National Public Radio reports...

...that I am wiry and have a thick beard.

Seriously, though, it's gratifying to see interest in our work.

The reporter tells me the story will likely air on NPR this weekend.

That's Alisa in the photo with me.

The Cod Are In

Age-0 Pacific cod

My first thought: we should notify the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Alisa and Elias and I were out at our study site out at Long Island, five miles from Kodiak City, just yesterday.

It was our shakedown trip for our summer sampling, our chance to get the mothership away from the dock and to put all of our new sampling gear through its paces.

We did a test set with the beach seine...and came up with hundreds of juvenile cod, just settled out from the ichthyoplankton.

Alisa, measuring fish on the beach

It felt like life, it felt like renewal, it felt like summer. It even felt like a breath of hope for this fishing town that has been a little short of good news lately.

And now that the cod are in, we're greenlighted to launch on our summer work.

Beach seine and barky

Not incidentally, we all loved being afloat again. The boys were touchingly happy to be sleeping in their bunks.

And I re-discovered that while the true peace of god begins at a thousand miles from sea, a truly good night's sleep begins on your own little ship in a snug anchorage.

Winter Calm

Last week we finally got out on the water to start our pilot study of juvenile Pacific cod winter ecology.

It was a little nerve-racking to use someone else's boat (the University's skiff). We're pretty used to knowing the gear we rely on.

But everything went just fine. We had a cracker day, as you can see.

And as for that part that I have now spoken to more reporters about the project than we've actually seen cod? Well, that speaks to how important the cod collapse is to Kodiak, and also the nature of a pilot study.

Among other things, we're figuring out winter habitat associations for juvenile Pacific cod, about which very little is known. So we go out, and try different things (Friday is our next day out), and over time new knowledge will be created.

It's not always that calm...

Game On?

Well, many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, and we really believe in research funding once the money has been conveyed. But with those somewhat superstitious nods to false hope in place, it appears that we have been funded to conduct some start-up juvenile Pacific cod research over this coming year, including a summer survey of Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula (above).

We're very excited at the prospect of doing marine biology from Galactic, and I'm particularly excited that the work will hopefully provide better information for assessing the strength of incoming cohorts to the population, which should be a real help for managers and the fishing industry as they try to figure out what's going on.

More soon.

In the Tradition

Last week the Galactics went beach seining.

Pulling the seine

A beach seine is about the simplest net there is to use. You set it from the dinghy, then pull it in to the beach by hand.

Sorting the catch. Alisa still has her deep knowledge of the juvenile groundfishes of Alaska

Age-0 saffron cod

A little help from the team

The Baxter Guide to the fishes of Alaska

Back in the 90s, Alisa and I did a lot of beach seining as a part of a large study seeking to understand how climate variability limited the ability of seabird populations to recover from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

We have great memories of those summers spent doing field work in coastal Alaska. Being outside all day every day, work that was both physically demanding and intellectually engaging, the camaraderie of fantastic people...who wouldn't remember that fondly?

It was great to be doing that kind of work again. The names of the fishes came back so easily. Kelp clingfish! Penpoint gunnel! We talked about the people we worked with, 20 years ago, and how some of them have found a lifetime's pursuit in the study of Alaskan fishes. And we remembered some of the people from prior generations whom we encountered in one way or another. It's a great tradition to be a part of, the tradition established by those rugged men and women who have pursued knowledge for knowledge's sake in the wilds of Alaska.

Writing it down

There's also a larger tradition that we were invoking - the tradition of understanding the world with repeatable measurement, careful observation, and falsifiable ideas. In this era where the wonderful intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment is held in such low esteem, and the scientific enterprise is under such specific political attacks, it was great to be back in that tradition....doing the simple things of observing the world, and writing down what we saw.

More specifically, we were working to support a study that has been running for more than a decade, using beach seines to measure the abundance of juvenile Pacific cod, and to sample their body condition and energetics, in order to better understand the factors that regulate this population that supports an important fishery around Kodiak.

Mama said there'd be days like this

Tufted puffins

We've always thought that wrapping family life into field work would be a wonderful thing to do. And it was, mostly. Elias in particular is right there with being able to help out. He measured fish, he took notes, he pulled the net.

Eric is still a few years away from being real help, as is his right as a seven year old. Both boys did a great job with some very early mornings to catch the tides we were working, but during these four days of seining Alisa and I were also reminded of the limits of what we can ask the kids to do.

We'll keep those in mind as we cook up plans for more extensive field work in summers to come.

But for this first run, I was very satisfied to see how happy the family ended each day, and how glowing the boys' overall reviews were for the experience.

From this first step...

...we hope that great things might come!

So, now that we have sailed back to Alaska, what's the status of our sailing life?

Well, we're back to the dreaming stage.

As a part of our move back to Alaska, I've taken a research faculty job at the University of Alaska, based in Kodiak.

One of the things that I hope to do in this new job is field research from the decks of Galactic. For years and years, Alisa and I have shared a daydream that goes something like, "We're two marine biologists who operate their own boat. Surely there's some niche of useful research that we would be poised to fill?"

Well, I'm happy to note that we have taken our first tentative step in that direction. We have four days of sampling scheduled from Galactic over this week and next, supporting a study of the dynamics affecting juvenile cod survival.

It's a funny place to be back in, dreaming about our next sailing step, rather than living it. So I'm very happy that we have a little biology work from the boat so soon after we returned.

Details to follow!

A beach seine, used for sampling the rich nearshore piscifauna. It should fit nicely on Galactic!

Boat Not For Sale

The Land of Fire in winter

Over the years we've seen a lot of friends and acquaintances reaching the end of their dream cruise, and a unifying feature is that the sailboat in question usually goes on the block immediately. Or sooner - often a cruising boat is listed for sale while the final homeward passage is uncompleted.

