Well. If I had never been to Alaska before, I would be very impressed by the approach at this point.
No bad weather on this trip - it's not really the season for it. But we have been sailing for hundreds and hundreds of miles through thick fog and living with clammy, cold conditions on board for quite a few days now. Occasionally a frond of kelp floats by us, and today we saw a tern. Signs that land can't be too far off.
A foggy day at sea might be the most cut-off feeling that I've ever had in the natural world. There's something about being surrounded by walls that are simultaneously opaque, amorphous, and luminous to put you off your normal game. Meanwhile you're tossing this way and that on the swell that comes charging out from those still walls, and you can't see a thing more than a couple hundred meters away...it's a very isolated feeling, almost one of sensory deprivation. And so these days of traveling through fog make Alaska seem like a suitably distant and different destination. This feels like more like something out of science fiction and time travel than a typical ocean passage. Hopefully the stage is being set for a suitably grand first summer for our family in the Great Land.
Eric is already getting wistful. "I'm sorry to see our sailing years drawing to a close," he says. (Where do 7 year olds get their occasional flashes of lucid syntax, anyway?) "But! I'm excited to start our Kodiak years." That Eric doesn't stay down for long.
And Elias was very happy today to go into a long, quite technical exposition on the similarities in feel and action between mahi mahi and salmon on rod and reel.
That's right. Super-big family milestone today - our first salmon in 10 years, a female silver, still a couple months from spawning, caught by Elias on the high seas. When we left Alaska, Alisa and I were surprised by how much we missed the food. So it was a pure delight to dine on the freshest salmon dinner imaginable, cooked perfectly by A. Elias said it was the best dinner he'd ever had in his life.
Just after the boys were in bed I saw the first alcid of the trip - a rhinoceros auklet, I think, which flew by us twice. I told the boys I'd seen it, and then wished I hadn't, wished I'd let one of them have the joy.
And just now, at midnight Hawai'i time / 0200 Alaska time, I looked out from the cockpit to see that the fog has lifted and the sky is already getting light in the north and east. Summer in Alaska...there are very few things in this world that compare.
We expect to arrive tomorrow.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
Friday, June 30, 2017
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Plastics and Pinnipeds
A colleague asked me to report on how much floating plastic we encountered on this passage, since our path between Hawai'i and Kodiak had us skirting the center of the North Pacific high, where the legendary Texas-size patch of floating plastic is meant to lie.
On a normal two and a half week ocean passage we might notice a single piece of random plastic jetsam floating by us. On this trip we were seeing much more than that - very roughly speaking, about 10 or 15 items a day, roughly between 30° and 45° North latitude. A lot of that was fishing debris - floats, and one memorably large chunk of net. We didn't go through the windless center of the high, of course, so I can't report on what the plastics concentration might be there.
We were also seeing occasional pinnipeds for a while there...quite a treat to spot those animals, which I can't help but think of as coastal beasts, a thousand miles out from the West Coast of North America. We never got a good enough look to ID one, but I think the consensus was that they were likely Otariids - maybe California sea lions?
And that's us, except that I'll note we are smelling the barn pretty strongly. Only about 260 miles to go. We've spent the day close hauled on the wrong side of a low, and it looks like the wind from that system should last through tomorrow, which has us very pleased indeed. I started the day by hand stitching a parted seam on our main, and we've spent the rest of the day with the sails reefed down and strapped in tight, Galactic going with a vengeance, well on her ear and a bone in her teeth, the spray at the bow and her somewhat raggedy sails the only white things to be seen on this gray gray stage that we are slowly crossing to the other side. For much of yesterday and last night we were reduced to standing watch with the radar alone, as a thick fog had visibility down to uselessly close confines.
And, final wonder of the natural world to note: As I write this, my 10 year old son Elias is happily keeping watch. Basically, he was so keen to do it and give me a break that there was no stopping him. So he's all rugged up in raingear and various sweaters and two hats and a neck gaiter, with my watch set to rouse him at ten minute intervals to scan the horizon, and otherwise laughing out loud at whatever book it is that he is reading.
