From Port Townsend WA to Glacier Bay AK …… 2009 Cruise Summary

Here’s where the Aurora took Jack the Skipper and First Mate Baggywrinkles this summer.  We cruised a thousand nautical miles along the Inside Passage, north from the 48th to the 59th parallel parallel and west from 123º to 136º.    We sailed out of our former home port of Port Hadlock on Port Townsend Bay, Washington, on June 13th and arrived at our new home part of Hoonah, AK on August 1.   

The year 2009 will be remembered for a magnificent summer that followed a monstrous winter. Our most difficult day was the very first – crossing Juan de Fuca Strait; our most difficult hour was also the very first, rounding Point Wilson for the umpteenth time.   As for the normally obstreperous waters of Johnstone Strait, Queen Charlotte Strait, Cape Caution, Milbanke Sound, Dixon Entrance,  and Icy Strait, they all behaved for us, as our endless stream of sun-filled photos show.   Next year when we come south through the usual rain, fog, or storms, we will have the vision of these spectacular vistas still in our heads.

Have a look at our pictures.  Those of the Skipper and First Mate together were taken by Piers Rippey, who brought welcome hands to our deck for ten days from Prince Rupert, BC and Auke Bay, AK.   The photos are arranged chronologically on one page; slide show takes 18 minutes.  No photo captions at the moment but here’s our route.

June 13             Mitchell Bay, San Juan Island, WA, at dock  48 34 N 123 10 W

June 14            Montague Harbor, BC on mooring buoy     48 53N 123 25 W

June 15            Nanaimo, at dock     49 10 N 123 56 W

June 16-17       Comox, at dock   49 40 N 124 56 W

June 18             Campbell River, at dock    50 02 N 125 15 W

June 19             Kamish Bay/Granite Bay, at anchor 50 14 N 125 19 W

June 20              Shoal Bay, at dock   50 28 N 125 22 W

June 21               Forward Harbor, at anchor 50 29 N 125 45 W

June 22               Lagoon Cove Marina, at dock  50 36 N 126 19 W

June 23               Laura Cove, Broughton Island, at anchor   50 50 N 126 34 W

June 24               Sullivan Bay, at dock   50 53 N 26 50 W

June 25                Blunden Harbor, at anchor   50 54 N 1217 17 W

June 26-27          Duncanby, at dock    51 24 N 127 39 W

June 28                Green Island, Fish Egg Inlet, at anchor   51 38 N 127 50 W

June 29-30         Shearwater, at dock    52 09 N 128 05 W

July 1                   Klemtu, at free dock    52 36 N 128 31 W

July 2-3              Khutze Inlet, at anchor   53 05 N 128 16 W

July 4                  Hartley Bay, at free dock   53 25 N 129 45 W

July 5                 Klewnuggit Inlet, East Inlet, at anchor   53 43 N 129 44 W

July 6-10           Prince Rupert, at dock   54 20 N 130 18 W

July 11                Brundige Inlet, Dundas Island, BC, at anchor   54 36 N 130 53 W

July 12-13           Ketchikan, AK, at dock    55 21 N 131 41 W

July 14                Meyers Chuck, at free dock    55 44 N 132 16 W

July 15               Frosty Bay, at anchor    56 04 N 131 58 W

July 16-17          Wrangell, at dock  56 28 N 132 23 W

July 18-19         Petersburg, at dock   56 49 N 132 58 W

July 20              Portage Bay, at anchor   56 59 N 133 19 W

July 21               Hobart Bay, Entrance Island, at anchor  57 25 N 133 26 W

July 22               Taku Harbor, at free dock   58 04 N 134 08 W

July 23-24         Juneau, at dock   58 18 N 134 26 W

July 25               Auke Bay, at dock   58 30 N 134 39 W

July 26-27        Hoonah, at dock   58 06 N 135 27 W

July 28              Bartlett Bay, Glacier Bay, at anchor  58 28 N 135 53 W

July 29               North Sandy Cove, Glacier Bay, at anchor   58 43 N 136 00 W

July 30               Sebree Cove, Glacier Bay, at anchor   58 46 N 136 10 W

July 31               Bartlett Bay, Glacier Bay, at anchor    58 28 N 135 53 W

Aug 1-present    Hoonah, at dock   58 06 N 135 27 W

Leaving Hoonah

Finally the sad moment came when we had to step off the Aurora.   I made a quick trip down the dock to say goodbye to the other cruisers: Diana and Neal on Dinero, the Smiths on Perseus, and Mike on Discovery – and stopped to congratulate Sean, the fishing guide moored next to us, on the 170-pound halibut he’d caught and was preparing to filet.   We walked through town -past the school, the fish packing plant, Hoonah Trading –  to the terminal wharf, where the ferry was just pulling in.    

