A quiet cove and contemplation

Tonsina Bay, AK, 2-AUG-2021 — It is midday at anchor in a bifurcated cove, alone, the three of us on Caro Babbo. It is an unusual time for Jennifer and I to be anchored in a cove anywhere. We spend most mornings and middays moving from one place to another whenever we are traveling in British Columbia or Alaska. These few days following our departure from Homer have been full days, long days, which like many days here at 59 degrees north in the summer, feel like multiple days, both in their duration and the amount that we experience.

Flora has been, in the months leading to our departure, eager, ambivalent and decidedly against making the trip. In the end, rather than come for a small time she has decided to join us for the entire adventure: 5 weeks. A small trip for us, 1/4 its normal length, and a long time to be on a small boat with your mother and her partner.

All of the work performed on Caro Babbo has been successful. A vibration, a resonance really, that thrummed to Chrissie Hine’s refrain: “watching the clothes go around, watching the clothes go around,” has disappeared. After its many years keeping us company, while all the time slowly destroying the bearing in which the propeller shaft sat and the propeller shaft itself, it is a missing friend and rhythm of our trips.

No boat is ever perfect, nor is a trip. We have a small leak of exhaust water that only manifests in the hour after we anchor, and communications and electronics that after having years worked successfully and peaceably together have decided to fray at each other.

The electronics culprits seem to be 59 degrees north, in the armpit of Alaska, a firmware upgrade, and a replacement unit. Part of this afternoon will be to disassemble the intercommunications among the devices and watch each item’s performance alone and as they are individually reconnected.

It has been a while since I’ve written, with no excuse other than not setting aside the time to do so.

Caro Babbo went into the water easily, and in fact sat in her sling suspended above the ground for an evening before the ‘splash,’ while the three of us slept aboard. The great joy of a boat in a sling overnight, beyond the sleeping therein, is unobstructed access to the bottom of the keel.

There are two stripes of the keel that have not been exposed in dry dock since 2013 and have not had their bottom paint replaced with epoxy and copper metal. I was easily able to do so.

At a few minutes before 6:00 a.m., which is much more than an hour after it became light, Caro Babbo was lowered into the water. The engine started easily, but the exhaust was dry, a major failing.

One determinate would be to open the impeller pump, which sucks raw water from the ocean and pumps it through a heat exchanger to commingle with the hot exhaust before it exits the hull. While I did not do that, after telling Aaron the lift operator that I would would, Aaron trundled off to bring a second travel lift so that we might sit longer in our sling while I debugged the problem.

Instead, after moving the newly-relocated seawater-strainer to a position closer the water line, on the second start there seemed to be water coming out of the exhaust. The aft sling was lowered below the keel, and Jennifer backed us out of the slings. Aaron and Carol waved goodbye and we motored off into the Bay. A quick look at the water temperature gauge and the hollow unmuffled sound of the exhaust told us that we were in fact not pumping water.

I tasted the liquid coming out of what I had thought was the raw water pump and discovered that it tasted of antifreeze. This promoted a bit of panic, but tracking the hose back I could see that it was the raw water hose. Hours later I remembered that I had poured antifreeze into that hose to keep it from freezing across the winter, so the taste of antifreeze was to be expected.

With the hose disconnected, Jennifer turned on the engine and water gushed. The engine was halted, the hose reattached and the next hose along the path was opened, the engine restarted and water gushed.

I thought perhaps there was a blockage in the tight elbow that injects the water into the exhaust stream. But we started the engine and wet exhaust and the muffled, padded sound of exhaust and sparkling water issued from the exhaust.

Panic at these circumstances has long abated. The cerebral knowledge and visualization in preparation for these many trips has morphed into confidence that we will solve the problem or devise a workaround. In a close bay like at Homer even the worst disaster would be solely financial and social; so close to land and in calm water there is little fear for life.

It would be another night before Flora would spend a night floating on Caro Babbo, something she had never done. That night my phone made a funny tone that I did not recognize, on the screen was a tsunami warning. Within moments a text appeared from some friends offering us a safe place to stay high on a ridge away from the water. Then the tsunami warning sirens started.

Tsunami warnings are taken seriously here. People from the docks and from the camping sites and restaurants that comprise the strip moved to the parking lots as if they were water flooding towards a drain.

I called Morgan and said he could come get us if he’d like, to which he replied it was not possible. Traffic would be utterly jammed and there would be no way to get to us. Walking up the ramp from the harbor I walked next to a woman from whom I begged a ride for the three of us. She replied, graciously, that of course we could ride with her. There would be space in the bed of her pickup truck; so Jennifer, Flora, and I climbed aboard, to sit on the bed of the pickup truck between a spare tire and a fiberglass ladder.