When I think back to the little nubbin that he was when we set sail...well. Parents know the abyss of time that you look down when you consider that sort of progression, from drooler to watchkeeper. We can natter on about Twice In A Lifetime this and that for the sailing life that Alisa and I have been lucky enough to lead over the last ten years, but for our boys this trip has been exactly one lifetime long a piece. And I'd like to think that the proof of what sort of life it is for kids, being raised on a traveling boat, is coming back to Kodiak with us - one of them currently sacked out under the raised saloon table, where he likes to sleep no matter what tack we're on, and the other looking out for ships on a somewhat shitty evening on the wide-open North Pacific, completely unfazed by the experience, and what is even more remarkable, trusted by Alisa and me to do an adult's job, or better, in the face of all that responsibility.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
On a normal two and a half week ocean passage we might notice a single piece of random plastic jetsam floating by us. On this trip we were seeing much more than that - very roughly speaking, about 10 or 15 items a day, roughly between 30° and 45° North latitude. A lot of that was fishing debris - floats, and one memorably large chunk of net. We didn't go through the windless center of the high, of course, so I can't report on what the plastics concentration might be there.
We were also seeing occasional pinnipeds for a while there...quite a treat to spot those animals, which I can't help but think of as coastal beasts, a thousand miles out from the West Coast of North America. We never got a good enough look to ID one, but I think the consensus was that they were likely Otariids - maybe California sea lions?
And that's us, except that I'll note we are smelling the barn pretty strongly. Only about 260 miles to go. We've spent the day close hauled on the wrong side of a low, and it looks like the wind from that system should last through tomorrow, which has us very pleased indeed. I started the day by hand stitching a parted seam on our main, and we've spent the rest of the day with the sails reefed down and strapped in tight, Galactic going with a vengeance, well on her ear and a bone in her teeth, the spray at the bow and her somewhat raggedy sails the only white things to be seen on this gray gray stage that we are slowly crossing to the other side. For much of yesterday and last night we were reduced to standing watch with the radar alone, as a thick fog had visibility down to uselessly close confines.
And, final wonder of the natural world to note: As I write this, my 10 year old son Elias is happily keeping watch. Basically, he was so keen to do it and give me a break that there was no stopping him. So he's all rugged up in raingear and various sweaters and two hats and a neck gaiter, with my watch set to rouse him at ten minute intervals to scan the horizon, and otherwise laughing out loud at whatever book it is that he is reading.
When I think back to the little nubbin that he was when we set sail...well. Parents know the abyss of time that you look down when you consider that sort of progression, from drooler to watchkeeper. We can natter on about Twice In A Lifetime this and that for the sailing life that Alisa and I have been lucky enough to lead over the last ten years, but for our boys this trip has been exactly one lifetime long a piece. And I'd like to think that the proof of what sort of life it is for kids, being raised on a traveling boat, is coming back to Kodiak with us - one of them currently sacked out under the raised saloon table, where he likes to sleep no matter what tack we're on, and the other looking out for ships on a somewhat shitty evening on the wide-open North Pacific, completely unfazed by the experience, and what is even more remarkable, trusted by Alisa and me to do an adult's job, or better, in the face of all that responsibility.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Gray Flash and Purple Prose
As we bear down on the last 800 nautical miles between ourselves and Kodiak, I find my attention divided between mundane observation and the most outlandish wrap-up thoughts.
To whit.
This day that is just ending we passed at the center of a 1034 mb or so high. Absolute crap for sailing, but top marks as a day of decadence, spent lounging around in the greenhouse heat of the dodger. Something there is about a blue sky day that turns your most industrious kind of Protestant into an instant human lizard, happy to sun on a rock while thinking blank thoughts.
The unhappy truth is that we had been freezing our various small parts off for a few days previous, even though we are still well south of the latitude of Seattle, much less Vancouver. Neoprene boots and goat roper hats have appeared on the crew. We made the "that's sort of cool, sort of" discovery that Elias' deck boots still have dried penguin shit on them from South Georgia. So it was nice for us to shed some layers today and take a break from breaking the news to the boys that no, Kodiak will actually be much colder than this.
