Home Port

Kodiak is the place where Alisa and I spent the last seven years of our time in Alaska, and also the place that we sailed away from on Pelagic, bound for Australia, nearly six years ago now.

I've been back a couple times for work in recent years, but until this month the whole family hadn't been back in four years.  My favorite indicator for just how long we'd been away is that we had a three-year-old child who had never been to Alaska.

We just finished a ten-day visit to Kodiak.

For the first four days or so, I was unreservedly smitten with the place.  If you're visiting Kodiak in the springtime when there are more than seventeen hours of daylight every day, and you're catching up with friends you haven't seen in years, the place can seem flawless.

But in the second part of the visit, after we had listened to enough stories about how people are actually leading their lives in Kodiak, I began to remember that it can be a very demanding place to live.  The winters can be brutal, interpersonal relationships in a town of six thousand people with no road access to the outside world can be challenging, the economy is sometimes marginal, and the cost of living is high.

For all that, we love the place, and this visit confirmed us in the idea that when we finally swallow the anchor and sell the boat and return to life ashore, Kodiak is the place we'll be looking to return to.

Sleep

Of all the unflattering photos of your kid that you could share with the world...

We arrived in Boston without any great drama, but Elias' and Eric's sleep patterns were of course still happily back in Opua.  Nothing could keep Eric awake during the day (above), but at night he was ready to party.  Our experience is that young kids shake off jet lag especially slowly, and for night after night we were forced to deal with a wide-awake, partying fool of a three-year-old until two or three in the morning.  Or later.

Then we got to Kodiak, where our friends Zoya and Patrick are very generously putting us up.  Elias was beyond delighted to learn that he would be sleeping on a mountain goat skin.

So far, Kodiak is living up to its billing in that over-the-top, stereotyped Alaskan way.  Ash from the newly-erupting Pavlof volcano has been sighted in town, and the weather, for the 18th of May, which is well into spring up here, is feeling quite...Alaskan.  Low temp today was -1°C, high 6°.

It's hard to understand why, and I might not have thought it out well enough to explain, but there are a lot of ways in which Kodiak feels more exotic than any any other English-speaking place that we have visited in the last few years.

Maybe it's just that when you're a visitor you see only the surface of things, which of course as a resident no longer register.  When you drive into town from the airport on an impossibly gray afternoon, you're just dumbstruck by how derelict the place looks.   Bluff, which is, as far as I can tell, New Zealand's best example of a down-on-its-luck, high-latitude fishing town, comes off as a picturesque Swiss village by comparison.

But then you start catching up with friends, and hearing about how everyone you used to know has been going about the business of their lives since you've been gone, and you start to remember the magic.  This place is just as ordinary as can be, but at the same time there is an edge to it, and a close familiarity with the unbending realities of life, that makes it like nowhere else.

Our time here is going to go too fast.

Galactic At Rest

We're in Opua now, one of the global centers of yachty-ness.  Opua is the northernmost port of entry for En Zed, and I think of it as a funnel at the end of the tradewind route across the South Pacific, catching all the yachts that come down from the tropics.  We're out of synch with the boats that crossed last year, so don't know many people here...but we did run into Momo, a family of four whom we last saw in Suwarrow, Cook Islands, in 2008.  It's funny how some people stick out in your memory, even if you never spent much time with them.

The energy in Opua is all about sailing away, as the migration to the tropics for the cyclone-free season has begun.

We're leaving too, but not on the boat.  We've parked Galactic on a mooring ball, and have a date with an Auckland - San Francisco flight tomorrow.

The boys have been vibrating with excitement for the last week.  I only hope they calm down once we're on the plane...