As Jack stood in line, the women at the counter were having trouble processing his simple request for two $33 tickets from Hoonah to Juneau, both places with only a few miles of road that connect to nowhere else.   But this being our very first trip, we of course weren’t in the system.  

“What?!” the counter girl exclaimed, “You’ve never taken the Alaska State Ferry?”    

Fellow travelers included an elderly couple off for their annual family camping trip and caribou hunt.  Ron Blough had worked as a logger and a preacher all over Alaska; before that they were missionaries in Japan.

The Le Conte, the small ferry on the Community Route had less than a third of its passenger capacity of 300 and only five or six cars and trucks.   It was very comfortable with nice touches, like a children’s library.   I read books in English to my seat mate,  three-year-old Lea, while her grandfather spoke to her in Tlingit.

Aurora goes into hibernation

It’s called winterizing a boat and we’d never done it before.  

In his hefty tome, Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual: How to Maintain, Repair and Improve Your Boat’s Essential Sysetems, Nigel Calder offers his usual weighty, complex, comprehensive advice on the topic.   But when we actually, started talking to folks on the docks, we discovered putting a boat into hibernation mode involved lots Nigel missed, including a good mix of  common sense and folklore.

Harbormaster Paul assigned us a great slip near shore  kitty corner to his own boat and just opposite the  slip of Assistant Harbormaster Arlen.  He told us to dock bow out (or, rather, into the bad south winds) and to tie up real tight, lines dock to deck.   Some people, including wooden boat owners, go for loose tie ups but Paul says he tightens them all lines up no matter.     And woe to those who tie up deck to dock with leftover line laying about: those lines gets chewed up in the snowblowers.

But we weren’t even there yet.  First we needed to change the fuel filters which meant retrieving the emergency supply of diesel from under the dinghy.   Easy lift using the halyard and the Milwaukee Wrench, the unsung hero of the cruise, which deserves a picture.  (Normally when sailors want to reduce effort they install spendy winches and hydraulic davits.  Hardly anyone realizes that a $400 Milwaukee Wrench with a little adapter can perform as well if not better.)

Then there was an overdue oil change.  Just when we thought we had it down to a system, it ended up taking all afternoon.   Suction pump on the blink, oil spraying about, horrible hot sweaty day, everything invisible behind the forest fire smoke drifting down from the Yukon.   To add insult to injury we couldn’t get the  oil filter off and spent an hour retrieving the wrench when it got stuck.  As we were taking a break from our discouraging slide down the learning curve, Howard from the Perseus walked by and told us to tell him if there was ever anything he could do for us.    So we squeezed him into the space , provided light and orientation, and he got the thing off.  Lesson learned:  hand tighten the oil filter.

Then we topped off the tank with diesel to prevent any condensation.  It was low tide and the attendant  up on the fuel dock at Hoonah Trading lowered the hose 45 feet to reach us.   Climbing up the little ladder to pay, I saw the Aurora from a new angle and realized I’d missed a photo op.

Tying up was heart wrenching:  the absolute end of our cruise.   Next we removed on to the sails, taking pictures of  the cunningham and the reefling lines so we can get them back in the right place next year.    The sails more or less flaked themselves right on the deck and we commended Carol Hasse for the generous cut of the sail bags, which helped us get them on with no trouble.   

One morning Jack woke up with a solution to a nagging problem.  On the deck of Aurora are three dorades or air vents big enough to accommodate a weasel  or other animal that might choose to shelter  their nests in Aurora.  He ran off the Hoonah Trading for supplies and set to work.   He cut ovals of wire screen, fit them over the dorade openings and clamped them on with 8-inch circle clamps.    Brilliant.   (I took a picture but it seems to have gone missing.)

The next job was to put new antifreeze into the fresh water system and, for good measure, into the raw water system: we closed the throughhull, dumped the antifreeze into the strainer, and briefly started the engine to suck it in.    

On the last day we drained the water tanks, closed all the throughhulls, and dumped something pink and non toxic called Arctic Ban into the tanks, the sinks and the toilet.   We put pots under the aft cabin mattress to let air flow under it and piled other cushions and sleeping bags onto it.   We pushed the sails through the big hatch in the V-berth and brought them into the salon, where the mainsail goes clear from the head to the galley sink.    Into the V berth we chucked the rescue equipment from the cockpit.  

Then I hosed the mud off the anchor and scrubbed the deck, tying or bungee-ing halyards and lines off the deck surface, and fastened the dodger and covered the windshield, winches, hatches and rails.   

We didn’t tarp, although many of our neighbors said they do.   Sailboats are designed to  have water wash over them; power boats are not.  

We supplemented two small electric dehumidifiers with five buckets of rock salt, which are supposed to drink moisture out of the air.  We opened up all the lockers in hopes that air would move around our clothing and bedding 

That’s Aurora there in Hoonah Harbor, the tall mast behind the blue tarp.   It was really hard saying goodbye.

