a varied and entertaining soundtrack. We have both played with Eli, changed his diapers and put him down for his nap. And now it is time to listen for the updated forecast. The coming weeks will see our adventure really begin to unfold, as we have two passages ahead of us that will take us all the way to San Diego or even Ensenada, Mexico, thirty degrees of latitude south of our northernmost point in Prince William Sound. It begins to feel like this Alaskan cruise has been a warm-up trip through the known or at least the familiar. The true adventure of distant shores and different nations is about to unfold. How interesting to find that when you do grab the brass ring of a dream and hold onto it long enough to leave everything else behind, you find a normal kind of life waiting for you on the other side. A normal kind of life, but not the life you would have led without the dream.

Inside Waters

Kodiak, where we’re from, is an archipelago, a place where the water surrounds land on all sides. Southeast Alaska, where we’re sailing now, is a country of fjords, a place where water is surrounded by land. It’s a big difference – at home we have open horizons and we sail around things. Here we look up at the mountains above us as we sail through the passages in between. Once again we’re reminded of the diversity of Alaska.

We timed our departure from Graves Harbor to catch slack water going through North Inian Pass, where the ebb tide can build a 9 knot current as all the water of northern Southeast tries to rush out of Cross Sound, meeting its twice-daily appointment with low tide.

It was foggy as we motored along the few miles of open Gulf of Alaska coast that separates Graves Harbor from Cross Sound. Incredibly foggy, so that even our thoughts were still and muffled in gauze. Visibility closed down to 100 feet, then 50. Seabirds in our path loomed out of the mist as big as houses until they shrunk down to their proper size as we motored past. Even with the aid of radar and the GPS everything felt claustrophobic. We decided to pull into Elfin Cove to fuel up and let the fog burn off and thread the pass at a different tide. But then the fog lifted. We got a little glimpse of sky overhead, and then suddenly miles of visibility. You can see the bands of fog lying low over the water in the distance in these pictures.

South Inian Pass is narrower than North Inian Pass, and subject to swifter currents, but it was right in front of us when the fog lifted. It’s the gap right off the bow in the next picture. It was only an hour after slack water, so we decided to brave the South Pass. Even an hour from slack, and making only 6 knots at best with the motor, the GPS showed us making 10 and a half knots over the bottom.

We had a great motor until Pt. Adolphus, where the breeze suddenly came up from behind and gave us a lovely sail under jib alone. Pt. Adolphus is locally famous for the humpback whales that congregate there in the summer, feeding in the tidal currents that swirl around the point. A few miles after the point we heard a sound the I was sure was a shotgun being fired on Pleasant Island, but that turned out to be two whales displaying about a half mile away. One lobtailed over and over, holding itself vertically in the water with its head down and its tail out of the water and slamming its tail into the water with incredible violence. The other was breaching, launching its body almost entirely out of the water and displacing vast sheets of white water when it came crashing back down. Occasionally there was a pause while one or the other would pec slap, smacking the water over and over with white pectoral fins that looked to be fully a third of the animals’ total length. Humpback whales are Megaptera novaeangliae, with the generic epithet meaning “giant wing” and referring to these long pectoral fins. The two animals kept it up, slapping and crashing and booming into the water. Ancient murrelets are cool, but 30- or 40-ton animals carrying on aerial displays is a much grander sort of wonder of nature.

The whale in this picture is not lobtailing, just showing its flukes at the start of a dive.

We spent the night in the Tlingit village of Hoonah, then had two unbelievable days of sailing up Lynn Canal to Haines. Lynn Canal is an incredible fjord, but for some reason fjords aren’t called fjords in Southeast. They’re “canals”, or even “inlets”, nomenclature that is completely insufficient to the majesty of the geography being described.

