Sitka, our affair is almost at an end

The weather for the last four days has been spectacular: sunny, calm, temps to the low 50s!

My stay in Sitka is coming to an end. All along, this time of year had been in the back of my mind as a point when wandering could begin again. Early March brings longer daylight hours and generally milder weather although this year could very well be an exception. It is also before the tourons (tourist and moron portmanteau) begin to show up. The angle of the sun light this time of year illuminates in a magical way. And I have to vacate my slip no later than March 6^th.

Yeah, the harbormaster’s office called last week and had me move to a different slip. She was able to find me one that I can have until early March. I have to say that the women in the harbormaster’s office have been extremely accommodating to Blue Note and her crew. Thank you, Kristi and Joy Ann.

So where to from here? I have never been to Skagway. On the list. I have only been to Wrangell once and that was over thirty years ago. On the list. I have never been to Point Baker/Port Protection or Port Alexander. On the list. I have never seen the west coasts of Baranof and Prince of Wales Islands. On the list.

How to see all those places while maximizing new exploration and minimizing repeat visits was a problem I began to contemplate about three weeks ago. To better visualize it, I fired up the ten-year-old laptop that serves as repository for my charts and navigation tools. I hadn’t turned it on since mid November and when it came up it was stuck in a graphics mode that wouldn’t allow the nav program to load. I pulled up the applet that controls the video and tried to change it. No go. I checked the disk, no go. I edited the registry, no go. I even found and downloaded the newest video driver version, nope. This desperate activity sporadically stretched over 4-5 days, to no avail. Nothing I did or tried would increase either the resolution or the color depth. Sigh. Was it time for a new laptop?

I began to search and compare laptop prices. Ugh, not cheap. I kinda wanted a Mac but I wasn’t sure if my outdated nav software would run on it. After another 4-5 days I finally settled on a Dell. Then the strange ritual I usually go through before I spend money I know I have to spend began. Pull out the credit card, grab the phone…pause. Put the phone down and stow the card…do something else. Repeat. Sometimes this silly cycle can go on for days. Fortunately during one of the do-something-else periods I fired up the old laptop and was looking around at what was on the hard drive, kind of with an eye to not having the machine around or not easily accessible when I came across Empire.

Empire is a game of world conquest involving armies, navies, air forces, logistics, strategy, and tactics. It began life as a DOS-based game with text graphics. It has antecedents in the UNIX world before that. It’s been around a long time. I had been addicted to it a long time. I say had because the version on the laptop was one I purchased back in the 90s and was copy protected. The method used required looking for a random word on a random page in the user manual to complete the installation. When I purchased the desktop several years ago I was unable to find the manual and was therefore unable to load Empire on the new machine. This was a good thing as I thought of the thousands of hours I wouldn’t waste in the future. Besides I still had the old laptop and if the urge became unbearable I could still fire it up.

Now I was contemplating not having it around at all. I knew that Empire would run in the only video mode that was now available and that Empire was now the only reason to keep the old machine around in a real estate-starved living space. Amongst this figurative withdrawal I thought of one of the quirky bugs in the Empire code. After you have vanquished the computer, the software switches video modes to play a corny little video sequence where a grateful civilian leader pins a medal on you. When the map display comes back up it doesn’t switch back to the original mode and to get back to it you have to do the steps in order. It got me to thinking of the reason for all the agony I had been enduring for the last week and a half. I pulled up the video driver applet and began trying things in different orders. After about fifteen minutes and a half a dozen reboots I was able to get the display back to normal. Yaaay! Not only that but the display was clearer than it had ever been and the operation of the external video port did not require a reboot. Win! And I still have Empire. :-)

End of circumtextition, whew! After several hours of pouring over the small scale chart of the Alexander Archipelago (Southeast Alaska) I think I have come up with a route that best fulfills the above criteria. Leaving Sitka, it goes north up the west coasts of Baranof and Chichagof Islands and through Lisianski Strait to Pelican. From there, north to Elfin Cove, through Cross Sound, Icy Strait, into Lynn Canal and north to Haines and Skagway. I’ll hit Auke Bay either on the way up or back. Then it’s south through Chatham and Peril Straits to Sitka and around Cape Ommany to Port Alexander, north to Baranof Warm Springs and around to Petersburg, thence south through the Wrangell Narrows to Wrangell, west around Zarembo Island to Point Baker/Port Protection. And then it’s south down the west coast of Prince of Wales and around to Ketchikan.

Of course this is all highly tentative. The actual course will differ by weather, whim, and time in that order. As I said before, we have been having a warm and relatively dry winter. There, however, is no reason to expect that it will continue. Folks around here speak of the herring snows of March, a phenomenon whose description sounds very much like the chicken feathers snow we got in Valdez. And gales are common the month of March. But right now it is wonderful. The snow level is above 1500 feet. The temps dip below freezing at night when it’s clear and into the high 40s during the day.

Activity is beginning to pick up around here. The seiners are gearing up, the float planes are beginning to fly, and the crews are starting to show up. By the time the herring arrive it will be crazy. Time to go soon.

I’ve included an image showing the path I described above. It is shown in red. You can click on it to make it bigger. I know, no labels. Those of you who have been following this blog should be able to find Sitka. If you can’t, pull up Google Earth and feed ‘Sitka AK’ into the search box. The other images are of a couple of herring fishermen and some shots of the harbor on a particularly beautiful dusk.

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