Icy Strait Point

The Hoonah Tingit have taken a bold approach to cultural tourism that may be a wave of the  future.  

Inside Passage cruise ship tourism is a two edged sword.   It brings income to coastal communities and affords visitors an experience both spectacular and affordable.

We thought we’d run into cruise ships frequently.  As it happens, Petersburg and Wrangell take no large cruise ships.   A single large ship a day is allowed in Glacier Bay and they cannot dock or anchor.   Prince Rupert, British Columbia has only one a week, Vancouver of course a few more, but we didn’t go there this year.   In fact, in our whole passage through Canada we encountered underweigh a single  large cruise ship, one of the classic, never-very-large vessels of the Holland America Line.  

Unfortunately, Ketchikan and Juneau have fallen victim to what the an editorial writer in The Juneau Empire calls “the magic blingdom” on the waterfront.   Mind you, four ships a day can dump 56,000 people a week on towns with populations of  less than 8 and 31 thousand people respectively.    I assume the same is true of Skagway, Haines and Sitka as well, though some towns manage better than others.    In addition to obvious environmental concerns huge,  it’s very sad to see shops operated by the cruise companies themselves or by merchants from the Bahamas, who simply move their operations there every fall.   

The attraction for visitors is clear.  Cruise line welcome all members of the family, able bodied or not.     Cruise ships can afford to take on leading scholars, naturalists and historians.   Many if not most cruise ship folks appear to be  foreign visitors to the US, for whom the week on the Inside Passage out of Seattle must be an affordable respite from land based travels.   But so many average foreign tourists traveling in foreign flagged ships probably weakens demand for historical, cultural and eco tourism.

Enter the Hoonah Tlingit and their locally based approach.  The original people of Glacier Bay, they were forced south across Icy Strait to Chicagof Island when the glaciers advanced in the seventeenth century.   In the early twentieth century many fished for or went to work at the large cannery established at the entrance to their harbor by investors from Port Townsend.     From 1912 to 1953 the Hoonah Packing Company operated as a full fledged cannery.  After that, it turned to other types of fish processing and eventually served as a maintenance base for the purse seine fishing fleet until 1999.   

In 2001, the Hoonah Native corporation, which had purchased the site, implemented the new concept of a private, purpose built cruise ship destination known as Icy Strait Point.   The wonderful old buildings of the cannery were renovated to accommodate a museum, restaurants, and thirteen, small Native-owned shops, including a bookstore.  The tribe constructed a new Big House for cultural presentations for themselves and to share.  Beyond the water front there’s a boardwalk with benches, totempoles and a daytime campfire.  Beyond are hiking trails and a ride down Mt. Hoonah on the country’s fastest longest zip line.    And visitors can walk the 3/4 mile to town or hire local guides for fishing, bear tracking, whale watching and the like.

There are no plans for a cruise ship dock at Hoonah; rather ships anchor out and tender passengers in.   Only one ship is allowed at a time for an average of 3.5  visits per week in the summer.   

A really nice touch is that Icy Strait Point is open free of change to all local Hoonah people and to visiting fishermen and cruisers in Hoonah Harbor.   We spent a fine sunny afternoon there, a welcome break from oil and anti-freeze.    While the experience is was more packaged than our visit to the North Pacific Cannery with the well trained teenagers of Port Edwards, British Columbia, Ice Strait Point really does have something for everybody.

Hoonah, population 715

 

As much as we liked Wrangell, we’ve decided to make Hoonah our temporary Alaska home.  We’d first heard the name from a neighbor in Port Hadlock when we were asking about the best places to leave a boat.  Hoonah is blessed with comparatively mild winters, a small protective harbor and the uber competent Harbormaster, Paul D., and his assistant Arlen S.  

Hoonah also gets accolades from Don and René Douglass in their fat, indispensable cruising guide Exploring the Inside Passage to Alaska: A Cruising Guide from the San Juan Islands to Glacier Bay.   In general, the authors take pains to explain to recreational cruisers that Alaska is different; since there are no marinas specifically serving recreational boaters, one should not expect help with lines or any of the fawning service that typifies facilities in the San Juans and Gulf Islands. (Think Roche Harbor: who needs it?)  

It’s so much better to tie up next to commercial fisherman with local knowledge, news of the day, and a knack for predicting the weather. In addition to fishermen, fishing guides, local working and family boats,  Hoonah, Harbor serves Alaskan cruisers who reside inland and several boats from the lower 48.  Harbormasters check dock lines and water lines every day.  When the temperature plunges, they go on board and plug in our heat lamps.  When the snow gets thick, they hire folks to shovel it off the boats.  For our 40 foot slip and this service we pay $850.  Electricity is additional.   Last winter, a hard one, total snow shoveling amounted to $50.   