As we sailed north up Lynn Canal the south wind built past the forecast 20 knots to a steady 25, gusting 30. (Wind directions refer to the direction the wind is coming from, so a south wind is behind you if you’re traveling north. Current directions refer to the direction the current is going to. Go figure.) We came charging up on a group of about a dozen boats that I couldn’t quite figure out – not seiners, not longliners, but obviously some kind of small commercial boat. They turned out to be gillnetters, a possibility that hadn’t occurred to my tired brain because there are not gillnetters in Kodiak. We only realized what they were, and the fact that they had gear in the water, when one of the fishermen drove his boat out of the group, banging into the four foot chop, and yelled to us once he was close enough, “You’ve got five nets in front of you!” He kindly led us through the maze. We spent the night anchored up in William Henry Bay, along with eight tenders and a few gillnetters. The next day saw another 25 knot breeze, and we made our best ever speed for Pelagic, 9.2 knots on the GPS at slack water, sailing wing and wing. Alisa says she shouldn’t have let me know that we were going that fast for fear that I’ll want to try to do it again.

That second day in Lynn Canal brought us to Haines, the end of the first leg of our trip. Haines is at the end of Lynn Canal, as close to the Interior as you can get while still being on saltwater, and it’s an uncommonly spectacular place, infested with majestic peaks and recumbent glaciers. We’ve spent a great month here, visiting our good friends Jen and Clint and Greg and Ann and Jamie and Kelly. Together we’ve set gillnets for salmon and pulled crab pots and generally enjoyed the bounty of Alaska, and we’ve had a great time catching up with these old friends and getting current in their lives for a while. Jamie and Kelly gave us the special treat of seeing them in the midst of building a fantastic timber frame house on the water and off the grid on Mud Bay, just south of town. We also left the boat in Haines while we attended two weddings, catching up with friends and family who in some cases we may not see again for years.

A highlight in Haines was taking our friend Greg sailing. We used to work with Greg and he taught us both a lot about being on the water in Alaska, and it was fun to be able to show him something new.

We’re now ready to leave Haines, having stayed one extra day to install some used solar panels that we bought here to replace two that died on us. The fireweed is mostly gone, the trees and meadows are starting to change color, and people are getting serious about making sure they have enough firewood for the winter. Fall is suddenly everywhere creeping in, and another too-short miracle that is summer in Alaska is coming to an end. Alaskans live by the season more than most people, and all the signs tell Alisa and me that it is almost time for another winter, the long season of skiing and close community, banyas and potlucks and conversation to fill the slow time of the year. But there won’t be a winter for us this year. We’re leaving Alaska, even though I like to think that we love this place just as much as anyone. The month in Haines has been a great curtain call for the years that we have spent in the Great Land, since this time with old friends has reminded us that while the country here may put most any other place to shame, it’s the people that make Alaska incomparable.

Crossing

After Hinchinbrook we motor southeast over the shallow continental shelf, across the waters less than 50 fathoms deep that make the area around Wessels Reef so treacherous in a blow. The Coast Pilot, our constant reference and guide, soberly warns that “With a strong S gale and ebb tide… tremendous seas, steep and breaking, are encountered just outside the entrance… During heavy weather, tide rips and confused seas are in the vicinity of Wessels Reef. Many halibut schooners have foundered between Cape St. Elias and Montague Island.”

Happily none of that is going on. We’ve picked our weather and the engine has us making a bit less than six knots as we gain our sea room. We motor by an ancient murrelet and two dependent chicks bobbing on the little waves. Ancient murrelets are members of the genus Synthliboramphus, arguably the most marine of all birds, since the chicks go to sea when they’re only a day or two old, tiny little fuzz balls, and they are fed at sea by adults until they’re big enough to be independent. I’ve never seen ancient murrelet chicks before, and it feels, in a very small way, like one of the natural wonders of the world is slipping by us as we motor past the three little shapes.

