The reason we anchored here was to escape the wind

Home Cove, AK, 28-Aug-2021 — There was no wind blasting with fury last night. There were gusts into the high teens, I would guess. The anchor swing traced on the tablet was smooth and might have indicated that we dragged some, but perhaps that was just straightening out the chain or the 10% stretch of the nylon rode tracing a lengthening and shortening arc.

Second guessing the wind is difficult to resist. We came to the cove because there would be no wind in here. Whether we were wrong about the wind outside the cove is something we will probably never know. Instead, we should be and are proud of Jennifer’s navigation that took us to a place where there was no wind.

This morning the sun has been slowly creeping over the mountains with yellow light falling on the peaks across Nuka Passage. There is no snow visible here. The peaks are only three thousand or so feet tall, two thirds of the way covered with pine trees. The forests streaked with land slides. Recent slides (how long is recent? I don’t know), Recent slides expose rock. Greenery has started to reclaim the others. Some have shrubs, other alders, the oldest have pine trees.

The common wisdom is the stands of trees with ”silvers” have not been logged. Here we see silvers in places that would have been difficult to log, and uniform green in the rest. Yes, this area has been logged.

The slides terminate in debris. Some slides still have trees mixed in the debris. Others are a mound of rock and gravel. The size of the rocks varies: in some mounds nothing more that 9 inches (20 or cm), in others, minivan-size and shaped boulders. Jennifer can explain why all of the rocks here are square edged.

Today, like yesterday, the sky is blue. Unlike yesterday, there are no clouds visible in any direction. At this time yesterday, the air was still like most mornings. This morning there is wind, variable is how the weather report would read. The wind changes direction at will, one moment stretching our anchor rode southward, the sun for the solar panels coming over the starboard side of the boat, the next stretching us northward, the sun over the port. We spin through east and west, but not staying, though at this moment we face east, the sun lands on a solar powered ventilation fan, which over the course of a few seconds spins to life.

Flora had a sleepless night, every 30 minutes or so, when I woke to check the swing I would see Flora working on embroidery with a headlamp, or reading from a tablet. At four, she was still awake. I didn’t glance over on successive checks, but she was asleep by daylight and sleeps on the main cabin, starboard setee as I write. After a week or so of having her own cabin, she decided she’d rather sleep in the main cabin, which is directly connected to the forepeak where Jennifer and I sleep.

It is nice to have her here, the only downside is the loss of privacy. Flora must contend with her shpmates traversing the main cabin unclothed on their way the head. If I know she is awake, I will put something on. I haven’t asked Jennifer about her night time, main cabin attire.

Forty-four years ago today, I married a woman who now lives, married to someone else, in Decatur Georgia. The distance in time is twice the age of the woman when we married. Time and generations have been on my mind during this stay here in Home Cove.

Flora is here, at twenty-five, living such a different life than mine at that age. Her voyage through life has been a less direct route, with shoals and headlands I never encountered.

I have been writing a series of stories, chapters I suppose, about my mother Lillian for her great granddaughter and namesake. It has made me ruminate on whether Lily, my great niece (Grand Niece?), will have any memory of me when she reads those chapters. Or perhaps I will be there, a strong an health nonagenarian, when she marries. Will she wear her namesake’s wedding dress, which I have safely packed away next to the wedding dress that the woman who married me wore those many decades ago?

Jennifer, Flora and I haven’t found activities, other than going ashore, that we will do together. Flora and her mother listen to audio books of a Young Adult series of Fantasy involving the dead resurrected and free (and I suppose chained ??) magic. I have been generally reading and occasionally watched videos alone, which I prefer to do with someone so we can talk about them. I find watching a video in the presence of someone else both rude to the other people and personally sad and lonely to be apart in the virtual world that I descend into. On passages, Jennifer and I read to each other. Jennifer assumed the accents of the characters, of which she has no breadth; I Iove her all the more for this.

Yesterday, across the afternoon and evening I watched Springsteen’s Broadway show. It is dense and something I found I could not watch all at once. It is difficult to explain the impact that he had on the lives of people like me. He is five years older than me, and the stories he told were all fiction, which we knew, but he was from not very far away. We were becoming adults, starting our careers and he and a cast of our Jersey friends, relatives and people we knew from the radio stations we listened to understood something, the same thing we all understood. Or thought we did.

The world was becoming ours. We were leaving where we grew up, going to places we had only read about and establishing ourselves there.

I look back on this through the crowded tunnel of my life. It is crowded with people I have known, loved and very, very occasionally been betrayed by. It is partially occluded by the shoals and promentories I avoided by careful pilotage or blind luck. There are those that I crashed upon through callousness or arrogance and hubris. I try so very hard not to see or acknowledge those.

The decompression of the end of trip, waiting for weather unearths these things, sometimes like the landslides we see striping the mountain sides, more often like the solitary trees we see on the promentories, rocked back away from the wind and waves displaying their very shallow roots in the narrow layer of soil atop the stone of the mountain.

Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.

Author: johnjuliano

One-third owner of Caro Babbo, co-captain and in command whenever Caro Babbo is under sail. View all posts by johnjuliano