The largest Tlingit village in Alaska, Hoonah is on an inlet known as Port Frederick.  It’s accessible only by air and water, although there are a few cars and several roads out the town to the sawmill and areas where residents fish, hunt and pick berries.  The village itself stretches along the waterfront from the old cannery on Icy Strait, passing the ferry terminal, the brand new not yet used TravelLift boat hoist, the Hoonah Trading Company, a public wharf and float, the food processing plant, the school, the float plane float, the harbor, the post office and a small airport that accommodates the tiny planes of Alaska Wings.

Hoonah Trading Company is the kind of store you dream about.  It has only what you need but everything you need.  It sits atop a long wharf with a fuel dock at one end and a gas pump at the other.  Between are a fully stocked Ace franchise with lumber, hardware and housewares and a small supermarket with abundant, inexpensive fresh produce.

The school is a stone’s throw from the harbor.   It doubles as a community center, the tribal big house being out at Icy Strait Point and the halls of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood needing repair.  The school houses the public library where we access Internet and the gym always seems to have kids playing basketball.  The school curriculum seems to include native Tlingit skills such as red cedar bark weaving and wood carving.  I should have asked about language study and whether the kids compete in canoe races using the dugouts parked out front near the totem poles.  

As for housing, it’s not Hoonah’s strong point.  Although there are attractive and well constructed homes up on the hill and toward the airport, most of the homes near the waterfront are scrappy little salt box bungalows.   Small and weather beaten, many have a single downstairs room with a put belly stove in the middle.

Then we figured it out.  The museum has before and after pictures of a 1944 a fire wiped out the wood-planked front street and the contiguous buildings on either side.   The wharves over the water and the small Russian Orthodox Church on a knoll behind were spared, but the heart of the village disappeared.  The fire had spread from a household smoke house and it seems that the chief of the clan to which the family belonged offered gifts and then committed suicide.   Then emergency housing came in on a ship that had been on its way to Hawaii; it was temporary military housing designed for an entirely different climate.  

We didn’t carry a camera around Hoonah, so these are cell phone snapshots.  Fortuntely the Hoonah has a very informative website http://www.visithoonah.com/ with a slide show tour http://www.visithoonah.com/images/slideshow/Hoonah%20Life/html/89.htm  of the “city” and good information on Hoonah Harbor  http://www.visithoonah.com/harbor_facilities.htm

As much as we liked Wrangell, we’ve decided to make Hoonah our temporary Alaska home.  We’d first heard the name from a neighbor in Port Hadlock when we were asking about the best places to leave a boat.  Hoonah is blessed with comparatively mild winters, a small protective harbor and the uber competent Harbormaster, Paul D., and his assistant Arlen S.  

Hoonah also gets accolades from Don and René Douglass in their fat, indispensable cruising guide on Southeastern Alaska.  In general, the authors take pains to explain to recreational cruisers that Alaska is different; since there are no marinas specifically serving recreational boaters, one should not expect help with lines or any of the fawning service that typifies facilities in the San Juans and Gulf Islands. (Think Roche Harbor: who needs it?)  

It’s so much better to tie up next to commercial fisherman with local knowledge, news of the day, and a knack for predicting the weather. In addition to fishermen, fishing guides, local working and family boats,  Hoonah, Harbor serves Alaskan cruisers who reside inland and several boats from the lower 48.  Harbormasters check dock lines and water lines every day.  When the temperature plunges, they go on board and plug in our heat lamps.  When the snow gets thick, they hire folks to shovel it off the boats.  For our 40 foot slip and this service we pay $850.  Electricity is additional.   Last winter, a hard one, total snow shoveling amounted to $50.   

The largest Tlingit village in Alaska, Hoonah is on an inlet known as Port Frederick.  It’s accessible only by air and water, although there are a few cars and several roads out the town to the sawmill and areas where residents fish, hunt and pick berries.  The village itself stretches along the waterfront from the old cannery on Icy Strait, passing the ferry terminal, the brand new not yet used TravelLift boat hoist, the Hoonah Trading Company, a public wharf and float, the food processing plant, the school, the float plane float, the harbor, the post office and a small airport that accommodates the tiny planes of Alaska Wings.

Hoonah Trading Company is the kind of store you dream about.  It has only what you need but everything you need.  It sits atop a long wharf with a fuel dock at one end and a gas pump at the other.  Between are a fully stocked Ace franchise with lumber, hardware and housewares and a small supermarket with abundant, inexpensive fresh produce.

The school is a stone’s throw from the harbor.   It doubles as a community center, the tribal big house being out at Icy Strait Point and the halls of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood needing repair.  The school houses the public library where we access Internet and the gym always seems to have kids playing basketball.  The school curriculum seems to include native Tlingit skills such as red cedar bark weaving and wood carving.  I should have asked about language study and whether the kids compete in canoe races using the dugouts parked out front near the totem poles.  