All through the afternoon and into the long evening the St. Elias mountains ghost by in the distance, slowly turning salmon-pink in the alpenglow. We take bearings with our hand compass and consult the chart to pick out Mt. St. Elias, the biggest coastal mountain in the world – 18,008 feet tall, and, with recent glacial retreat, ten miles or even less from summit to tidewater, as maintains my spotty memory. Where the Sea Breaks Its Back, Corey Ford’s classic account of Vitus Bering’s voyage of discovery to Alaska from Kamchatka, tells us that Mt. St. Elias was first sighted by Bering’s crew on July 16, 1741. Georg Steller, the expedition’s naturalist who was to gain lasting fame from the contributions to science he made on that voyage (and I do mean lasting; any 21^st century Alaskan biologist worth their salt knows who he was) had sighted land the previous day during a break in the fog. But, since he was a mere biologist, the salty crew of the St. Peter ignored him. Some things never change. The St. Peter was 40 days at sea when St. Elias was sighted, and short on water. The crew was overwhelmed with joy at the sight of land and the release from the unknown of the uncharted watery void they had been crossing. Bering, their captain, was sick and unimpressed by the sight. “We know nothing of this coast”, he is meant to have said. “We have no provisions to winter, and a west wind may come up and prevent our return to Kamchatka.” Bering had labored through the prime years of his life in the effort to organize an expedition to Alaska, and when that new land was finally before him, he was already a wrecked man, fated to die before the return trip was complete.

We, living in an entirely different age, think seeing Mt. St. Elias was neat because it reminded us of our junior crew, and because I know someone who climbed it in winter.

The wind came up a bit from the west that afternoon, but nothing like the 15 knots forecast. Concerned about momentum, and not wanting to slat along at two knots, we kept motoring. We put Elias to bed and Alisa and I took turns standing watch through the night, looking out at the mysterious sea as the sun sank behind the mountains to the north of us. It never grew completely dark through the whole crossing, since we were still close to 60° north and solstice wasn’t too far behind. Our autopilot is down, so while we can grab a few minutes away from the wheel for a quick trip below, that’s all the freedom we get while motoring, and when we run back up the companionway we’re likely to find the barky thirty degrees off course, merrily running down the meridian for Hawaii. So for the most part we were tied to the wheel that first night, trusting the faint glow of the compass dial to tell us where to point her and listening to the slap of the waves on the hull. Every four our five hours we would come below, aliens dressed against the ocean chill in X-Tra Tuffs and sweaters and rain gear, turn on the red night light over the port settee, and wake the off watch from the dewy slumber of the sleeping bag to take their turn.

The next day the west wind did come up, and we made sail, wing and wing with the pole out and everything prevented. The beauties of sailing in this situation are three. It’s quieter than running the damn engine. Sailing is really cool. And the wind vane steers us great under sail, so that suddenly we have no need to attend to the boat every minute while on watch. It’s hard to overstate how big a difference that makes. We can read, or make a cup of tea, and the wind vane and the sails work together to make us go where we want to.

With the wind vane working the passage looks like this.

We’re crossing one of the truly wild places on the planet, just one tanker, one cruise ship and two fishing boats on the whole three day crossing to distract us from our reverie. The days take on the rhythm of the sea, as the wind builds and fades and the waves change according to the wind. We watch Leach’s and fork-tailed stormy petrels flitting by, and more and more frequently the grand shapes of black-footed albatrosses wheeling low over the waves. At one point when the wind leaves us and we pull down the sails thirteen albatross gather around us, evidently mistaking us for a longliner about to set gear. Alisa wonders if we can feed them, and remembers the canned clams and mussels that have been on board for three years. She flings the bivalves at the assembled albatross one by one and drizzles the enticing oil on the waves, but gets no takers.

Each night watch lasts just long enough. We are tired, but also alone with our thoughts while the others sleep below, alone in the half light and the ineffable peace of the sea. Alisa asks one morning if we have the voice recorder on board. “My mind just gets going,” she says. “It would be great to get it down.” I get to thinking one night about the value there might be in taking the world as it is, accepting the evidence of our senses and turning our backs on the endless cacophony of spirituality and religion. Being satisfied with the notion that what we can touch, and see, and deduce, is all there is to the world. I even come up with ironclad arguments in support of this perspective. Whatever might lie beyond the reach of our senses, whatever mystery there might reside in the universe, can only be revealed to us through our senses. Everything else is just telling ourselves stories.

Another night I see a sperm whale, about a half mile away in the half light, its blow angling 45 degrees forward the way sperm whale blows do.

The crossing is also a roller coaster of crew morale, just like the roller coaster ride that any traveling presents. One day sunshine, good speed, and the wind vane taking care of all the drudgery, and Alisa and I revel in each other’s presence. Then the long night with each of us standing watch with our solitary thoughts. Then the morning made bitter by short sleep, working together to set the chute and pole it out as the breeze dies, me fuming, Elias below screaming, screaming.