Traffic traffic snaked slowly off the spit until the police arrived at the bottleneck intersections and countermanded the stop signs and traffic lights: the speed of traffic rose to close to double the 25 mile an hour speed limit.

Our host and driver refused an offer to come to our friend’s house high on the ridge and instead drove us, his spouse and their grandchildren to the high school, which was the designated gathering place.

Like the night of a football game, cars and pickup trucks all parked in the parking lot in parking spots facing the spit listening to the radio and watching what might happen.

As we left Caro Babbo, Flora grabbed her purse containing her passport, and her laptop. Jennifer and I only grabbed our cell phones and what we had in our pockets. I’ve always thought and planned that if something should happen to Caro Babbo so that she was no longer sailable, that would be the indication that it was time to stop. I wondered if this might be that night.

The radio told us that it was an 8.1, later raised to 8.2, earthquake, 100 times the force of the earthquake that we experienced last year in Dutch Harbor.

The tsunami warning was due to be called off in 3 hours at 1:00 a.m.

Douglas and Morgan came to the parking lot to pick us up. We shook hands with the man in the cab of the pickup truck, gave our thanks to his spouse and said nothing to the two teenage grandchildren sitting in the back seat. High on the ridge, in Morgan and Douglas’s beautiful rented home with the awe-inspiring view, Morgan made us tea and we talked until 1:00 a.m. when we all decided it was time to sleep.

As we were bedding down for the night, I heard, though no one else did, a different siren telling all was safe and that we could return. It was 1:00 a.m., and I could not envision undoing the preparations for sleep that Morgan and Douglas had made for us and tracking back to Caro Babbo for a few hours sleep.

Douglas had a 7:00 a.m. conference call. That would be a perfect time for Morgan to drop us off at the boat and for us to finalize our preparations for motoring to Seldovia, which is exactly what we did.

Day One in Seldovia was spent in the times of modern life: on the internet researching, making reservations and flight arrangements, and the second day walking and exploring Seldovia and eating on board.

Our days of $30-a-head light lunches of a sandwich and soft drink need to be put behind us. The purse does not have that kind of depth.

In Seldovia, I realized that Jennifer and I live in a segregated world, not one of color, nor gender, nor even intentionally of age though that is how it generally shakes out. We leave in a world segregated by employment.

We do not work: we don’t have the kind of responsibilities of making money that require us to be any specific place nor work any specific hours or days. We live in a world with like people. 7/8 of whom are born in the 1950s or earlier, and the rest through either fortuitous financial circumstances, or the decision to take a different path, whether by choice or happenstance, travel with us.

At times, we will meet the fishing boats at a dock. These are people, primarily but certainly not even close to exclusively men, who work damn hard, are self-employed and have a business sophistication that surprised us when we first met them. But in Seldovia, the fishing boats were out and we were surrounded by those in the world in which we find ourselves,

Jennifer has changed our plan. Before, we were convinced we would make a run up into Prince William Sound and sail there. Instead, we have decided, this shortened year, we would make only small journeys from harbor to harbor, after the 60 miles of yesterday, and perhaps not even get into Prince William Sound, but enjoy the many places here, safe from any bad weather and beautiful in the extreme. Where in Prince Williams Sound there are, we are told, ample tour boats, along the Kenai, there are only fishing boats and us.

And so today, I will write and continue to read MFK Fisher, in a lovely volume of five of her best known books and learn about the mother of modern food writing. I’ll scowl even more at Ruth Reichl, the once editor of Gourmet under whose command the title was scuttled by SI Newhouse at Conde Nast. I feel as if my regard for her has curdled under the discovery that her biography is so based on MFK Fisher’s, or should I just realize that Fisher set the standard and rather than exceed it, Reichl decided merely to use it.

It is a quiet day, and I find that any day completely given over to the sybaretic, is a day that I feel I have cheated myself out of. I feel, and I am having trouble broadening the definition of what gives me the feeling of purpose and accomplishment in a day, as if I have only so many days left and I must use each wisely and waste none.

At the end of each day, this I know, there must be a feeling of having accomplished something. Writing, certainly feels the bill, a maintenance task, will also fill the bill. But creating, creating is the sense of accomplishment and for some reason, which I am very satisfied with, sailing is creating, entertaining friends is creating, building something new is creating, and continuing to build the life Jennifer and I have together is creating.

And so my friends I will leave you at this moment to engage in the maintenance that Caro Babbo requires, though debugging may not be exactly creating but it is part of the same milieu. I will prepare for our hop to the next anchorage, and daydream about how I will use the fresh meat on board, which is in its last days, before it must be transformed into something that will give it three more days of life before it too is past it’s due date.

Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.