As for housing, it’s not Hoonah’s strong point.  Although there are attractive and well constructed homes up on the hill and toward the airport, most of the homes near the waterfront are scrappy little salt box bungalows.   Small and weather beaten, many have a single downstairs room with a pot belly stove in the middle.

Then we figured it out.  The museum has before and after pictures of a 1944 a fire wiped out the wood-planked front street and the contiguous buildings on either side.   The wharves over the water and the small Russian Orthodox Church on a knoll behind were spared, but the heart of the village disappeared.  The fire had spread from a household smoke house and it seems that the chief of the clan to which the family belonged offered gifts and then committed suicide.   Then emergency housing came in on a ship that had been on its way to Hawaii; it was temporary military housing designed for an entirely different climate.  

We didn’t carry a camera around Hoonah, so these are cell phone snapshots.  Fortuntely the Hoonah has a very informative website  with a slide show “city” tour  and an introduction to Hoonah Harbor.

The last frontier of the hunter-gatherer

 

*****The last frontier of the hunter gatherers

Use of tools is one thing that sets people apart from the other animals that share the planet.  Commercial fishing is the last vestige or the hunter gatherer phase of human cultural development.  The tools of fishing used today evolved directly from those of our ancestors.  Nearly all fish catching devices in Alaska are simply improvements on one of three basic types of devices:  hooks, nets and traps. 

Over the years, fishermen have developed increasingly efficient gear designed to harvest specific species.  As harvest efficiency has increased, so has the number of commercial fishermen.  The combined effect is that today’s commercial fishing industry is, in most cases, capable of catching a lot more fish than the stocks can biologically support.  

To maintain a long term supply of seafood, government fishery managers develop regulations to limit both total catch and fishing effort.  Regulations dictate what kind and how much gear can be used, establish boundaries of the districts in which fishing can occur, and determine what days (or even hours) fishing will be permitted.

Terry Johnson, Ocean Treasure: Commercial Fishing in Alaska.  p. 19

Commercial fishing is the last vestige or the hunter gatherer phase of human cultural development.  The tools of fishing used today evolved directly from those of our ancestors.  Nearly all fish catching devices in Alaska are simply improvements on one of three basic types of devices:  hooks, nets and traps. 

Terry Johnson, Ocean Treasure: Commercial Fishing in Alaska

Here’s my take away and and what calls me back.    Time and space are different in Alaska.  It’s not just in a different time zone.  Not just long days suddenly reversing into long nights.   An ice age flows right into the present in Glacier Bay.   People there sense things differently.  Eventually, you do, too.

 Alaskans practice the wisdom of the ages as they move across the waters and the land in search of subsistence.  Natives and settlers alike, share an age old ethic of self-sufficiency that distinguishes them from most other Americans.  Halibut hooks and other tools of the trade adorn totem poles.   Contemporary families budget time and energy to take care of their food needs and look forward to it.

Alaskan waters are so abundant that there is a thin line between subsistence and commercial fishing. Many commercial fishing vessels become the family home during the summer months. 

 Alaskans are genuine foodies who make most chefs and diners look frivolous.  Of course, they  have supermarkets.   In fact produce is amazingly high quality and fresh and the prices are just fine.   Summer nights are too short to grow corn in Alaska but it arrives with its silk glossy and damp.    Melons do well on the long trip are apricots, peaches and pears are respected and protected.  Local growers turn out beautiful summer salads and greens and families brag about the size of the cabbages in their household plots.    But meat and fish?  Nearly impossible to find at the supermarket.

It was great to see the excitement of the Blough family as they left for their annual reunion and caribou hunt.   All the Alaskan cruisers we met were looking forward to the hunting season.  Everyone takes their annual  allotment of deer, which is 6 small Sitka deer per adult.  Most of them were also hoping to get a moose.   Dianna licked her chops in anticipation while sharing her recipe for bear ribs.  Many folks hunt black bear  but seem to agree that brown bear is not very good at all.   Since Neal and Dianna have professional butchering equipment at home, they also order two cattle and two pigs on the hoof.

At Hoonah Trading Company, canning jars, rubber seals, and canning parifin were flying off the shelves asolks came out of the woods with pailfuls of salmon berries, then blackberries and next huckleberries.   

It was the fishing we saw up close.   Every dock has a number of simple fish cleaning tables with a fresh water hose.  Around 4 pm every day people line up to use them.   Huge sockeye, pinks and chum, many males with the hooked jaws of spawning season.    The largest halibut we saw was 170 pounds, but everyday we saw people bringing in lots of smaller ones.   

