Day 25

After a good nights sleep, we once again woke up at 6:00 and got underway just a few minutes after the fisherman who had shared our anchorage last night. Everything went pretty smoothly in the morning, by this time I had settled back into sailing-time and was used to getting up early, and later when I was pulling up all that 200 feet of scope, I really woke up. Especially since we were in well over 40 feet of water, so when I got to the chain I was pulling up all 40 feet of 3/8 inch chain, and the 7.5kg anchor on top of all that. At least when we are in 30 feet I’m never pulling up everything at once.

After getting the anchor aboard, we got underway at 7:00am, headed for a medium-distance run up to Wrangell, but we needed to time it just right because there were some tricky narrows about halfway there that I wanted to hit at slack. For the first few miles up to the entrance to the narrows it was flat calm with some light, intermittent drizzle that we motored through with the only occurrence being a single porpoise who played on the bow for a few minutes before shooting off. However right as we got to the beginning of the narrows it really started to rain and get miserable, on top of which, visibility dropped down to less than 1nm, so navigating the torturous channel was going to be fun.

The narrows themselves, which connect the northern and southern portions of Zimovia Strait, are a rock and island studded mess with a winding channel only a few hundred feet across at its narrowest point, and no more than 1200 at the widest for 3.5nm. luckily, in this instance the tide markers on the iPad’s chart were correct and we hit the narrows exactly at slack. While we were going through, though, I noticed a boat anchored back behind one of the larger islands that at first I couldn’t tell what it was at all, but after looking through the Binoculars for a few minutes I was able to determine that it was a rig I had never seen before, or even heard of. As far as I could tell it was a 40-something foot fiberglass monohull with an unstayed Marconi-cat-schooner rig with wishbone booms. (Wow, I never thought I’d say that before)

After we got through the narrows without incident, the wind started to pick up and as soon as we were clear of the last rocks, we raised the sails and were soon racing downwind at 5-6 knots before 15-20 knots of wind. There were two more things that changed as we passed through the narrows as well. The first, and more harmless one was that the water changed color. It was amazing, that morning we had been sailing through clear, dark water, but as soon as we were in the northern part of Zimovia Strait, it was like we had suddenly sailed onto Kenai Lake, the water was exactly the same silty and opaque turquoise blue-green, and after a quick glance at the chart, I realized that that must be from the outflow of the Stikine River, 18.5nm to the north. The second thing was that the rain stopped and once we had visibility we could see the dozen or more gillnetters fishing right in our path, the result of which being that we spent the next few hours gybing back and forth as we dodged around the floating nets and their attendant boats, passing close enough to some to see that none of the boats were catching much fish.

Once passed the fishermen, the wind started to die and we started to feel a 2 knot current on or bow, that was supposed to be 1 knot from astern, according to the same iPad chart that had gotten us through the narrows at exactly slack. Then, as the wind died, it also swung around to the North, so we ended up motoring into everything, and for over an hour and a half, our ETA stuck at exactly 2 hours away before the current started to abate and we could once more gain some ground. At least by ten the rain had very definitely stopped, so it was dry slog rather than a wet one, and by the time we tied up at Wrangell at 3:45, the sun was making some brief appearances from behind the clouds.

Due to this and the fact that we had arrived so early, Jason and I went for a short walk around Wrangell, but finding nothing very impressive, we went back to the boat just in time for Jason to pack his stuff and catch the ferry back to Ketchikan, on which he would travel the same distance that we had covered in three days in a matter of hours.

The rest of the day I just hung around the boat, reading or napping, and that night I burnt some sausages for dinner. (Yum.) Although my confidence and skill in handling the boat, anchoring, and docking had increased over the past days, sadly, my cooking still leaves much to be desired outside of the realm of spaghetti or soup. But nonetheless, I scraped off the charred bits and still managed to have a halfway decent dinner then got a good night’s sleep.