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.

The part arrived on Thursday. In the interim, I changed the engine oil and did other routine maintenance. We also drank too much beer and ate out in restaurants. Something we rarely do.

Kodiak, generally, has a good tourism trade. Of course, this year it is dead with many shops and museums not opening and sightseeing boats tied up at the dock.

Fish processing and off-shore fishing is becoming monopolistic with three processing companies dominating the industry. In these pro-business times, they are buying up the larger boats and any licenses or catch allotments that come with the boats or are for sale. This allows them to set the price for fish bought from independent fishing boats. The price this year is 60% of what it was last year. COVID does have a role in the lower price, but since there is no competition among processors, the pricing is opaque.

We became friends with a fisherman named Ryan on the vessel Castle Cape. He filled in many more of the blanks in our knowledge of the fishing industry, including some of the dollar amounts.

He also told us the story of Kevin and Winona from an outsider’s perspective. The two stories agree, but each party includes a different subset of the facts. Ryan was very interested in how we met them.

Ryan also gets around town on an electric, one-wheel skate board. The one with the very large wheel protruding up in the center.

He offered to let Anja, Thomas, Jennifer and me to try it. Anja, who is a good snow boarder and paddle boarder, mastered it in a few moments.

Over the course of the week, Ryan reconfigured his boat as a long liner. This change includes adding an enclosure to the open aft deck.

When Ryan and I spoke about the business, we agreed it’s all about cash flow.

When installing the new throttle control, I found that it had been broken in a second way the entire time we had it. A follower finger had broken off. This explained the non-linear throttle response. Basically, a dead spot in the throttle movement, where the handle moves, but the RPMs do not increase.

The mechanics are geeky, but very cool, and patented, so I’ll do a separate post in the fall.

We left Saturday morning to the same, continuing wonderful weather we’ve been having since we arrived: wonderful sunshine, but zero wind.

After two hours of motoring, the wind picked up and we had a leisurely sail, averaging about 3-1/2 knots. In the middle of the afternoon, the wind stopped for a few moments and changed 180 degrees, at exactly the same speed. This is a common Long Island Sound experience. Jennifer’s only comment was that none of the weather prediction models contained this change.

Kitoi Bay has a hatchery. In front of the hatchery is a pen teaming with jumping salmon. The bay itself also has jumping salmon and some recreational fishing craft.

Around six PM, a group of seven or so sea lions came bounding past our anchored boat chasing salmon and discovering the pen. The floats supporting the nets for the pen are about a foot long and six inches in diameter. The sea lions easily peered over the nets, but made no attempt to swim over.

This morning we are motoring in the glassy water that the native peoples of SE Alaska use as the basis for their designs.

Wednesday looks like the day to cross to the mainland. Weather mixed with currents is a concern. Currents here are not charted. In places where the Bering Sea can reach the Pacific, barometric pressure in the Bering Sea plays as large a part in current as does the tide.

The Coast Pilot, the bible of coastal navigation, throws up its hands when discussing currents out here.

We left Anja and Thomas in Kodiak waiting for wind. Even they will have to ‘engine’, as Thomas correctly calls it. Weather will soon be changing.

A fisherman named Chuck, on FV dragonfly, told us that we can cruise and sail around this part of the world any time of year. It’s just that the wait for weather will be longer. Perhaps a few weeks or longer. This matches Sara and Wade’s story about waiting for weather in a cove more than a week in 40 knot winds when sailing in the Aleutians one fall.

We’ll arrive in Homer earlier than expected, we suspect. Then we will make land-based tourism plans and figure out how best to get to Port Townsend.
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