We pass north of the Fairweather Grounds at night, seeing the two fishing boats of the trip as white lights on the horizon, beyond the reach of the radar. We bring up the coast of Southeast in the morning, sullen glaciers and impassable mountains.

We pass the entrance to Lituya Bay. I’ve been there once before, on a work trip, and know it as perhaps the single most impressive spot in coastal Alaska. In the 1950s a giant rockslide created a wave that crested at 1,700 feet above sea level and swept the two fishing boats that were anchored in the little fjord away, one to be lost, the other to find itself floating outside the bay, in the open Gulf of Alaska. Everything below the high water mark was swept clean, so today you can follow the path of the wave as it swept out the bay – everything above its path is spruce forest, everything below is alder, and the line between the two is so sharp that it might have been drawn with a pencil. I’ve been thinking about visiting Lituya every since we decided to travel down the west coast of North America, but now that we’re in sight of it we pass it by. The entrance is dangerous, and tidal, and though we could surely navigate it, our crossing of the Gulf feels like enough, enough for two people new to cruising with an infant on board. Spending a few days rowing and hiking around Lituya feels like a trip for a different crew. Alisa asks me if I mind passing it by, and I honestly don’t. “I feel like I’ve had my visit to Lituya,” I say.

And then, a few hours later, we pass through the granite islands on each side of the entrance to Graves Harbor, just north of Cross Sound, the northernmost entrance point into Southeast Alaska. The granite islands are like a gate. As we pass through we leave the swell of the ocean behind. We motor through the flat bay, our bow cutting a path across the mirror-still water, our wake sending wavelets out in a v, little packets of information traveling to the spruce-clad shore. The bay takes a hard right turn and we anchor far in back, protected from the Gulf. It’s a beautiful spot, and all to ourselves. Paradise. Sun comes out and we dry musty cushions on deck and break out the solar shower. Harbor porpoise breaths break the stillness, common and red-throated loons swim by. The first passage of the trip is over.

Post #1 from Haines

7/08/07

Today we sailed (and motored) from Bulldog Cove, in Resurrection Bay, to Fox Farm Bay, just inside Prince William Sound, leaving behind known cruising grounds for Pelagic. After a fits-and-starts beginning with fluky winds the southwesterly promised by the forecast filled in and we had a brilliant reach with the spinnaker. We could clearly see the clouds curving out from the low centered south of Kodiak, two hundred miles from us. The coast we traveled was so austere – cliffs to the water, glaciers unworldly clean snaking back into the mountains. Clouds low over everything, a nation of clouds building as the low crept closer, the smooth shapes contrasting with the jagged mountains. Everything gray, all color inaccessible to the eye. Even the greens of the mountainsides muted. A busy coast, with other traffic making the trip between the Sound and Seward, but the coast itself is remote, too rugged to land a boat in most places, too rugged often to even walk. Untouched, untouchable. A hundred places where no one has ever set foot. Alaska.

We anchored in a beautiful, serene little harbor, all to ourselves. Salmon jumping, beautiful upland crags around the bay. Everything, above and below the water, glacial carved. After dinner we play cards in the cockpit. Coming below afterwards I smell the typical boat smells – salt, must, oil. Then, going forward to check on Eli asleep in his little net pen, I come upon the sudden surprising smell of baby. His upper left tooth coming in.

7/09/07

From Fox Farm Bay we motored up Elrington and Latouche Passages, long fjords that are open on both ends and give us deep, safe routes for navigation. Dall’s porpoise join us in Latouche, cleaving the water off our bow, sucking perfectly timed breaths when they erupt from the water’s surface. They have the couch potato physiques of the cetacean world – bodies too thick to be called sleek – but they move incredibly fast with the tiniest flick of their flukes. We first know they’re coming when we see the rooster tails of them surfacing in the distance. I go up on the bow to watch them sporting in our pressure wave, darting back and forth across our track, and decide that any boat too fast for Dall’s porpoises to bowride is too fast a boat for me.

