55° 22’N 160° 15′ W, 2-AUG-2022 — This year moving around the Aleutians is like a boxing match, or gorilla warfare, or maybe a game of cat mouse with the weather.
It’s clear that the summer of 2020 was an unusually good summer. The opinions are mixed as to whether this year is a normal summer or a less pleasant than normal summer.
We move when the weather is good, and sit tight when it is bad, which has been about 50/50.
We arrived in Sandpoint Saturday night. The Marina was desolate with 5% of the available space in use. Jennifer parked us in the back on the transient dock where it makes a 40 degree turn. We tucked in in front of the dive / research vessel… With our bow facing the entrance of the harbor. The wind would be on our nose when it came up, and with any luck we would be hidden from it by the larger ship.
Within a few hours I thought I heard someone call my name, which was absurd since I doubted anybody there knew my name, and there were so few people that it made no sense.
Jennifer stood up and said that is Hans and Sylvia, who are the owners of Alumni, the 60 ft aluminum sloop.
We popped our heads out of the cabin and sure enough there they were. Sylvia called to us that they need helping docking. We had docked them in Dutch Harbor, and now we would once more do it again.
Hans spun the boat around so that it would be behind us about pointing in the right direction. Sylvia walked along the side of the vessel with a coil of brown braided line that she wanted to throw to me. Between the bow thruster and for and aft jockeying Hans brought Alumni closer to the dock. Sylvia tossed me the line.
The line in front of a midships cleat with one end on a large electronic winch and the other ever tied to the rail on the dock, as alumni moved forward the line pulls the entire vessel in parallel to the dock. Hans uses the winch to make any adjustments.
Sylvia tossed another few lines to Jennifer and me to make fast. We spoke for a few minutes and then Hans and Sylvia finished placing their actual dock lines while Jennifer and I went back to Caro Babbo.
The next afternoon, Saturday, one of the larger fishing vessels arrived. We spoke to one of the young crew who said that a season would be closing at 6:00 p.m. that night. They had decided to come in a bit early but that the rest of the boats would be trailing in. By the next morning the Marina and the transient dock was full.
This time, we didn’t head into San Point, we stayed on the dock and socialized with the fisherman. We were surprised that some of them knew us and could tell us where we had been on this trip. They recognized the boat, sometimes they recognized us, and I assume they also saw us on AIS.
It was a lovely few days.
We set up the enclosure that Josh and Homer made for us. We hadn’t put it up when there was any wind because we weren’t certain how it would deal with that wind. The construction is like a modern tent with fiberglass poles formed into arches that stretch the material into a dome.
Josh knows his stuff; he builds canvas structures for use up here in Alaska and his knowledge about where to put external support straps doesn’t seem like much until the wind starts to blow.
Suddenly, we had a new room on Caro Babbo. In the morning when the cockpit is normally wet from the falling dew it was a dry room. We read in that room though the weather outside was not very pleasant, we ate dinner in that room and we worked in that room. It was wonderful.
Although the boats were in because it was the end of the season – – there are many seasons throughout the year – – none of the boats left for their home port. They saw the weather coming that we saw.
As Andrew and Morgan on one of the large fishing boats told us, their captain decided, why should we beat ourselves to death getting to know when we can just wait here a day and leave tomorrow when the weather will be very nice.
Our thoughts exactly. Today we are starting at 36 hour trip that will take us 180 miles to Port Wrangel, where we will again wait out whether. I was hoping to sail, but both Jennifer and Hans told me no it will most likely be a 36-hour motor. And so now 2 and 1/2 hours into our trip we motor.
Jennifer altered our course to take us through the gap between these islands. If you look up our lat and long, you’ll see where we are. She correctly figured that the ebbing current would speed up through these islands and give us an extra knot or so of speed for a few hours. It is the venturi effect, but Jennifer wouldn’t use that term.
The current marker said the current would be against us at half a knot, but as we left the harbor we found it was one and a half knots. When we are traveling that much slower than we expect to there is always the worry that we have picked up something on the propeller. The easiest way to diagnose it is to turn 180° and see if instead we pick up that speed. We should have been traveling about five knots, we were traveling 3.5, so when we turn around we should be traveling at 6 1/2, and we were.
In keeping with a custom that fisherman are fairly strict about, we were given the fillets from a sockeye salmon.
The boat across the dock from us who had had his crew quit spoke to us for a while. And then in a positive conversation said, my gosh I don’t have a fish to give you. We hadn’t ever considered that this was part of the etiquette.
Yesterday afternoon as we were walking on to the dock A man carrying several bags of salmon, after passing us, turn around and call to us would you like a fish?
He’s the man who gave us the fillet sockeye.
We have to eat and otherwise prepare that fish.
This morning while Jennifer was still asleep I started a bread pudding from a half a loaf of increasingly stale bread.
In a while I’ll make some of the fillet into gravlaks, some of it I’ll make tonight with pasta and a white sauce from some fresh whole milk we have, and possibly, I’ll take some of the grav locks chop it finely with some raw salmon and make some salmon tartar. I’m not sure this is anything Jennifer will eat.
We’ll also have some of the salmon either poached, or placed skin down on in a frying pan until the skin is crispy and the salmon is cooked all the way through. That is both Jennifer and my favorite way to make salmon.
Agrapina, 200 NM from Sand Point, 6-Aug-2022 — A thirty-six hour overnight to Port Wrangel, two nights there, then weather takes us here. Port Wrangel is good for wind in one direction, Agrapina is good for weather from another.
We sailed twelve of the thirty-six hours, even reefing at one point, then the wind died.
Port Wrangel is the only anchorage we’ve been in that is the close, small and protected place to anchor that we think of when we envision a place for the night… Protected from all winds and waves where there is little indication what the weather is ‘outside.’
The weather in Agrapina was predicted to be mild. Instead, the wind was stayed between 15 and 30 knots kicking up small white caps.
Hans told us that if the wind got to thirty knots he and Sylvia would head out into open water on the sixty-foot Alumni. They feel there is not enough drag room in here for them.
Jennifer was spooked and spent today measuring the wind speed. The bottom here is good holding and we have anchored in much worse conditions with no problems, and so it has been here.
The diagram shows a very consistent swing arc in wind varying from 7 to 28 knots.
The day has been pretty with blue skies. This morning was calm and warm, with the temperature rising as the winds rose.
Yesterday, we spotted 11 brown bears at the stream that feeds into the head of the bay. Confused salmon jump from the water near where we are anchored.
Tomorrow, we move 60nm to Big Alinchak Bay, a good portion of the way to Geographic Harbor. It also provides protection from the South West winds that will take us there.
We’ll eat something small, get up before six and be gone with the sunrise.
With luck, the wind will still overnight as we’ll have a calm start to building wind.
Sailing to Port Wrangell, Hans took this picture of us.
I don’t know if we’ll ever come back. Here there is no expectation of seeing another pleasure vessel. A Caribou (?) on the beach didn’t run from us, just calmly stared. River otters were openly curious and harbor seals followed us upstream in cloudy river water thrashing wildly when they rose too close to the dinghy.
Jennifer tells me we may stay in Geographic for close to a week waiting for weather. Unlike last year when a high-pressure zone stayed put for a while giving us calm, sunny weather, this year we will continue to be weather vagabonds, but within Geographic Harbor moving from anchorage to anchorage to hide from wind and waves.
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