Day 40, 41, and 42 (7/06-7/08) Gulf Crossing Part I

After 4 days of living alone in Hoonah, one of sailing alone to Elfin Cove, where I met and had dinner with the people aboard a motoryacht, at 11:00am, as I was lugging 9 gallons of gas along the boardwalks of the tiny community from the gas station to the marina, there was the roar of a small plane, and a few minutes later a blue-and yellow seaplane tied up to the end of the dock, where a bag of mail, two dry bags of clothes, and dad greeted me (the bag of mail was for the community post office of Elfin Cove, not me). Almost as soon as dad stepped aboard, it seemed we ere off the dock, with only a short pause to stow his bags, buy some last-minute provisions at the general store, and grab a bite to eat.

The day was bright and sunny, but also calm, as we motored out past the protection of the inside passage for the last time, and Darwind began to feel a regular ocean swell start to roll in from the south. As we exited Icy strait, we were hailed first by the motoryacht I had dined aboard last night, then by another sailboat, I believe from Australia, headed south after a windless gulf crossing. Also, as we entered the open ocean, I impatiently waited until we had for the first time a clear horizon to the south, where I could practice using a sextant on a moving boat for the fist time in my life. To do this, I first familiarized myself with bringing the sun down to the horizon by swinging the index arm and aligning the mirrors. This proved more difficult than one would expect, even motoring along over a gentle groundswell on a perfectly cam day. Eventually, I found the perfect spot, standing with one foot planted on the cockpit seat and the other braced up around one of the supports for the stern arch that carries Darwind’s primary solar panel and wind generator, and around 2:30pm, I took a series of sights, carefully noting the time down to the second. I then waited and relaxed in the sun, trying to blot out the sickening drone of the engine and watching for kelp and logs as dad took an off-watch.

For this passage, I had set up at watch schedule of 2 6-hour watches during the day and 3 4-hour watches at night. That way, by keeping to a watch-on/watch-off system, neither one of us would have the same watch twice in a day, and every other day one of us would get only 1 night watch instead of 2.

Anyway, around 6:00pm, I took another set of sights, and picking the best from both sets, I sat down at the nav station to crunch the numbers. After two exhausting hours of searching through cryptic instructions, panning back and forth through the massive reduction tables and nautical almanacs stored on my computer, picking dad’s brain for anything he remembered from the merchant marine academy, and finally looking it up in an ancient textbook, I had everything added, subtracted, the proper errors and declinations factored in, azimuths calculated, all to the sweet accompaniment of the engine and inverter, and I was finally ready for the fun part: plotting. First I took out a clean plotting sheet (basically a giant compass rose with some blank latitude lines), where I first plotted the evening sight, ending up with a line of position (LOP), crossing the paper at about an 45 degree angle. I could be anywhere along that line, which continues on or thousands of miles making a circle of the earth, but that’s where the first early afternoon sight comes in. after plotting it’s LOP, which was nearly horizontal (A noon LOP is your latitude), and then it was the simple matter of advancing that LOP the number of miles we had traveled between the sights, in this case around 8 nautical miles due west (our course), and the point where the two LOP’s cross is our position at the time of the second sight. It turned out that in the end, after comparing my result to our GPS position at the time of the second sight (which I took note of for precisely this purpose, I was only 10nm off! Pretty damn good for my first running sight ever!

After having fun with the sextant and recovering from the queasiness induced doing math below decks in sizeable swells, something I had noted when attempting to do math(or any) homework on passage, dad cooked up a good pasta dinner, and then I ducked below while he relieved me for the first night watch. There had been absolutely no wind all day, and there still wasn’t anything at 10:00 when I came on for the middle watch until 2:00am, and the sun was just setting behind the icy peaks ahead and to the north. That night, though the motor was still churning away, I looked forward to my first night passage on my boat, as I have always loves sailing through the pitch-black night, but I was to be disappointed because just as I finally thought the orange tinge had gone from the north-western sky, the north-east started to brighten into a pre-dawn grey. All this light is all well and good for spotting logs, but I was sorely disappointed at being cheated of my night sailing.

The next morning, all during my first long day-watch, we were toyed with by teasing winds from the south, north and occasionally west, causing a ray of hope as the slack mainsail, raised to dampen the rolling, filled ad we started to move perceptibly faster and faster… until the wind died away to nothing again as soon as we started to even think about the mere possibility of maybe throttling down the engine a bit.

