Icy Strait, North of Hoonah, 5-AUG-2018 — I lay in bed for a while this morning after the alarm went off at 4. I wasn’t tired, but I thought it might be darker than we wanted to leave. Sunrise is around 4:50 in the morning these days.
It probably wasn’t, but I lay there anyway. About 4:20, I got up, used the head and found my clothes in the main cabin where I left them. Socks are always the problem. Without turning on the lights, dark socks in dark shadows are generally found aboard Caro Babbo by feel: either underfoot, or on hands and knees.
This morning I found two pair of Jennifer’s dark socks before I found mine. Realistically, the only difference between my socks and Jennifer are that she has worn one pair and I have worn the other. There are also some socks that come barely above the shoe line, which I won’t wear. Feminine connotations aside, they are just not comfortable.
Our seven days in the park were uneventful. We were able to show Erwin and Laura things we thought they would like, and which they did. Erwin found walking to the face of a glacier, touching it and exploring it to be a high point. We did this in Reid Cove at the Reid Glacier.
The charter vessel Sea Wolf had come into the cove that morning and was depositing its passengers around the cove. Jennifer struck up a conversation with the owner, Kimber. I returned to the boat to pick up Erwin and Laura.
As we have found in this part of the world, there are no more that two degrees of separation . The conversation with Kimber progressed to where we were living in Port Townsend. Kimber exclaimed, that was Shelly Webb’s house. ”I’ve been to your house for dinner.”
After Erwin, Laura, Jennifer and I walked around the face of the glacier for a while, I shepherded everyone across the streams in advance of the rising tide. While I scouted ahead, Jennifer jouned Kimber’s group in applying the glacier silt as a facemask, a glacial facial, and posing in the group’s pictures.
Jennifer, Erwin and Laura decided to walk along the beach to the closest point to Caro Babbo, while I took the dinghy back. I’d ferry them once they arrived.
As I was being pushed off the beach Jennifer noticed that the Sea Wolf RIB had stopped a couple of hundred yards up the beach towards Caro Babbo. ”See if they are looking at a bear,” Jennifer commanded. I told her I would return if they were or return to Caro Babbo, if they were not.
They were.
We had watched two brown bears work the beach the night before, at one point standing face-to-face, within bear hugging distance of each other. Now a healthy-looking male was working its way towards the trio.
I returned and picked up all three in the Pudgy.
The four of us exceed the Pudgy’s safe working load by about 20%, which is why I made two trips to drop everyone off. In a warm summer day in a harbor with warm water, I wouldn’t have worried about being overweight.
In 0 degree C water, caution was called for.
They use a 1-10-1 rule here. You have one minute before you are no longer able to help yourself out of the water. You have ten minutes before you lose consciousness, and one hour (well, 45 minutes to 1 hour) before you can no longer be revived.
Life jackets serve two purposes: foam jackets provide nice insulation against the cold; all life jackets help find your dead body.
The Pudgy carried the four of us very well.
The weather report for yesterday in Icy Strait, from the coast guard/NOAA, was for 25 knot winds and four foot waves. The weather reports the entire time we have been in the Glacier Bay area have been alarmist. The two different mode GRIB files we downloaded said nothing of the sort, but Jennifer was spooked, so we asked for an extra day, which we were granted and spent the day around the Glacier Bay Park office and lounge.
It is something Jennier and I never do. We had a great time.
We saw a number of ranger presentations, all made by the same ranger, James McClean. James and I spoke before the first presentation and he may have remembered me, but when I fainted standing up after it, I was fixed in his mind. (I was quite dehydrated. A quart of Pepsi, a hearty lunch and quart of water seemed to repair everything. The bitch of it all is that when you reach a certain age, everyone is attributing grave causes rather than just stupidity. Youth is allowed stupity — though come to think of it, having been a teenager, no two words were better paired than stupid and teenager.)
On the escorted walk, we merged for a moment with a Japanese group. James warmly greated the leader, whom he knew in Fairbanks, and chatted away in Japanese for a while. Cool. This guy speaks Japanese.
In the evening, after meeting more people who knew both Shelly Webb and Kimber, we watched another of James’ presentations.
After the presentation, I went back to speak with James, but found him laughing with another man in a conversation in Norwegian.
I went back a few minutes later as James was closing up and asked, ‘‘How many languages do you speak? I saw you speak Japanese this morning and now you were speaking Swedish.’’
He replied,‘‘ Norwegian actually.
‘‘Well, of course, I speak the Scandanavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian.’’
‘‘Of course?’’ I answered.
”They’re all the same language.” We discussed that for a moment.
Then, ”German, I’m most fluent in German. French, Japanese. I can speak Mandarin, and some Spanish, but I’m not fluent.
”I’m trying to learn colloquial Egyptian Arabic, but google will only translate into classic arabic. I’d sound like a college professor.”
He told me he didn’t start learning a second language until he was thirteen, when he and a friend started studying Russian on their own. Everything else he learned after age fifteen – post puberty.
He mentioned briefly that his grandmother used to speak to him in Dutch when he was a young child. Did that have any effect, I wonder.
He doesn’t speak Dutch. We talked about how impossible it is to learn dutch, because no one in the Netherlands will speak dutch to you. They will only speak english. Same thing in Sweden James commented. But, he eventually studied in Sweden in a rural setting and became fluent that way.
We’re now about twenty nautical miles from Glacier Bay. Erwin and Laura fly out of Juneau the day after tomorrow at 7 am.
We lost our slack day hanging out at Glacier Bay for an extra day, so we’ve decided to make a one day 65 NM run to Juneau. So far, currents are against us the whole way, which we expected, but winds are calm, which we did not.
Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.