Elias noticed that even in the midst of that sunny day, the water kept what he called a "glacial" cast. The miraculous blues of the tropical oceans are now, for the Galactics, regulated to that place where god meant Teutonic Americans and Midwesterners of the Lebanese diaspora to enjoy them: as screen saver photographs.
Oh, fudge. "Screen saver." That's me speaking from my 2007 time warp again. Re-entry is going to be so problematic.
By dinner time (thanks, Alisa!) we had reverted to the gray skies at the edge of the high. Baking on a rock on a sunny day may be fine, but there is something about a gray-on-gray sky and sea combo that does make a mariner sit up to take notice. I found myself scanning the horizon, scanning the sea, glancing quickly back at a particular set of clouds to make sure they weren't trying anything while I was looking away. Maybe these gray seascapes put me on notice of the chance of something Nautical going down. Anyway, I'm apparently the kind of guy who comes alive around mother of pearl seascapes. Maybe it's all for the best that we're going back to Kodiak.
And so, instead of the blaze of a tropical sunset, the day ended with the sun just sort of collapsing into the wet blanket of clouds heaped on the horizon. "No more green flashes for us," observed Alisa. "Gray flashes from here out."
Well-meaning folks have occasionally asked if we have any concerns about returning to land life. There is one that I will easily confess to: that of immediately getting swept up into the chase-your-own-tail swirl of everyday life, so that this decade of full-time sailing just fades away, without us having the time to properly ruminate over everything that came to pass from that one wild-eyed act of selling up and sailing out just after our firstborn joined us.
This is where the purple prose comes in. This afternoon I was sitting in the sunny cockpit, enjoying the Captain's prerogative of an Atlas beer from Panama while coding away in R, the computer language for data analysis that has become the Esperanto of 21st century ecologists. Suddenly I found myself taking a break from my joint problems of noisy data and complex hypotheses in order to fire up a Word document and record How It Feels, this particular moment in my life that has me as close to Ulysses as I hope to ever come.
Unfortunately, my impression of How It Felt at just that moment had me yammering on about a fire that burns hot, about a desire to get out and know this world of ours in the least abstract way imaginable. And while I might not know where that desire might lead me, I do know by god that it's a desire that I would ignore at my own peril.
That kind of stuff. I blame the Atlas beer.
But, for all that this quick scribble was not-ready-for-Cruising World type stuff, I felt the glimmer of insight in there somewhere.
There is a part of me that feels like a wild-eyed, wild-haired lunatic riding back to Alaska on the bow of our little ship, completely transformed by two lifetimes' experience packed into a single decade. Alisa and I have played it very straight on this trip in a lot of ways. For my part, I've stayed gainfully employed for about eight of the ten years, I did my PhD, and I've managed to be a no worse than average sort of dad to our two boys. But for all that, we've been living these ten years on the bleeding edge in important ways. Alisa and I set off to follow our dreams, knowing in advance that we might dream in a vivid, Patagonia-in-winter sort of way. As a result, for days or weeks or months at a time we have been living in the arena where our seamanship and our love for each other and our willingness to meld entirely into a single, single-minded unit are tested in their ability to keep the family safe and prospering and pursuing happiness on the high seas, or in some southern frosty fjord far from anyone else at all. It has been a tremendously fulfilling way to live, and like most long-time sailors who are returning home, we look forward a little nervously to belonging to a milieu where we can't share an unspoken bond over that sort of experience with our peers.
Anyway...my 2000-0000 watch is rapidly drawing to a close, so it's time to wrap up these late-night musings. A prize has been set for the first Galactic to spot an alcid, that guillemot-murre-puffin-murrelet tribe of continental shelf seabirds that will be our first notice that we really Have Arrived, even if land isn't yet in sight.
I'm putting my money on Elias to win the prize.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
To whit.
This day that is just ending we passed at the center of a 1034 mb or so high. Absolute crap for sailing, but top marks as a day of decadence, spent lounging around in the greenhouse heat of the dodger. Something there is about a blue sky day that turns your most industrious kind of Protestant into an instant human lizard, happy to sun on a rock while thinking blank thoughts.