By noon, when dad relieved me, we had a bit of some northwest wind, but like all the other zephyrs of the morning, we assumed it would soon die away into a flat calm. This was not to be. By that evening, when I came on for the first night watch, we were beating right into the teeth of 25-30 knots of wind from the NW, which soon kicked up a nasty 6-foot chop, which Darwind slammed and shuddered into, loosing all but the faintest memory of forward motion, on top of which, the double forestays, never quite as tight as a single one would be, bowed before the wind, created a nasty belly in the jib which reduced our already limited pointing ability to nearly 60 degrees off the wind! Dad and I tried to do everything we knew how to ease her; we headed offshore on one long tack, searching for less seas in the deeper water, but the wind just got stronger and the waves higher farther out, so we tacked, before trying to change the triple-reefed main and #2 jib for a double-reefed main and storm staysail, but that actually slowed Darwind down to almost a compete stop so back up went trusty #2, slightly overpowering, but better than wallowing in the troughs making half a knot in the wrong direction. That night though, as we steered the boat on by hand to try eke the most out of every favorable gust or wave, however, I felt great, sailing into the sunset, ith beautiful, rugged mountains reaching high to starboard, the open ocean rolling under the keel from port, and the wind and high-flung spray whistling back into my face. It was then that I discovered something truly amazing about the personality of Darwind, and that is that on the wind, with properly trimmed and balanced sails, she will steer herself better than any autopilot ever made. I discovered this just about the middle of my watch, around 8:00, when having very badly to take a piss, I said hell with it and just let go of the tiller for 30 seconds while I did my thing. When I got back in the cockpit, I was surprised to find the boat still exactly on course, which can be expected for a bit, but usually the boat eventually drifts either onto or off the wind, according to her design or sail trim, but this Darwind simply refused to do. I didn’t touch the tiller for over 10 minutes, but I watched, transfixed as it lazily swung back and forth with the roll and the boat took absolutely no notice, her long, straight keel and apparently perfectly balanced sails kept her never more than 10 or 15 degrees off course, about what you would expect from a high-end electronic autopilot. The only reason I eventually did grab the tiller again in the end was because the tiller was starting to bang around on the cockpit seats quite a bit, and a stronger puff of wind needed to be taken advantage of, and despite her brilliant qualities, Darwind still couldn’t quite know how to bear off in a lull and up in a gust to get every last fraction of a knot towards our revised goal of Yakutat, only 30 nautical miles away as the crow flies.

The wind continued all of that night, but for the first part, I was having so much fun sailing Darwind to her utmost, that I even took an extra 2 hours on my first night watch, which looking back, might have been a contributing factor to my mood the next morning. The next morning the conditions were almost exactly the same as the previous evening: we were barely any closer to Yakutat, the wind was still howling in our face, and we were barely moving. The only difference was that today it was raining and overcast, and if anything the seas were bigger. Yippie. In fact, I was so annoyed that in the last 18 hours we had made only about half of he 30 miles to Yakutat, that for almost my entire morning watch, I gave in, put down the engine, seas or no seas, dropped the jib, and pounded straight into it. Actually, t probably wasn’t as bad as all that, or the engine would have been next to useless, cavitating and submerging with every wave, but the rain and greyness made it seem that way.

Also, as we slowly pounded our way towards Ocean Cape and the shelter of Yakutat bay, the famous surf crashing on the beaches became louder and louder, but by the time dad came on watch to relieve me, I was to wet, tired and miserable to care, and I didn’t even get up as we passed over the bar, or even until we were nearly at the dock and needed to rig fenders and docklines.

At Yakutat, tied up to the old wooded docks at the small boat harbor, a mile’s walk from the nearest store, we were greeted by friendly fishermen and eventually the “harbormaster” who both assured us that the spot we were in was fine and we could probably leave the bot there, until one of the fishermen remembered that a big charter boat always comes in to that spot, and that we should better move, so we moves around to the outside transient dock, across from the pilot boat that had taken us out for a ride the first time we had visited Yakutat on Northern Passage, and the only other sailboat in the harbor, which looked like it hadn’t moved in decades. The next day, after a blessed 12 hours of sleep, dad and I got up and after following instructions to the glass door bar, where we ate the worst food imaginable, and got online with the slowest internet I have ever used, to look at the weather forecasts to see if this northwest wind would last, and unfortunately, it looked like it would be sticking around for at least a week, so we decided to take this chance and return to Anchorage. This would be my first time back and the first time I had spent off the boat all summer, but my cousin Matthew was flying up from Connecticut in a few days, (we had hoped to meet him on the boat in Seward or Wittier) and it would be good to have a week off, maybe even spend some time on the Lynx and head down to Seldovia. So we spent the next day putting everything to bed on the boat, during the mad scramble of which, I ran two or three miles to three stores in an attempt to find a lock for the companionway, and had my first experience hitchhiking on my way back, then we were in the one cab in Yakutat, which charges $20 no matter if you’re going across the street or to the other end of town and back, and finally we were on the 11:00 plane to Anchorage.