Sitka to Wrangell

9/13/11

Well here I am in Wrangell’s Sourdough Inn.  A very nice place, very quiet and it has WiFi.  I think I'm the only guest in this lodge. I'm watching this huge screen TV, which is where the WiFi is.

I just spent the last two days “winterizing” Blue Bossa.  First I cleaned it – galley, head, floors, and rugs.  Then I put the kayak and paddleboard on the roof of the pilothouse.  Then I pulled the outboard off of the dinghy and put it on its bracket in the stern.  Then I put the dinghy on the forward deck, bottom up. Then pumped all of the fresh water out and put in special (ie: potable) antifreeze in the fresh water lines.  Then closed all of the thru hulls except the engine intake valve.  Then opening all of the cabinets and bunks to get maximum amount of air circulation, then putting out a couple of 110v fans and a couple of electric dehumidifiers in strategic places on the boat. 

Cover looks good except the back...

Oh yeah, and putting the cover on the boat was a real treat: it came in 4 pieces, and figuring out where what goes where was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without the picture.  Luckily I have prior experience putting the cover on the Siwash, which is also a very complicated set-up, so after laying each piece out on the dock I was able to figure how to put it all together.  It was an original cover made for the boat 12 years ago, before all the crap that was built up from the previous owner and myself on the stern – so it fit fine in the bow, but looked like scrambled eggs in the stern.  Hopefully I have plenty of line set up to hold the cover tight on the stern so that it doesn’t all come apart.

It was a real adventure getting here from Sitka.  On 8/29 we filled up with fuel, left Sitka about 2pm and went outside, heading for the outside coast of Baranof Island.  It was smooth seas with a 3ft swell to Samsing Cove.  Samsing Cove was very pleasant, landlocked and very quiet.  Inside was a fishing boat tied to a buoy further up the cove, but it left shortly, leaving the cove to myself for the night.

Singsam Cove

West coast of Baranof, heading towards the Rakof Islands

landing on Goddard Hot Springs

The shack

The view

The happy customer

The place

The next day we left Samsing to head to Herring Bay.  Winds were light out of the west, cloudy skies, and no rain.  Blue Bossa did a lot of twisting and turning around islands and rocks until we worked into Herring Bay and dropped an anchor, wind coming out of the north.  I launched the dinghy and, bringing a bathing suit, zipped out of the bay, headed east to Dorothy Narrows and headed north to Goddard Hot Springs, where there was a small shack and a place to land the dinghy.  Grabbing my bag, I walked the small boardwalk to the shack, which inside was a large round hot tub with a faucet to let in hot water.  It had a nice view from its window (no glass) of Kliuchevoi Bay with a lone ketch at anchor.  It isn’t as good an anchorage as Herring Bay, but, because it was calm, it looked good enough.  Anyway, the tub felt fantastic and I soaked in it for about a half hour before taking my shriveled body out. I pushed the dinghy back in the water and explored around until I ended back on BB.

BB in Herring Bay

The next day - 8/31 – we left Herring Bay at about 10, wormed our way around a bunch of islands and then shot through 1^st narrows, which brought me into the Rakof Islands, then squeezed through a narrow entrance to Baidarka Cove. It was like I was cheating the outside ocean, staying under the protection of these little islands and passages while still being out on the west coast of Baranof. The last 3 days had no rain and even some sun, but today, it started raining hard at about 5pm.  Weather forecast promised heavy rain and wind for the next 4 days. Yikes!  It rained and blew hard that night as promised.

The next day it was calmer and, with a high tide, I left Baidarka Cove.  We weaved thru the second narrows and went up the middle channel, which was rough because of the SE wind. There was no more free rides (protection from chains of islands) from the outside. We wound through yet another narrow pass called Cameron Pass then dipped into Scow Bay, on Beauchamp Island. Scow Bay is a bombproof anchorage separated from the Gulf of Alaska by just a few low-lying islets and rocks.  It was raining, so I didn’t do much except read.

Cruisn' the Raka Islands

Scow Cove

The next day I decided that there was enough of a window to slam against some 20k southeasterlies to make further south and anchor at Still Harbor, where I figured I would stay for a few days, as the forecast promised very high winds for the weekend.  It was a lumpy as well as a windy ride, but do-able.  It was a 3-hour bash.  Still Harbor was more picturesque than Scow Bay, and was very quiet and calm.  Since it was on Baranof Island and had a creek running into it, I was hoping that I would see some bears.  I actually did see a bear on shore the next day – he/she was looking for tidbits on the medium tide shore, pushing over large rocks to find goodies.  I rushed down to get my camera and tripod, but when I put my head back up, the bear was gone.  Darn!