After Latouche we hoist a reefed main, staysail and reefed jib and beat into 20-25 knots of wind. We heel over hard, digging the gunwale into the grey water. Knight Island is close ahead to port, a mountain plopped down in the middle of this inland sea. I’m keen to see how we handle a beat in this much wind, the protected waters of the Sound removing the big seas of the open Gulf from the equation. With Alisa below we tack slow singlehanded tacks that leave us plenty of time to make leeway. Our boatspeed is almost six knots but after an hour and two tacks we’ve made two miles towards our anchorage. There’s water on deck and bullets of rain sizzling into the sea around us and the weather gets thick enough to hide all land from sight. I’m wearing two sweaters and the goatroper and X-tra Tuffs and raingear and getting distinctly moist around the edges and I look down from the rain slashing down at us and the crazy angle of heel that has the mast cantilevered out over the water, our three sails like three blades thrown into the wind, and there below the open companionway is Eli, standing up in his playpen, holding on with one hand and pointing at me with the other, smiling.

I pull down the main and roll up the headsails and we commence motoring into the weather. If I’m not paying attention, and sometimes even when I am, we plow the bow into a wave and take water on deck, crystal clear and six inches deep, the motion of the boat sending geysers into the air where the stanchion bases block the water’s passage. We’re slow and a little pool of water collects on the cabin sole from a deck leak we didn’t know about and the coast we motor by is lonely, racked by ragged driven clouds that tear themselves to pieces on the unbending spruce forests that are all we see above the water.

We pull into Snug Harbor, a short twisting fjord that gives us flat water but turns out to be a blowhole, winds gusting into the 30s. Even after two tries at anchoring we’re closer to the beach than I like, less than a tenth of a mile, anchored in 100 feet of water with the 5/8” nylon shackled to the back end of our 40 fathoms of chain.

I look at the radar again and again to measure our distance from shore but it never does change. For two and a half days we stay put while the wind knocks us from side to side, heeling the yacht over and sending us dancing around the anchor. We look out through rainsmeared portlights at dizzy images of sodden green mountains spinning past. Condensation drips from bronze and wind booms in the rigging. The back of every cushion is wet and mold sprouts in lockers, everything happens in a watery half light. Gusts of wind backdraft the cabin heater and fill the salon with acrid diesel smoke. We go about the business of the day, Eli’s care giving the day its only structure, our little family surrounded by a wilderness of water and land, seabirds and pouring waterfalls, mist-shrouded glacial valleys.

7/13/07

We spend the day in Cordova, where neither of us have been before. Nor Eli, for that matter. Alisa’s friend from Kodiak, Erik, has moved to town and bought a gillnet permit, and a mechanical problem with his boat has him in town instead of out fishing the opener, so we get to visit with him for the day. Cordova has been blessed by the success of the marketing campaign for Copper River salmon, which has prices incredibly high, and even with most of the fleet out fishing the town has the bustle and energy and working-for-a-living vibe that every coastal Alaskan town should have in summer, and which contrasts with a place like poor Seward, which is tarted up for the flesh trade, processing hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. The boats that fish the Copper are bow pickers, designed to work in the shallow flats and sandbars of the Copper River Delta, directly exposed to the Gulf of Alaska. They’re heavily powered and sound like stock cars as they thob through the harbor. There's one tied up on the right in this picture.

7/14/07

We catch the tide out of Cordova and motor out of Prince William Sound through Hinchinbrook Entrance. Sun, luminous flat blue sea, fluffly white clouds over emerald mountains wearing skirts of evergreen spruce down to the shore. In front of us, about 320 miles of open ocean to Cross Sound, the entrance to Southeast Alaska. It’s our first overnight passage as a family, and Alisa and I are both a bit taut – the combined work of the passage and taking care of Eli, the reputation of these waters, the vulnerabilities of the boat that I keep catalogued in my mind, where they are always ready for contemplation.

We pass a white fishing boat wrecked, listed at the pitch of the beach, listless, and then we are through the entrance. Light west winds are forecast and it is still, with just the pulsing ebb tide swirling the water around us. Now the clouds are cut from crystal, the water turquoise. Mountains disappear into the distance. We feel a sense of hope, optimism. “We’re pointing it south,” I say. “Warmer places. Australia.” Alisa is jovial, Elias querulous. We put our faith in the notion that fortune favors the bold.

