Kashevaroff Mountain

Long before we were a sailing family, Alisa and I were a young couple in love with adventuring in Alaska.

The opportunity to introduce Eric and Elias to the delights of outdoor living in the Great Land was one of the big bright sides of our return to Alaska.

Earlier this winter, the boys and I headed up Kashevaroff Mountain, one of the most accessible peaks in Kodiak. Our goal was to spend the night in a snow cave. Elias was particularly endearing in his desire for Eric to accompany us in spite of my concern over his younger brother's ability to do the trip.

Digging the snow cave.

Eric did great. There turned out not to be enough snow to dig a cave so we had to retreat back to the truck by headlamp.

Last weekend, with spring well advanced, we returned to try our luck at sleeping under nylon.

Spring in Alaska. The brown season.

Alfresco. Al dente.

Tent floors are for people who don't care about weight.

Still snowy if you go high enough.

The difference in ability between the two boys is something to navigate. Eric is doing great, and can clearly get up the mountain and spend the night, no problem. Elias, though, is ready for longer trips.

Walking to Winter

This continues to be a veeerrry warm winter in Kodiak. Snow at sea level has been a more or less complete wipe out.

Still, we have managed to sniff out a few low-altitude ski outings for ourselves. The boys had a four-day school weekend this week, and the whole family managed to get out for cross-country jaunts on both Friday and Sunday. The snow was just good enough on both days, but still good enough to be lots of fun, if you follow me.

It's been so much fun to see how quickly the boys have figured out the basics of skiing. This is a totally informal, grass-roots kind of skiing that we have introduced them to this winter, and they have both seen the joy immediately. Any offer to go skiing by us is met by unanimous acclaim on the part of the fo'c'sle hands.

Elias and I have also continued our occasional efforts to walk up Cope Mountain to get to more or less decent Alaskan winter conditions.

This trek is still too much for Eric. It was about all that Elias could do this weekend to make it up the hill with the unaccustomed weight of a pack and skis on his back.

But he is keen to try again soon, with the addition of a sleeping bag and snow shovel in his pack, so that we can spend the night in a snow cave up on top of the hill.

As soon as we get a few details of our kit worked out, and the luxury of a couple good weather days more or less over a weekend, I think we'll be giving it a try.

Starting with this little dream...

Let's see. Since July, we've...

• Got a job.
• Bought a car.
• Bought a house.
• Watched the kids sail into school with nary a look back, and barely a hiccup along the way.

Things seem to be going just about as well as we could wish for in our re-introduction to land life after 10 years away.

True, my job has been more or less eating me alive. That will get better in time, I trust, and I hope that the University of Alaska will eventually be a great place for me to practice my science. But for this winter, I am laboriously laying the foundation for that hoped-for future.

So science demands have completely overflowed into the discretionary time that I was used to having on the boat. But more than this (hopefully temporary) time poverty that I find myself living through, I think that it's just the nature of the transition that has kept me away from this blog lately.

This was so much the place for sharing my impressions of family life afloat. Which, after all, was my life, and our life together, for these last ten years.

As our life turns into whatever shape it will take back here in Alaska, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that I'll end up with some new sort of stories to fill these pages.

I'll make a nod towards that new beginning with these pics of the boys learning to ski.

I had a go at learning to surf when we were in Australia. It was fun, but trying to learn a new sport in my 40s mostly just left me yearning to do something I already knew how to do. Which, for me, is Nordic skiing.

I'm not a particularly good skier, but I am very comfortable on the boards, and Alisa and I got up to all kinds of long trips back in the old days, skiing for days along frozen river valleys and over mountain passes, camping each night in the snow.

And, for all these years that we were away from Alaska I had this little dream in the back of my head about how wonderful it would be to teach the boys to ski. I loved the idea of passing along this thing  that has given me so much pleasure through the years.

My parents came up to share the holiday with us, and they gave the boys skis for Christmas. A few days later we finally got some snow on the local golf course (it's been a terribly warm winter) and the whole family went out to have a go.

And well. The boys loved it, and are crazy to go as often as our paltry snow will allow. And not incidentally, they're pretty good at it to.

Mark it up as another part of life in Alaska that is suddenly that much richer for being able to share it with the boys.

El Niño in the South

Alisa shovels.  Eric "helps"

For a while I've been wondering what a strong Niño might mean for winds during our coming summer in the South Atlantic.

I haven't found any information about that.  But we seem to be having one effect already - we're enjoying an incredibly snowy spring in Puerto Williams.

People tell us that snow in September is rare down here, and we're having snowy day after snowy day.  Which is exactly the weather we would choose for what is odds-on to be our only season in Puerto Williams.

We don't have skis, which would really put things over the top.  But someone did lend us a sled, which the boys are predictably delirious over.  And recess during the school week has devolved into father-sons snowball fights on the Micalvi.

Every day, it seems, we awake to a fresh dump.  Alisa has been impressing our neighbors with her assiduous shoveling of the deck.  We figure it's the Alaskan thing to do - we are the people who shovel snow.


Summer seems improbably far away.  And that's fine with us.

Below - cowabunga!

The Life Micalvi

The process...