The unhappy truth is that we had been freezing our various small parts off for a few days previous, even though we are still well south of the latitude of Seattle, much less Vancouver. Neoprene boots and goat roper hats have appeared on the crew. We made the "that's sort of cool, sort of" discovery that Elias' deck boots still have dried penguin shit on them from South Georgia. So it was nice for us to shed some layers today and take a break from breaking the news to the boys that no, Kodiak will actually be much colder than this.
Elias noticed that even in the midst of that sunny day, the water kept what he called a "glacial" cast. The miraculous blues of the tropical oceans are now, for the Galactics, regulated to that place where god meant Teutonic Americans and Midwesterners of the Lebanese diaspora to enjoy them: as screen saver photographs.
Oh, fudge. "Screen saver." That's me speaking from my 2007 time warp again. Re-entry is going to be so problematic.
By dinner time (thanks, Alisa!) we had reverted to the gray skies at the edge of the high. Baking on a rock on a sunny day may be fine, but there is something about a gray-on-gray sky and sea combo that does make a mariner sit up to take notice. I found myself scanning the horizon, scanning the sea, glancing quickly back at a particular set of clouds to make sure they weren't trying anything while I was looking away. Maybe these gray seascapes put me on notice of the chance of something Nautical going down. Anyway, I'm apparently the kind of guy who comes alive around mother of pearl seascapes. Maybe it's all for the best that we're going back to Kodiak.
And so, instead of the blaze of a tropical sunset, the day ended with the sun just sort of collapsing into the wet blanket of clouds heaped on the horizon. "No more green flashes for us," observed Alisa. "Gray flashes from here out."
Well-meaning folks have occasionally asked if we have any concerns about returning to land life. There is one that I will easily confess to: that of immediately getting swept up into the chase-your-own-tail swirl of everyday life, so that this decade of full-time sailing just fades away, without us having the time to properly ruminate over everything that came to pass from that one wild-eyed act of selling up and sailing out just after our firstborn joined us.
This is where the purple prose comes in. This afternoon I was sitting in the sunny cockpit, enjoying the Captain's prerogative of an Atlas beer from Panama while coding away in R, the computer language for data analysis that has become the Esperanto of 21st century ecologists. Suddenly I found myself taking a break from my joint problems of noisy data and complex hypotheses in order to fire up a Word document and record How It Feels, this particular moment in my life that has me as close to Ulysses as I hope to ever come.
Unfortunately, my impression of How It Felt at just that moment had me yammering on about a fire that burns hot, about a desire to get out and know this world of ours in the least abstract way imaginable. And while I might not know where that desire might lead me, I do know by god that it's a desire that I would ignore at my own peril.
That kind of stuff. I blame the Atlas beer.
But, for all that this quick scribble was not-ready-for-Cruising World type stuff, I felt the glimmer of insight in there somewhere.
There is a part of me that feels like a wild-eyed, wild-haired lunatic riding back to Alaska on the bow of our little ship, completely transformed by two lifetimes' experience packed into a single decade. Alisa and I have played it very straight on this trip in a lot of ways. For my part, I've stayed gainfully employed for about eight of the ten years, I did my PhD, and I've managed to be a no worse than average sort of dad to our two boys. But for all that, we've been living these ten years on the bleeding edge in important ways. Alisa and I set off to follow our dreams, knowing in advance that we might dream in a vivid, Patagonia-in-winter sort of way. As a result, for days or weeks or months at a time we have been living in the arena where our seamanship and our love for each other and our willingness to meld entirely into a single, single-minded unit are tested in their ability to keep the family safe and prospering and pursuing happiness on the high seas, or in some southern frosty fjord far from anyone else at all. It has been a tremendously fulfilling way to live, and like most long-time sailors who are returning home, we look forward a little nervously to belonging to a milieu where we can't share an unspoken bond over that sort of experience with our peers.
Anyway...my 2000-0000 watch is rapidly drawing to a close, so it's time to wrap up these late-night musings. A prize has been set for the first Galactic to spot an alcid, that guillemot-murre-puffin-murrelet tribe of continental shelf seabirds that will be our first notice that we really Have Arrived, even if land isn't yet in sight.
I'm putting my money on Elias to win the prize.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)