By Labor Day, I was still waiting for the storm to hit – the weather forecast said that it was going to hit that night – gale to storm force winds - waves were suppose to be 18 feet and winds over 40 knots.  I was skeptical - I’ve already read two books and was on my third – I was bored and ready to move on, but I had to sit this one out. 

Baidarka Bay

That night, I almost lost my boat. 

The wind started to come up just when it was getting dark, the boat tacking back and forth on the anchor.  I was feeling pretty secure, thinking that the bottom was muddy and that the boat wouldn’t drag.  That feeling went down the drain in a hurry.  About 10pm, the anchor chain started making grinding noises, usually made when rubbing against rocks or boulders, the boat jerking.  Knowing that there shouldn’t be any rocks where I was anchored, I instantly became alarmed, looking futilely out in total pitch darkness with driving rain.  Since I couldn’t know where I was by looking out, I turned on the computer chart.  I was shocked to find that Blue Bossa was yards away from going aground on a small rocky island 100’s of yards where we were originally anchored!  Holy Shit!  I turned on the engine and headed into the wind, taking some of the strain off of the anchor. 

Scow Cove

I was in a very bad situation and needed to get out of it and the only way to do that was to raise the anchor.  Normally when I pull the anchor up, I'm on the bow pushing the buttons to raise the anchor, while the engine is just idling.  But the wind was blowing 30-40 knots - no way was the windlass going to pull the anchor up unless I took off the strain by using the engine at the same time raising the anchor. Even if the windlass could pull up the anchor by itself, as soon as the anchor was off the ground, the boat would go hurtling towards shore before I could get to the pilothouse and maneuver out of that situation.  Which meant that I had to stay in the pilothouse to maneuver the engine and the boat while pressing the remote anchor windlass switch in the pilothouse.  Plus I also had to keep the engine revved up enough to supply extra electricity for the batteries. At the same time, I had to keep the boat into the wind and the only way I knew where I was heading was looking at the chart and looking at the radar. 

It took me a good half hour to finally get the anchor up, multi-tasking, sweating and swearing the whole time, looking at the depth sounder, which ranged from 49 ft to 6 ft., the boat tacking back and forth while I’m madly struggling to keep the boat into the wind while lifting the anchor up, constantly adjusting the throttle and trying to keep the RPMs up.  Argh!  It would have been a challenge with another crewmember in the bow – now it was an almost impossible task.  Thankfully all of the boat’s systems were working!

Still Harbor - when it was still

Finally the wonderful sound of the anchor hitting the pulpit informed me that I now had to work my way back up the bay in safer waters.  Still in pitch black, heavy rain, and 40 knot gusts, and working only on the radar, chart plotter, and depthsounder, BB made her slow way back up the bay, still tacking back and forth, me struggling with the wheel to correct (using only radar to figure out where you are makes it easy to over-steer), until it looked like the right place to anchor.  I let the anchor hurtle down, letting 200’ out.  Once it looked like it set, I revved up the engine to push the boat hard left for a bit of time, trying to move the anchor chain over to the left.  Once there, I ran up the deck and let my Bruce anchor (2^nd anchor on my bow) out in a hurry.  When it had set, I now had a V-shaped anchor arrangement, which stabilized the boat from tacking and taking the strain off of just the one anchor and my own peace-of-mind. 

I decided that I would keep my computer on and do an anchor watch until the wind died down.  The barometer started to go back up and the wind started moderating at about midnight and I finally hit the sack about 2am, turning the engine off, which had been generating all that time.  Thankfully, the only damage I got was spraining my shoulder – again.

So my blasé attitude in anchoring almost wrecked my boat in a very out-of-the-way place.  I think I learned my lesson. In forecasted gale/storm force winds, put out another anchor, and put out lots of scope.  Keep the GPS on and set the anchor watch alarm.  Yeah, it takes some juice to run it, but if it’s windy, I’m sure it’ll be useful and I can always turn on the engine to keep the juice up. I actually have an old 2^nd generation night vision monocular for dark nights. I didn’t use it that night -  I tried it out the next night and it was really bad – you can hardly see out of it.  I’m glad I wasn’t depending on it.

