Cruising Caro Babbo – Page 2

After six days in Dutch, we head east again.

Written on my birthday. Two days prior, two fishing boats left Dutch Harbor, and Jennifer and I climbed to higher ground, all of us waiting for a tsunami.

Dutch Harbor, AK, USA, 24-JUL-2020 – It is my birthday today. I’ve come to the conclusion there is no such thing as a day off. Here in Dutch Harbor, we have had a full social life and will take tonight for just Jennifer and me. We’ll go to Angelina’s, which has an amazing Mexican menu. We’ll eat some small plates, I think, and drink some beer.

Living on Discovery Dock with us in the Bob Moss International small boat harbor are Anja and Thomas on Robusta and Ola* and Michael on Crystal.

Plastic

Traveling to where there are no people, one sees new things, and things anew.

Port Townsend, WA, 11-NOV-2020 – Our first landfall in Alaska was Hot Springs Cove, Inanudak bay, Umnak Island, Aleutians on the Bering Sea side.

The crossing had been uneventful, with good weather the entire way. There were no major equipment failures, and by using our windvane for most of the trip, the sounds were of wind, water against the hull, and the propeller, driven by the streaming water.

Life in Homer

Labor Day Weekend 2020, Homer, AK – Homer is not what we expect. Alaskans tell us, uniformly, that Homer is the Port Townsend (where Jennifer has a house) of Alaska. We feel blind, because we don’t see it.

Caro Babbo Sleeps, John Doesn’t

Port Townsend, WA, 1-OCT-2020 – In Homer, AK, Caro Babbo, resting on stacked wooden squares called cribs, winterized, locked and watched over, sleeps. I on the other hand toss and turn. Dryland, people, culture, and COVID are difficult transitions.

Give me a few minutes to catch you up.

Seldovia Dreams

Seldovia, AK, 31-Aug-2020 — Jennifer brought us here to Seldovia to wait out weather. We arrived Friday for weather taking place out by the Barren Islands, Islands we’d passed between under power because there was no wind.

Saturday, through VHF radio weather reports, we learned that it was blowing 40 knots out there, but here in Seldovia it was calm. It seems, in times like this, there’s no reason to be tucked away in a small harbor. But there is, of course.

Our last anchorage; I do not look like a tadpole

Port Chatham, AK, 27-AUG-2020 — This is the last time we will anchor on this trip. Everything is mixed: Melancholia at having this long adventure end, and impatience to move on.

The day before yesterday and the day before that stick in the mind as embodying so much of an Alaska cruiser’s life. We motored and motored around a point from one anchorage to another: four hours, some of it dodging rocks and kelp. Much with no wind and some with wind that would have required beating to windward. Continue reading “Our last anchorage; I do not look like a tadpole”

Books

Phoenix Bay, Alaska, 23-aug-2020 — Bill Buckley and I parted company with me having a much lessened opinion of the man, not that it was too wonderful to begin with.

Bill, in all his interviews and promotion for the book, including his article for the New Yorker, which I read almost forty years ago and still remember, fails to mention other people on the boat: the professional captain, the cook and the stewart. Then there is the video camera man, the audio person and the producer. Somewhere in the book another man appears as mechanical maintenance crew. Continue reading “Books”

Kodiak and the home stretch

Kitoi Bay, Alaska, 23-aug-2020 — We spent almost a week at the dock in Kodiak. Like all time at a dock, it is maintenance and repairs interspersed with tourism and socializing. I never complete all the repairs and never do as much tourism as I would like.

The day before we came to Kodiak the gear shift lever refused to engage the gears. After forty-five years, it owed no one anything. After calls here and there we found that the Volvo Penta dealer in Seward, Alaska Industrial Power, could have the part drop shipped to the harbor master’s office in Kodiak. Complete with shipping, the cost was under two hundred dollars. Continue reading “Kodiak and the home stretch”

Shape in the Land

Shilikof Strait, 40 nm west of Big Alinchak Bay, AK, 10-Aug-2020 — Jennifer sees things in the geology that I cannot. Generally, she sees how the land was formed, its history and future. The land around us is generally volcanic, shaped by erosion and glaciers, often by earthquakes and continental drift.

Some the land is a puzzle: how did these two type of earth end up next to each other or intermixed?

We’re in a part of the world where currents have never been studied, where coves and inlets have never been charted. There are places further west that few people, beyond those on fishing boats and the dozen or so cruising boats, will ever see.

Continue reading “Shape in the Land”

William F and me

53° 18.93N 168° 27.14W 17-jul-2020 — I’ve started William F Buckley’s Atlantic High, a book I’ve known about since parts of it were printed in the New Yorker in 1981. The copy I have is the fifth printing, so the book did well.

I had, before I read the NY’er piece, determined I wanted to sail across the Atlantic. Buckley took a number of friends on this trip (he’d crossed before and written a well-regarded book, Airborne) and required his friends to keep journals of this trip that he would turn into a book.

It was different sailing then. Position was mostly by celestial navigation, though I think Loran may have existed. In celestial navigation you learn once or twice a day where you think you might be, generally based on where you thought you were yesterday, if you have clear skies. Otherwise, it may be a few days sailing by compass before you once again learn where you think you may be. Continue reading “William F and me”