Our cruising neighbors, some from the inland areas of Alaska, have promised to show us the ropes next year.   Most of them clean, cut into portions,  vacuum pack and freeze their catch on their boats.   Out of town sport fishermen take their fish to a small shop behind the Harbormaster’s that processes and packages fish for shipment.   The morning we flew out of Juneau airport, I felt pangs of sheer envy at the huge cartons of frozen fish that many travelers were checking with their baggage.  

As for commercial fishing, we’ve had to learn about the rigs of the various fisheries just to navigate past them.   We learned about gillnetting from Joe Upton’s Alaska Blues and from the talkative Arnie.    After LaDonna’s dramatic story of the Wrangell purse seiners, we peppered seiners with questions.  Trollers were everywhere, from the lovely antique double ender in whose company we negotiated Green Rapids to the dozens in Hoonah Harbor.  Our favorite boats there,  moored side by side, are Icy Lady and Happy Hooker.  

We saw our first longliner leaving Frosty Harbor:  a bizarre non contiguous assortment of red balls and flags stretching nearly across the channel.      We consulted our Canadian charts book, which has good illustrations of  a troller, a gillnetter, a purse seiner, a long liner and a trawler.   Identifying how fishermen in each fishery set their lines and nets is an essential part of cruising the Northwest Coast.   (Alan Sorum’s artlcle “Identifying Alaska Commercial Fishing Boats”  has the basics but poor pictures.)

This post has wandered and taken time to write.   As I try to finish things up here, I am distracted and feel a powerful call of the wild.  It’s the end of  August and the wilderness of southern Oregon should be spectacular.    So I’ll end this with quite from an anthology called Alaskan Stories  (edited by John Miller) hat I picked up used during my final visit to Juneau’s Rainy Retreat Books.   (And read as I tried  to fall asleep in a hotel bed, which didn’t move the way our bunk on Aurora does.) All the other Alaska books are safely shelved on Aurora but this one sneaked back to Portland, making my reentry all the more difficult.   

Robert Coles, the great psychiatrist, teacher and  Children of Crisis author, brings us these words of a fourteen year old Eskimo girl who once spent six months in Fairbanks.

I remember waking up in the house we had in Fairbanks; I went to the window, and I saw – another house.  I bent my neck and looked, and there was the sky, a small piece of it – the size of meat  or fish we have in the middle of the winter, not the fish or meat we eat in the summer.  Everywhere we went there were houses and stories.  We kept looking at walls.  I couldn’t see beyond a street; there were always cars and buildings.  The sky was not the sky I knew.  There was no ocean.  At school there was a playground but across the street there were stores.  My mother said she felt a lot of time as if she wasn’t getting enough air.  My father ended up in bars at night, drinking.  He didn’t see anything except the beer inside a bottle.

One day he came home and said he wanted to go back to our village; he wanted to stand near the ocean and look at the water, not drown in beer.  We left the next day.  My uncle has been in Fairbanks a long time, but we couldn’t stay, and  I’m glad we’re back here.  As soon as we got home, my grandmother told me to go say hello to the ocean, and to the ponds, and to take a walk through the grass, and to watch for foxes and say hello to them.  And to not forget the sky; she never does – she’s always looking at the sky and watching the clouds, and she can tell if the weather will change by the way the clouds go across the sky.   She won’t tell me her secret.  She says I’ll learn it by looking at the sky long enough myself! 

Signs of a shared sense of humor

 

Designer, age 13, nails it on first shot

 

Alaskans love their flag and with good reason. It shows world class elegance in design and comes with a good story.

The flag was designed by a 13-year old named Benny Benson, a Native from the Aleutians who grew up in an orphanage.   Along with 700 other kids, he he entered a  competition held in schools throughout the territory in 1927.  After his design was chosen at the local level, it was sent on the Juneau with his explanation: 

The blue field is for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, an Alaskan flower. The North Star is for the future state of Alaska, the most northerly in the union. The Dipper is for the Great Bear—symbolizing strength.

The Territorial Legislature adopted it the same year.  In 1955, a tune called “Alaska’s Flag” became the Territory’s official song.  Of course, both sailed into Statehood.  

In comparison that silly gold Oregon beaver on blue background just doesn’t fly, does it.

Alaskans love their flag and with good reason. The design is classy and elegant and comes with a good story.

The flag was designed by a 13-year old named Benny Benson, a Native from the Aleutians who grew up in an orphanage.   Along with 700 other kids, he he entered a  competition held in schools throughout the territory in 1927.  After his design was chosen at the local level, it was sent on the Juneau with his explanation: 

The blue field is for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, an Alaskan flower. The North Star is for the future state of Alaska, the most northerly in the union. The Dipper is for the Great Bear—symbolizing strength.

The Territorial Legislature adopted it the same year.  In 1955, a tune called “Alaska’s Flag” became the Territory’s official song.  Of course, both sailed into Statehood.  

In comparison that silly gold Oregon beaver on blue background just doesn’t fly, does it.