The next day, it was windy, about 20 knots, and partly cloudy and still blowing out of the south.  The weather report suggested that I stay in the bay, and maybe try for it on Wednesday. But the weather was forecasted to still blow out of the south for the rest of the week through the weekend - so no matter what I would do, it would still be a struggle to keep going south if I ever hope to get to Wrangell. 

Beautiful morning, but still washing machine conditions

So having stayed in Still Harbor for 5 days, with only contacting civilization via my satphone, I decided to take a very small window of opportunity where the wind was less windy to try and make my way south, hopefully far enough to get around the south point of Baranof Island.  So on Wednesday the 7^th of September, at 5:30am, we left Still Harbor, passing through the entrance with huge waves on either side (thoughts of the entrance to Morro Bay during the winter), with my engine RPM to 3000, we busted out of the surf area and, when far out enough, proceeded south.  The seas were an absolute washing machine, with waves from the north, west, south, - yes- and east, since the big swells were back-washing against the cliffs of the coast and coming out against the other waves making it totally chaotic.  I had started with a reefed mainsail, but quickly let it out all the way to help try to maintain some semblance of stability, especially since there wasn’t any wind to speak of.  It was so rough that I actually got a little bit seasick, which is really hard considering I didn’t have breakfast.

The south wind came up a little bit but never got over 10 knots; and the further south I went, the less the waves were.  There were a bunch of places that I would have liked to stayed, but I figured I’d better git going while the gittn’ is good. We rounded Cape Ommaney on the south of Baranof, continued south to Cape Decision on the south of Kuiu Island, started heading north to Port Protection, on the north side of the Prince of Wales Island, where we spent the night – an 85 mile trip.

Interestingly enough, the US Coast Guard stopped me.  I was just tying up to a public dock in Port Protection (a very small community of local fishermen), and I heard a couple of guys talking from off my stern, I turn around and there’s about 4 CG men in a big red inflatable waiting for me to finish tying up.  As soon as I was done, they came alongside the dock and wanted to do a safety check to make sure I had all of the proper safety equipment - which they did, being very nice about it.  I checked out fine, except I didn’t have a plaque stating that it was a big fine to pump oil out into the water.  But they forgave that and went along checking out other boats.  Whew!  An interesting finish to a very long day!

During the past week, it had rained so hard that the Stikine River and every other river outlet made it so that no matter which tide I was trying to take, the current was always going against me all the way up through Sumner Strait.  So it took longer than I expected to get to Wrangell the next day.  I found out later that the levels on the Stikine River hit a record high, destroying some property up there and causing some consternation.  All through Wrangell, it was the big talk about the heavy rains.  I also found that – really – this summer was non-existent as far as the locals were concerned – this from many people that I talked to.  So I guess I shouldn’t feel that Alaska is nothing but one giant monsoon.  Hopefully next year will be a much better summer, weatherwise.

I was going to haul my boat out at the Wrangell boat yard and store it on dry land.  But there is heavy construction going on in the yard with new cement and they couldn’t haul out until complete – and who knows when that would be.  There are two harbors in Wrangell.  The first one (Reliance Harbor) I was familiar with – old and kind of grubby.  The 2^nd harbor (Heritage Harbor) is new and not quite finished yet (parking lot).  It has brand new docks, all new electrical system, and it’s in a very quiet, very un-exposed breakwater completely surrounding the harbor.  My slip is practically right in the deepest part of the harbor. Plus keeping it there is only about $85/month, not counting electricity – cheaper by far than the storage fees on land.  So that decided me to winter in the water at Wrangell.

Along with double docklines, full cover, and a security guy that will be checking the boat every other week, I think I should be OK.  It’s a bit nerve-racking to be leaving my home for so long, wondering if it will be all right when I get back.  I met a nice couple on a 40’ Willard trawler who, in their younger years traveled on a sailboat 8 years going around the world.  They now live in Wrangell and cruise Alaska during the summer time.  They’ll help keep an eye on my boat too.

So that’s it, folks, for Blue Bossa Blogs for 2011.  I may come out with a piece or two on some adventures that I’m planning on doing this winter, so you should keep checking out the site – I’m going to keep it active, but not put in as much diatribe until I get back to Blue Bossa in early April.  In 2012, I’m planning on taking BB down the coast of Prince of Wales Island (outside), sail south and explore the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Guaii), then sail on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  There should be a lot of opportunities for more adventures.