This only makes sense. A well-found traveling boat represents a lot of capital, and demands a lot of upkeep. If you're not using the beast, there's little point in keeping it.

Plus, as Paul Beatty points out in The Sellout, having a yacht that you never use is a signifier of the second level of white privilege. And who would want to go there?

We've just completed our first haulout since South Africa. And while Kodiak is a great place to work on the boat out of the water, that doesn't mean it's cheap. When you're living on the boat and traveling widely, that sort of expense just feels like the price of the ticket. But it feels very different when you're back in your home port and looking for a house. What felt like the price of the ticket can start to feel more like a frivolous outlay of cash.

But for all that, we have no immediate plans to sell Galactic. And that has to do with our current vision/dream for what the next stage of our sailing lives will look like.

We've spent the last 10 years as all-in, full-time sailors. No house ashore waiting for us, no vehicles, no furniture in storage save my grandmother's rocking chair and my grandfather's work bench. That's the Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander style of sailing. No compromise to dirt dwelling made, and a sailor sleeps on his/her boat every night of their life.

But over the last few years of our sailing we became more and more aware of another way to pursue decades-long sailing odysseys. We can call it the "home base" model.

When Lin and Larry Pardey very generously opened their home to us on Kawau Island for their annual Thanksgiving dinner, we realized their was a home base for them, and had been for decades, if I'm not mistaken. It certainly makes years of tromping around in very small sailboats easier if you have a small house and a big shed waiting for you somewhere, patiently holding your stuff.

Likewise for the fantastic time that Leiv Poncet showed us at his family's place on Beaver Island, in the Falklands. Leiv's parents are pioneers of far southern sailing, and have decades and decades of sailing achievements behind them, but they didn't do it while using the yacht as the exclusive family home. Even 50-foot Damien II would get pretty small for a family of five during a Falklands winter.

And so for us, we hope. We're stopping the all-in part of our sailing both because being full-time sailors doesn't encompass everything that we want to do in our lives, and because we wouldn't mind having more of a home base than our uninsured sailboat. Our sights aren't set nearly as high as Kawau or Beaver Islands, but I'm sure we'll be able to find something cozy in Kodiak, with a shed as a part of the deal.

And, in our case, as I've written in this space before, we hope to transition to a more purposeful sort of sailing, and start using Galactic as the platform for our marine biology research. No telling how the funding gods will view that idea, but we have plans to submit two research proposals along those lines this year.

And in the meantime, we will continue to live with the maintenance list that comes with Galactic, and work to keep her in good shape for whatever it is we end up doing. We love sailing as much as we ever have, perhaps more than we ever have. And after 10 years all-in, we're as good at sailing as we are at anything else in life. So we're daring fate by hoping that we might be lucky enough to keep the magic going for a few more years in this new way.

This is a good excuse to dig out old Kawau and Beaver Island shots. Here are the crew, in a much younger state of being, in front of Taleisin.

Here and below - Thanksgiving dinner.

I think the guy to my right was spinning a real line of bull...

Leiv and the boys lighting a fire on Beaver Island, to roast... 

...Beaver Island mutton chops. 

Alisa and Leiv canning meat for ship's stores on Peregrine and Galactic

Hiatus

That's us Galactics. We're in the US and on hiatus from the sailing life.

For me, that means a period of immersion in the science life (above).

I've been thinking a lot about the practice of science.

Like the difference between skepticism and conservatism in science - the former is the foundation of our approach, but it can too easily transform into the latter, in which we're skeptical about everything but the status quo paradigm.

I've been thinking about how our current understanding of the problems I work on is fundamentally wrong in some way. That error will be painfully obvious in the future, but it is so hard for us to see the error now.

I've been thinking about the paths that a scientist can take in their career. You can contribute to the incremental progress of the larger community, which is guaranteed to produce results over time - a safer approach. Or you can step back and try to see a path that everyone else has missed, and which might give a shortcut that can bypass a decade of more incremental work - a much riskier approach!

And I've been thinking about how difficult it is to make a really useful contribution in a field where there are a lot of really smart people working really hard on the same questions.

Science, like sailing, rewards the state of being all-in.

In between science meetings and time spent navel-gazing on the questions above, I have a two-week break in which I've joined Alisa and the boys as we catch up with our State-side loved ones.

We've been having a great time.

Siblings!

A dry run for their first Halloween. Tintin and Captain Haddock.

East Wind Blows

East wind blows.  The weather is so good.  The sun shines and Elias says there's not a cloud in the sky and I say you're right.  Not a single one.  When people normally say that there's at least a few somewhere down around the horizon.  But not today.

Not a single one.  Beagle Channel

Or the day after.

We have considerations.  Who doesn't I suppose.

Our considerations are number one above everything else especially in the can you believe it Beagle Channel: wind.

East winds blow.

What you hear about the place is west.  West wind.  With modifiers.  Like howling.  And remorseless.  The Beagle Channel is scene to a certain amount of bragadoccio from afar.  People write between the lines of their posts.  I am an expert sailor.  And these are demanding conditions.

All that fades when you're actually here.  The winter-over crowd is very low key.  Maybe bragadoccio comes with the summer.

But still September has a reputation.  Remorseless.  Howling.  West.

We are going west.  As soon as I get my work done I tell the unassuming people every time they ask. Just as soon.  The magic day gets pushed back.  As we knew it would be and we're not fussed.  We have some time.

As soon as I get my work done

Meanwhile September is magic.  East winds blow.  No winds blow.  Snowy days still starry nights.  We could have left a dozen times I tell the particularly unassuming chap next to us.

Considerations.  What if.  What if we sailed to Namibia? What if we chartered in Alaska?  What if the research funding comes through?  What if we keep going?

East winds blow.

Meanwhile: plot twist

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.