Maxi 95 and Our Adventures
Where Caro Babbo sails
Port Townsend, WA, 1-OCT-2020 – In Homer, AK, Caro Babbo, resting on stacked wooden squares called cribs, winterized, locked and watched over, sleeps. I on the other hand toss and turn. Dryland, people, culture, and COVID are difficult transitions.
Give me a few minutes to catch you up.
Continue reading “Caro Babbo Sleeps, John Doesn’t”Seldovia, AK, 31-Aug-2020 — Jennifer brought us here to Seldovia to wait out weather. We arrived Friday for weather taking place out by the Barren Islands, Islands we’d passed between under power because there was no wind.
Saturday, through VHF radio weather reports, we learned that it was blowing 40 knots out there, but here in Seldovia it was calm. It seems, in times like this, there’s no reason to be tucked away in a small harbor. But there is, of course.
Continue reading “Seldovia Dreams”Port Chatham, AK, 27-AUG-2020 — This is the last time we will anchor on this trip. Everything is mixed: Melancholia at having this long adventure end, and impatience to move on.
The day before yesterday and the day before that stick in the mind as embodying so much of an Alaska cruiser’s life. We motored and motored around a point from one anchorage to another: four hours, some of it dodging rocks and kelp. Much with no wind and some with wind that would have required beating to windward. Continue reading “Our last anchorage; I do not look like a tadpole”
Phoenix Bay, Alaska, 23-aug-2020 — Bill Buckley and I parted company with me having a much lessened opinion of the man, not that it was too wonderful to begin with.
Bill, in all his interviews and promotion for the book, including his article for the New Yorker, which I read almost forty years ago and still remember, fails to mention other people on the boat: the professional captain, the cook and the stewart. Then there is the video camera man, the audio person and the producer. Somewhere in the book another man appears as mechanical maintenance crew. Continue reading “Books”
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. Continue reading “Kodiak and the home stretch”
Shilikof Strait, 40 nm west of Big Alinchak Bay, AK, 10-Aug-2020 — Jennifer sees things in the geology that I cannot. Generally, she sees how the land was formed, its history and future. The land around us is generally volcanic, shaped by erosion and glaciers, often by earthquakes and continental drift.
Some the land is a puzzle: how did these two type of earth end up next to each other or intermixed?
We’re in a part of the world where currents have never been studied, where coves and inlets have never been charted. There are places further west that few people, beyond those on fishing boats and the dozen or so cruising boats, will ever see.
53° 18.93N 168° 27.14W 17-jul-2020 — I’ve started William F Buckley’s Atlantic High, a book I’ve known about since parts of it were printed in the New Yorker in 1981. The copy I have is the fifth printing, so the book did well.
I had, before I read the NY’er piece, determined I wanted to sail across the Atlantic. Buckley took a number of friends on this trip (he’d crossed before and written a well-regarded book, Airborne) and required his friends to keep journals of this trip that he would turn into a book.
It was different sailing then. Position was mostly by celestial navigation, though I think Loran may have existed. In celestial navigation you learn once or twice a day where you think you might be, generally based on where you thought you were yesterday, if you have clear skies. Otherwise, it may be a few days sailing by compass before you once again learn where you think you may be. Continue reading “William F and me”
Hanalei Bay, Kuaui, HI, 25-JUN-2020 — If you’re asking why are we still in a Hawaii, it is the proper question.
We were to have left Tuesday, but will leave tomorrow instead.
I’ve wriiten that in a cruising boat, you, the skipper/owner/crew are the weak point: the boat will protect you. I am the weak link. I have been injured and then suffered from Vertigo. We waited while I healed.
Continue reading “Why are we still in Hawaii? We leave in the morning.”Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 5-MAY-2020 – The Clash song, should I stay or should I go, always echoes in my head at times like this. We’re vacillating between leaving the boat here and sailing to Alaska. Dutch Harbor by the edge of the Aleutians to be exact. It’s potentially a bunch of weeks at sea in a weather window.*
The major question is, would we be welcome and could we sail from place to place? The answers are all over the place, changing from day to day. The kicker is how might answers change while we’re at sea for three or four weeks?
Continue reading “Sit or Sail?”Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 31-MAR-2019 — The marina is where all the tourists come for whale watching trips and swimming with dolphins, for deep sea fishing charters and to spot turtles swimming among the docks. All of that is closed. The marina has settled down to a quiet neighborhood.
Continue reading “Staying put for the duration”