The Micalvi is the ship that was scuttled on the outskirts of Puerto Williams to make a dock for visiting yachts.  But it is also something of an iconic name for a certain kind of sailing.  The Micalvi is where people spend a season between their trip down the Patagonian canales and their trip to Antarctica.  It's a place that we've heard about a hundred times, a shorthand name for an adventurous sort of sailing life that gets you to out of the way places like this.

...and the finished product

And now, after hearing about it for years, here we are.

Elias on the bridge

The Micalvi  itself is something of a playground for the kids.  The bar inside is closed for the winter, but the wheelhouse, which is still quite a luxurious place, has served us very nicely as the setting for a  BYOB social with the other yachties that are here at the end of the winter.

Ice on the seno this morning.  It's still winter

And the yachts - what about them?  You'll see in the pictures above that the place is completely full of yachts waiting out the winter months.  We hear that prices have gone up in Ushuaia, the Argentinean port just thirty miles away on the other side of the Beagle Channel, and that more boats are wintering here as a result.  And of course there are more and more boats in general, especially here in the far south.  A place that only a few crazies visited two decades ago is now available to any crazy who can get together enough money to buy a boat.

The teenager on Mollymawk has a skull collection
that impressed the Galactics very much

Penguin skull!

Johan on Alea

And how about those boats, and the people sailing them?

I'm happy to report that the boats are a pretty ordinary lot.  Nothing too fancy, as you might expect, and nothing too flash.  The people, too - pretty run of the mill, unassuming sorts, no superhero complexes among them.  A good group.

Optimist training in Beagle Channel

Elias coming back from sailing school.  He loves it

Family walks are a big attraction

If we had our druthers, we'd be just about ready to go - tanks full, stores full, slip the lines and go get lost again in los canales.  But we need to get a variety of life issues beaten into shape before we can do that again.  In particular, I have a full load of science work that will keep me dependent on the internet link here for a month or so.

Parakeets in winter - too cool

A leftover from a tense time with Argentina

But, if everything goes according to plan, we have a tremendous Austral summer ahead of us - Tierra del Fuego at first, then Christmas in the Falkands, and who knows what else.

It's not too hard to put in a little stationary time first.

Notes From a 'Nother World

It's my childhood!  I own it!

So, this trip that I've been writing about was a gem...except that it wasn't solid like a gem.  For all the effort that we put into this endeavor, it didn't profit us in the obvious way that a gem would.  We got nothing from it except the subtle way that it might have changed all of our characters, and now that it's over, it has immediately wafted away to the realm of memories, in a very non-gemlike fashion.

Brazo Noroeste (Northwest Arm), Beagle Channel

Everything that happened on that trip - all the concerns and sensations and considerations and moments of wonder and everyday living that filled each day - they're all a part of another world, very different from where we find ourselves now.  Very different.

Seno Ventisquero, Brazo Noroeste - centolla fishermen unloading their female catch...

After Caleta Brecknock and Bahía Desolada we found ourselves in the northwest arm of the Beagle Channel.  Because we had been doing all we could just to figure out what was happening day by day and week by week, we hadn't been anticipating Brazo Noroeste, and the wonder of the place took us completely by surprise.

I suppose that's another benefit of going in winter, when there aren't other yachts around to tell you about the delights of the place you're about to see.  It can be so nice to just discover the whole thing on your own.

We started off in Brazo Noroeste by attempting to commit some glacier tourism in Seno Ventisquero.  But we found sea ice (mixed with glacier ice and curious South American sea lions) miles from the glaciers at the head of the fjord.  We turned back.

Talking to the armada

As we retreated to an ice-free backup anchorage for the night, the sun was still shining.  But mares' tails told us that the days of bluebird weather that we had been reveling in were coming to an end.

A centolla feast was fair consolation for the missed glaciers.

The weather was shutting down the next day as we traveled east down the Beagle Channel.

The sea lions were still curious.

Our goal for the day was another attempt at glacier tourism - this time in Seno Pia.  As we approached, the blue skies that make the mountains come alive were just holding on.

But once again our hoped-for anchorage was iced over.

So we turned around again.  But spirits remained high.

We anchored in Caleta Julia, and dutifully reported our position to the armada the next morning by email.  It wasn't until a week later that we realized that this anchorage is forbidden to yachts.

¡Lo siento! Quiero hacer la cosa correcta, pero soy extranjero y no entiendo mucho.

This shot above was taken the day after we arrived, and much of the ice in the caleta has melted out with the arrival of the warm front.  When we pulled in the night before, the spot where Galactic is sitting (just to the right of center in the pic) was completely surrounded by ice.  When we saw how difficult it was to tie the boat in with that much ice around, we were glad for our decision to turn around from the much icier glacial fjords we'd visited over the past two days.

Dawn at Julia.

Snowball fight.

Beagle Channel

After we left Caleta Julia behind we sailed into some of our most demanding situations of the whole trip.  But we weren't quick enough, or interested enough, to get pictures of those moments.  So for the purposes of this post, we'll forget that they happened.

Some things are best told in full narrative form, anyway.

I'll close with this moment that I did photograph - southern right whale dolphins, bowriding Galactic in a driving snowstorm, in the Beagle Channel.

That moment is gem enough for me.