Hometown boy crosses nation to Alaska in 1915 Ford

 

What should I see parked near the Mendentall Glacier but an ancient Ford pickup with New York plates and the names of small hometown businesses. Turns out the owner, Doug Hauge, is from Stittville, a village in the catchment area for Whitesboro High School, from which we both graduated.  

He’d driven all the way from New York on back roads along with a bunch of other Model T nuts from around the country.   His has got the original equipment from the tires up, though he did add GPS and a tiny ingenious, fold out camping unit in the back.   

2009 is the centennial of the first cross country road race, won by the Model T, of course.   The group planned their route to coincide with various local events and festivals and received well earned hospitality everywhere they went. 

At the end of that trip, in Seattle, Doug said good bye to the rest of the fleet and continued on to Juneau with his nephew for crew.    Several days later I noticed that The Juneau Empire thought it was a pretty cool story, too. So have a look at their nice illustrated write up.  http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/072709/loc_471371167.shtml

Yet, another good thing about Alaska: It’s a place where folks with large dreams of adventure in very small, unlikely vessels – if they make it – end up to telling their stories.

 

What should I see parked near the Mendentall Glacier but an ancient Ford pickup with New York plates and the names of small hometown businesses.

Turns out the owner, Doug Hauge, is from Stittville, a village in the catchment area for Whitesboro High School, from which we both graduated.  

He’d driven all the way from New York on back roads along with a bunch of other Model T nuts from around the country.   His has got the original equipment from the tires up, though he did add GPS and a tiny ingenious, fold out camping unit in the back.   

2009 is the centennial of the first cross country road race, won by the Model T, of course.   The group planned their route to coincide with various local events and festivals and received well earned hospitality everywhere they went. 

At the end of that trip, in Seattle, Doug said good bye to the rest of the fleet and continued on to Juneau with his nephew for crew.    Several days later I noticed that The Juneau Empire thought it was a pretty cool story, too. So have a look at their nice write up with more photos (including the one at the right, which I’ve stolen). 

Yet, another good thing about Alaska: It’s a place where folks with large dreams of adventure in very small, unlikely vessels – if they make it – end up to telling their stories.

My random list of important or interesting details

Baggywrinkles Blog tends to go on about things that anyone can find on the internet.  Offline sailors need to make do with paper or pdfs for details they cannot pack away in their heads.

Here is a fairly random list; some things visitors to Alaska should remember and others that are simply nice to know.  The first four here are verbatim footnotes from Lynn Schooler’s (unfortunately unindexed) Blue Bear.

There are five species of Salmon in the North Pacific:  pink, red, silver, chum and king (also known as humpies, sockeye, coho, dog and spring, respectively).  In general (but varying significantly by area) the order in which different species return to their natal streams to spawn is king (in early spring), sockeye (early summer), pink and chum (midsummer) and silver (which run well into fall.)

Low pressure systems rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and high pressure systems move in the opposite direction.  Thus the leading edge of high pressure system spinning from west to east across the gulf is usually heralded by the arrival of a north wind, and on a low-pressure system the wind will be from the south or south-west.  There are many exceptions to this, of course, but it is a useful rule of thumb.

The rise and fall of the tide can be plotted as a bell curve, with the greatest amount of change occurring during the middle.  To calculate the speed with which the water level is changing during a given period, divide the distance from high tide to low tide by twelve.  During the six hours of a diurnal change, 1/12 will occur during the first hour, 2/12 during the second, 3/12 during the third and fourth, 2/12 during the fifth, and the last 1/12 during the sixth.  Thus on a moderately high tide, say eighteen feet, the water level will rise or fall by four and a half feet per hour during the middle of the tide, which also makes the current during that period the strongest.  

Half of all bear cubs die during their first year, and the primary cause of this mortality is male bears.  Biologists surmose that this urge to infanticide is nature’s way of increasing the chances that the genes of the largest, strongest boars will be passed on, since a sow that loses her offspring will enter estrus, or a period of fertility, sooner than one raising cubs, and choose to mate with one of the more dominant males in her area-a system that seems rather clumsy at first consideration, since a boar had not way of knowing whether or not he’s killing one of his own cubs, but which in the long run gives preference to the fittest line of genes among the species.  

According to the Alaska State Museum, nineteen native languages are spoken in Alaska today.  The main coastal tribes are the Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit.  There are the tribes of inland peoples known collectively as the Athabascans.  Then there are Eskimos, peoples who live on the coasts from the Gulf of Alaska to Greenland.  Wikipedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Natives also lists are two other coastal groups, the Alutiiq of the coast southeast of the Aleutians and the Eyaks, whose language loss and merger with the Tlingits is of interest to linguists.   Aleut (in their own language they refer to themselves as Unangan), Alutiiq, Athabascan (including Ahtna, Deg Hit’an, Dena’ina, Gwich’in, Hän, Holikachuk, Kolchan, Koyukon, Lower Tanana,, Tanacross, Upper Tanana), Eyak, Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian and Eskimo (including Inupiat, Yupik, Siberian Yupik, Yup’ik, Cup’ik, Sugpiaq, Chugach, Koniag).