What a privelleged time we live in, what an almost divine ability so many possess, to direct our lives in any pursuit of our choosing. And what do people do with this widespread freedom from material want, this freedom that would stun the imagination of past generations? Nothing. Watch American Idol. What a simple allure there is in the idea of living a life that will be worth the telling.

And meanwhile, Elias is changing into a little boy in front of our eyes. His third tooth is in. Suddenly, he has a new facial expression, a wise-guy, eye-squinting false smile that sometimes stands in for his sweet baby smile. He spends the day standing in the playpen, keeping a sharp eye on whatever Alisa is doing in the galley.

Afloat

The most-repeated cautionary question that we heard before setting out was, "Does Eli get seasick?". This question always seemed implicitly critical - maybe because Alisa and I were being thin-skinned, and maybe because it flew in the face of the "we'll just figure it out when it happens" attitude that is required for an undertaking like ours. If you wait until you have everything figured out, you'll never go. In any case, I'm very pleased to report that Eli showed no signs of discomfort on this trip - he's apparently a right natural sailor. What we did discover is that if the barky is rocking along on a beam reach in a five-foot swell, feeding Eli down below makes us sick. There's something about getting the little spoon heaped with rice cereal into the little open mouth, swinging back and forth, that brings on the green sheen in the person operating the spoon. And meanwhile Eli just keeps opening the little mouth, wanting to be stuffed with more rice cereal, please.

In addition to being a fun companion in the cockpit, E. also assists with tasks below - the only member of the crew to volunteer to give Alisa's splice of the new anchor rode the taste test.




There was lots of getting used to life afloat on this first leg to Seward. Lots. But there was also some incredible sailing. We waited for our day to make the crossing from Afognak to the mainland, a nice west 20 romp that had the barky banging along famously under jib alone, the Monitor taking care of the age-old question of which way to point the pointy end. The westerly weather continued as we moved along the Kenai coast towards Seward, and we had some great sailing through the fjords. Working the ship with Eli aboard is largely singlehanding for me, just as we planned, as Alisa is often stuck below with endless morale-boosting exercises for the squirt. The downwind sailing that we had is the toughest point of sail for one-person work, with spinnaker pole maneuvers and boom preventers, low apparent wind acting on the windvane and the eternal question of jibing: intentional or un-? But the recently-rebuilt windvane worked like a champ, and the green crew worked out the bugs.

One of the great events of our trip was meeting up with the Gyre, the USGS research boat with, among others, our good friends Shiway and Yumi and John Piatt (above) aboard. We knew that their study of the elusive Kittlitz's murrelet, and the glacial fjord habitat of that mysterious bird, would overlap with our transit through the Kenai Fjords, but I lost my copy of their itinerary on the rush out of Kodiak. So it was the happiest of luck that showed them anchored up in Moonlight Cove as we steamed in out of the fog one evening. We rafted up for a visit, and our paths crossed a few other times during the next week. Good fun.

With some navigational hints from the captain of the Gyre in hand we decided to brave the sill that bars entrance to the spectacular landscape of Northwestern Fjord. Depth in the fjord goes from 50 fathoms, to 30, to 3 across the sill, with boulders and no depth not too far away. The tide was flooding when we crossed, giving us this scary view of the hazards as we crossed. But, gray hairs aside, the entrance was easily made, and we got the great ice age views we were looking for.

We dipnetted some floating 10,000 year-old ice for G&Ts that night. And, small state that Alaska is, we turned the corner and found the Gyre. Here's the Gyre for scale, and a picture that Shiway got of us in front of the ice.

Seward has been great, after an unexpectedly strange shift from a week of life afloat back to life in the harbor. We've had a great week of visits with friends, but now it's time to go! More from Cordova or Haines.

Goodbye

5/24/07

Leaving town was so unpleasant.

