On the road again

Overcast, mid 30s calm.

It’s another lazy morning on Blue Note. We are tied to the dock in front of a Forest Service shelter next to Bohemia Creek near the northern end of Lisianski Strait. I say lazy because it feels the same as has been the norm for the last four months: the captain doesn’t get out of bed until after 8AM, the coffee maker is started, the crew goes ashore to take care of morning business, the coffee is consumed, breakfast gets eaten, and we’re ready for the day by 10.

We finally extricated ourselves from Sitka. Sitka is a very comfortable, easy place to be. As an example, Thursday night I went to an excellent concert at Sitka’s fairly new Performing Arts Center. The April Verch Band played to an almost full house in the beautiful 500-seat venue. April is a Canadian national fiddle champion as well as a very accomplished step dancer and she and her two bandmates burned the house down. If you watched the Olympic opening ceremonies last month you saw the April Verch Band.

Then Sunday night was to be another open mic at the Larkspur Café. Ted Howard had been increasing the pressure on me to get up and do a few songs. I would have had the weather not turned favorable for voyaging.

Turn favorable it did. We got away Saturday a little after noon. The morning had been mostly cloudy with a cool ten knot northerly blowing. By the time we were underway the clouds had left and the wind veered to the northeast and filled to 15 knots. There were small craft advisories posted for the outside waters through the evening. My plan was to move to Salisbury Sound, evaluate the conditions for Sunday and then either continue up Peril Strait to an anchorage on the inside in case of heavy weather or anchor in Sukoi Inlet off Salisbury Sound and continue up the outside if it were settled.

Sunday dawned cool and clear in Sukoi Inlet with the breeze out of the north at 20 knots. As we motored up the inlet I hoisted the main to the masthead. This proved to be a miscalculation. Upon entering the Sound whitecaps could be seen all the way across. Blowing a steady 25-30 we had a very exciting sail across to the passage behind Klokachef Island. Gaining the lee, I put a reef in the mainsail, but by that time it was evident the winds were being channeled through the passes and that its velocity was probably more like 15-20 knots. We motor-sailed up the outside to the entrance to the inside passage at Khaz Bay, some five miles, adjusting the sail trim as the wind veered and backed and moving up and down in the long six foot swell.

The cruise through the passage was fun, twisting and turning, only 40-50 yards wide in a few places and less than 20 feet deep near Kimshan Cove. Watching the depth finder can be such a two edged sword. You are cruising along secure in the knowledge that there is plenty of water below and that the tide is rising when all of a sudden the bottom comes rocketing up. Your heart gets an immediate hit of pure adrenalin. Time dilates. You pass over without a bump and you are left with the thought that you only get so many of those intense rushes in your lifetime. Steve on the Miss Roxanne used to call it the scare box. I’m inclined to agree.

We emerged at Imperial Passage from Portlock Harbor back to the open ocean. By this time the wind had died to variable to ten knots. The six foot seas were still rolling, the peaks far apart. The entrance to Lisianski Strait from the ocean is only 125 yards wide with a hidden reef to the east and an exposed rock to the west. The best channel lies nearer the rock. It’s an interesting conflict to know you have to hug the rock to avoid the hidden reef. One look at the scare box cured that conflict.

From the entrance the Strait becomes deep from shore to shore. It made for a relaxing run up to the dock where we are. Well except for a glitch in Otto the autopilot. He decided to take about an hour break from turning left. He’d turn right but wouldn’t turn left. When the hour was up he went back to work with nary a burp yesterday afternoon nor today.

Pelican is a little over an hour around the corner. If I can get a connection I’ll post this.

ap

Sitka, how can I miss you if you won't let me go?

Where to start? The big story is the weather, as in not getting suitable weather for travel, especially on the outside coast. Sunday morning it was blowing to 55 knots with seas to 25 feet on the outside and here at the dock we were getting sideways chicken feather snow. This not entirely unexpected state of affairs is bumping headlong into there being no room at the inn. Yeah I’m still here in Sitka…only through the efforts of Kristi in the harbormaster’s office. She originally gave me until the 6th of March, but the slip’s owner was delayed in getting his boat back in the water. Well he’s delaying no more. She called to say he will splash on the 17th, tomorrow.

By the time she called on Friday afternoon I had been keeping a weather eye since the 2nd in preparation for departure on the 6th. By Friday afternoon, Passage Weather was showing a 2-3 day window starting in the late evening of Monday the 8th, but by the time Monday afternoon arrived the expected calm had disappeared and no good window was predicted for the foreseeable future. As things stand, I will call Kristi tomorrow after 8AM to see if she was able to find me another temporary berth. If she can, I will move there until the weather breaks. If not, I will head out, altering course to stay in the sheltered waters of Peril Strait, probably to Tenakee Springs.

Kristi’s kindness is exacerbated by the arrival of the Sitka Sound herring fishermen. Between the seiners and tenders, over 150 are expected. Not even half way there and they are rafted 2 and 3 deep along the transient floats. The quota this year is the biggest ever and with the economy the way it is, most of the permit holders will likely show up. To the aforementioned boats, add several dozen fish cops buzzing around in small fast boats and more than a few spotter planes flying around overhead all confined to the designated areas of the Sound. It is one of the most intense fisheries, often only open for 15 minutes. It is very lucrative, estimated at almost $10 million this year and when you consider there are 49 permit holders the intensity begins to become understandable.

So here I sit. I’ll append a note to this entry tomorrow after I find out if there is a slip for me or not.

ap

ADDENDUM: Kristi came through with another slip so I'm here until Friday afternoon or Saturday morning.

Thought I'd add a couple of nighttime shots of the herring fleet.

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.

ap

In the groove

I know it has been awhile since I have updated this. My only excuse is that when traveling it’s easy to find things to write about that are interesting. Tied to the dock, not so much.

So what’s been going on? Pretty much just finding the groove here in Sitka. Weekend before last, I went to an open mic hosted at the Larkspur Café. I met Ted Howard, one of the musical mainstays here. He’s in a blues band by the name of Belly Meat as well as a member of Sitka Folk, an organization that promotes music events here. It was an enjoyable evening.

Last Friday night, I went to see Belly Meat at the Westmark Lounge. They’re a four piece, stand up bass, slide resonator, Ted on guitar and mando, and a hot harp player. Ted had asked me to bring my harps and sit in, but after listening to their harp player, all I wanted to do was sit and listen. Good stuff.

Saturday night was a fund raiser for a local fisherman who has cancer. There were four bands, the Sugar Shakers, a rockabilly cover band, Belly Meat, the Sitka Blues Band, and another band whose name escapes me. Held upstairs at the Moose Lodge, there had to be over 150 people dancing, drinking, and bidding on pastries and tasties. I was impressed by the turn out as it was competing with a local production of the Nutcracker Ballet, which by all reports was excellent.

Sunday afternoon it was back to the Larkspur Café for a jam session. Three quarters of Belly Meat showed up, Ted, Ernie the bassist, Gary, the exceptional harp player, as well as John, a very tasty mando player. Although most of the tunes were a little outside of my usual fare, I managed not to embarrass myself too badly. It was fun and I look forward to doing it again this Sunday.

Other than that, I’ve gotten a little more done on the novel and Jazz has familiarized himself with the smells around the harbor and environs. We’ve been having gorgeous weather, clear, highs in the low 40s and calm winds. It looks like it has snowed but it’s actually frost from below freezing temps at night. And the sun is above the horizon for over 6 hours. Pretty nice.

The pic of Mount Edgecumbe was taken last weekend from where we were tied up when we first arrived. It shows the main entrance through the break water to the right. The others are of Eliason Harbor.

ap