 

Baggywrinkles Blog tends to go on about things that anyone can find on the internet.  This is because offline sailors need to make do with paper or pdfs for details they cannot pack away in their heads.

Here is a fairly random list; some things visitors to Alaska should remember and others that are simply nice to know.  The first four here are verbatim footnotes from Lynn Schooler’s (unfortunately unindexed) Blue Bear.

• 

  Spawning Coho

  There are five species of Salmon in the North Pacific:  pink, red, silver, chum and king (also known as humpies, sockeye, coho, dog and spring, respectively).  In general (but varying significantly by area) the order in which different species return to their natal streams to spawn is king (in early spring), sockeye (early summer), pink and chum (midsummer) and silver (which run well into fall.)

• Low pressure systems rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and high pressure systems move in the opposite direction.  Thus the leading edge of high pressure system spinning from west to east across the gulf is usually heralded by the arrival of a north wind, and on a low-pressure system the wind will be from the south or south-west.  There are many exceptions to this, of course, but it is a useful rule of thumb.

• The rise and fall of the tide can be plotted as a bell curve, with the greatest amount of change occurring during the middle.  To calculate the speed with which the water level is changing during a given period, divide the distance from high tide to low tide by twelve.  During the six hours of a diurnal change, 1/12 will occur during the first hour, 2/12 during the second, 3/12 during the third and fourth, 2/12 during the fifth, and the last 1/12 during the sixth.  Thus on a moderately high tide, say eighteen feet, the water level will rise or fall by four and a half feet per hour during the middle of the tide, which also makes the current during that period the strongest.  

• Half of all bear cubs die during their first year, and the primary cause of this mortality is male bears.  Biologists surmise that this urge to infanticide is nature’s way of increasing the chances that the genes of the largest, strongest boars will be passed on, since a sow that loses her offspring will enter estrus, or a period of fertility, sooner than one raising cubs, and choose to mate with one of the more dominant males in her area-a system that seems rather clumsy at first consideration, since a boar had not way of knowing whether or not he’s killing one of his own cubs, but which in the long run gives preference to the fittest line of genes among the species.  

• According to the Alaska State Museum, nineteen native languages are spoken in Alaska today.  The main coastal tribes are the Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit.  There are the tribes of inland peoples known collectively as the Athabascans.  Then there are Eskimos, peoples who live on the coasts from the Gulf of Alaska to Greenland.  Wikipedia  also lists are two other coastal groups, the Alutiiq of the coast southeast of the Aleutians and the Eyaks, whose language loss and merger with the Tlingits is of interest to linguists.   Aleut (in their own language they refer to themselves as Unangan), Alutiiq, Athabascan (including Ahtna, Deg Hit’an, Dena’ina, Gwich’in, Hän, Holikachuk, Kolchan, Koyukon, Lower Tanana,, Tanacross, Upper Tanana), Eyak, Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian and Eskimo (including Inupiat, Yupik, Siberian Yupik, Yup’ik, Cup’ik, Sugpiaq, Chugach, Koniag).

• Phone Service:     North of Campbell River there’s almost no cell phone service except in cities.   In Alaska  there was no G3 service for our iPhones but slower, E service, was available in towns. 

• Internet service along the coast is problematic.   Libraries have free wifi and some access to computers. However, many libraries have very limited hours and Juneau’s otherwise lovely library simply didn’t have enough band width.   Our northernmost recreational marina – Sullivan Bay – had free wifi on the docks.   Alaska tended to have wifi in bars but you have to be 21, so this slowed down Piers.  Very few coffee shops have wifi.   In Juneau, Heritage Coffee is an exception and the Silver Bow Hotel and Deli is simply a great place to hang out. Some libraries –  Hoonah, Prince Rupert, etc – leave their wifi on so you can access it anytime outside on the steps.
• In terms of overall communications Prince Rupert was the best:    It just got cell phone service (Canadian providers) and it still has lots of phone booths.  And right on the waterfront is Cow Bay Coffee, PR’s community gather place, with great free wifi.    The tourist information center and the library also have good wifi. 

• The Alaska Department of Labor has excellent information on Seafood and Fishing Jobs in Alaska:   job descriptions for fisherman and seafood processors, conditions, pay, crew costs, accommodations, and safety.  There are orientation videos and a list of community seafood employment specialists.   

• Next year I’ll make a number of pdf files of the following since I usually can’t check facts or get info by Internet while cruising.  For example, this blog.   Alaskan and BC Fishing Regulations.  Selected pages from the National Parks Service Glacier Bay site.