We had a fun party on our boat the night before we left, just seven friends and us sitting around the salon. We put up some decorations that we use for birthday parties aboard so that things would remain festive and not descend into a dreary prolonged goodbye. It worked. Some time after midnight we turned on the red night-vision lights for atmosphere and people stayed until two in the morning, talking beneath the red lights and drinking cocktails. It reminded me of the best part of Kodiak, the social life that used to support parties where lots of liquor was drunk and the conversation roared and subsided all night. We and our friends had lots of parties like that three or four years ago, and then gradually stopped. But over the last few weeks we spent almost every evening with friends.

Our departure day was a jumble of painful goodbyes and last minute jobs that went on all day. It was raining intermittently, hard, and a south wind blew the barky hard into the dock so that I wondered if we’d have to pull ourselves off with lines. Ian and Rich MacIntosh came down to say goodbye. Patty and John Mahoney came down to say goodbye, and Patty gave us an Aluutiq spirit pouch that whalers in kayaks used to wear around their necks, carrying a little pinch of Kodiak soil to ensure their return to land. We filled ours with a little piece of Kodiak to bring us back safely. Zoya came down, carrying her five month old, Stuart, with one hand and holding on to two year old Nora with the other, staring in through the portlight to see if we were around, her hair blowing across her face in the rain. Carrie Worton came down with her two kids and took the title and key to my truck to pass along to the buyer. Gregg Rosencranz came down too, and Lisa and Bill, and we all walked up to the parking lot. When Alisa hugged Carrie goodbye she told her she’d miss her, and then as we drove away, Alisa said to me, tears running down both cheeks, “Carrie’s one of the people that I’ll probably never see again.”

And then we dropped off the truck and had yet another tearful goodbye after Sara Persselin drove us back to the boat. It wasn’t blowing too hard anymore but the clouds were thick and just above the water, cutting the verdant island off low and making Kodiak look more than ever like the Aleutians. Then Mark came by and gave us some fish, just like he did the day he delivered Elias, and we left. Elias was crying and Alisa was cooking dinner and I was getting last minute things ready while the engine warmed up. Then I cast the lines and pushed off and as I accelerated backwards out of the slip Alisa came up the companionway with wide eyes, wondering how I could have just gone ahead and cast us off on this odyssey without involving her.

She called John and Patty to say we were coming up the channel and when we reached their house, drinking in the view of Kodiak spooling by that we had both watched from different boats so many times, they came out front to wave goodbye to us. I turned out of the channel to go around the south end of Woody Island and looked back to wave at the little figures of Patty and John, waving with both hands over their heads in the rain. And that’s how I remember leaving Kodiak, looking back to see those two waving people, with the Island so green, and so many mountains, and the town so small.

Motoring out of the Kodiak channel.

Jay and Steph and Elise were waiting for us on their boat at Long Island. We visited for a while the next day and then they left to go back to town, one last painful waving goodbye. It was still foggy and rainy, and late, and we decided to stay put. The head backed up and Alisa took the pump apart to unclog it, the worst job on the boat. As I write the cabin heater is down and the high today was 46 degrees. Rain beats on the cabintop and condensation forms on the insides of the hull, getting everything wet. We are simultaneously lonely and too crowded, buried by baby gear on this little boat. “This is a big undertaking,” says Alisa. “It just doesn’t seem possible that we can sail to San Diego.” I feel the same way. “All those guys who say they would do this but their wives won’t let them don’t know how good they have it,” I say. “They miss out on a lot of work.” We have been working hard for this moment for years. Now it is here, and we feel that we’ve bought ourselves nothing but uncertainty and a kernel of fear in our stomachs. And, cruel irony, we’re only five miles from town, listening to the Kodiak public radio station.

5/26

We stayed anchored up at Long Island for two and a half days, waiting for lumpy east weather to lay down before our green crew crossed to Afognak. It was the strangest limbo, simultaneously missing Kodiak and being able to see town, relieved to be gone but also dumbfounded at the thought that we could ever pull off the trip to Oz in that wet, cold boat hopelessly crowded with baby gear.

As a gesture towards crew morale, I declared a day ashore on Long Island, and Eli got to wear his lifejacket and ride in the dinghy for the first time. Note the attire for late June at 58° N.