Day 43, 44, and 45 (/724-7/26) Gulf Crossing Part II

At 5:00pm, July 23, at Yakutat harbor, I slung my and dad’s bags into Darwind’s cockpit, lying ready and waiting out a northwest system this past week while I was away, resting and playing in Anchorage and Seldovia with my cousin Matt, who flew out from Connecticut to come hang out and sail in the far north. This week was also the first time all summer that I had spent with Lynx, the 12-foot catboat my dad and I built over the past few years, and my first boat. In fact, so far this summer I felt (and still feel to a degree) extremely guilty about poor old Lynx, who after all, I had built with my own two hands, from the first plank, and who I had offhandedly mothballed after only one summer of sailing. Suffice to say, much of my guilt was eased by being able to finally sail on Kenai Lake with her, something that I have wanted to do since we first drove past the beautiful teal waters on the way to Seldovia.

After a few fun days in Seldovia hanging out with Matt, including a 7-hour hike up Gradation Peak, overlooking Seldovia and Katchemak bay, during which I realized just how little exercise I got sitting around on a small sailboat all summer, the weather and dad’s work came together in a nearly-perfect window for us to get the rest of the way across the gulf, so at 5:00am dad and I had our bags packed with newly cleaned clothes and the addition of an asymmetrical spinnaker, we boarded our plane to Yakutat, with one stopover in Juneau and an arrival time of 11:00am. Thus started a very trying day. On arrival at Juneau, having crossed the gulf in a little over 45 minutes, we found that the plane couldn’t get to Yakutat because of bad conditions and some work on the runway, so we ended up crossing the gulf again, back to Cordova, then on to anchorage, where we had to turn right around and rush to get on the plane back to Cordova, which in the end, brought us to Yakutat, where the conditions had finally lifted just enough to land.

So now, back on the boat after my first sojourn away from her all summer, dad and I got busy preparing for the departure, stowing food, filling gas, buying ice, scrubbing the bottom where we could reach it with the boathook, and before we knew it, it was 10:30pm and we had just finished tightening the bolts on the engine mount, so we decided it would probably be best to abandon our plans for leaving that night, and decided to stay and get some real sleep (airplane naps don’t really count).

We were up bright and early the next morning at 4:00, and were motoring out of the glassy bay, leaving all the fishing boats tied up to the docks astern, weaving around some islands, past a large ship anchored in the bay taking on fish, and finally out past Ocean Cape where Darwind started to roll into a glassy, 8-10 foot groundswell from the south. The calm winds, the last we were to experience until resurrection bay, 300 nautical miles to the west, lasted for only a few hours, and by midday, we had the full main and #2 jib flying, and at around 3:00 in the afternoon, the engine was pulled up out of the water, where it was to remain for the next few hundred miles. Also, around noon, we were visited by a small pod of Dhal porpoise, who seemed to have even more fun playing and surfing in the sizable swell than they did in the calmer water we had previously encountered them in. Once the porpoise moved on, I started to feel the effects of a long day of traveling followed by only a very short rest, so I woke up dad and headed below. By dinner, when we really started to move, I relieved dad, who had been on watch for about 7 hours, and we decided to abandon the more rigid watch schedule of the first part of the gulf crossing for a much more flexible system in which we just relieved the other person when they got too tired or cold to go on much longer, then try to stick it out as long as you can before calling for a relief. It ended up with dad taking some long late-morning/day watches while I slept, then I would come on for most of the night, usually one really long evening watch and one shorter stint in the very early morning. Anyway, as I came up on deck in full foul weather gear around 6:00pm, with the boat doing her best under main and #2 before 15-20 knots of wind from the SE, picking up in the intermittent rain squalls that came down from windward every half hour or so, I felt great, fully rested and totally on top, and to make it even more idyllic, the porpoise came back to give me some company for a bit just as I came on watch.

Around 9:30, I hailed a large fishing boat overtaking us from astern on the VHF radio, and after making sure that he saw us and was altering course to pass to our south, I watched the big lumbering trawler bound for cold, stormy Dutch Harbor slowly plow past us, plunging and crashing through the swell that we were gliding and bobbing over like, as my dad later described it, “a graceful cork”. It was just getting dark as she passed us, and as she was on almost exactly the same course, for many hours I was able to check Ray’s course by her bright white sternlight, which remained in sight for another four hours. This was our only encounter with another vessel until the far side of the gulf.

As the first night of this crossing drew in and the horizon, already only a few miles away due to the fog, slowly shrank in around us until there was nothing but the boat, the wind, and the waves, the entire universe seemed to shrink and all that mattered was the bot and the next wave. The only thing visible outside of the boat on this cloudy, moonless night was the occasional white gleam and muted roar of a big wave breaking close by. I have always loved night sailing through the pitch blackness, and every time I experience it, the feeling never fails to amaze and impress me. Also,, this was the first time I had experienced it such a little boat, as on the first part of the gulf crossing we had clear skies and this far north it never really gets dark enough that you cant see the horizon. This time too, as the night came on, so did the wind, until by 10:30 or 11:00 Darwind was surfing along at over 6 knots, dipping the end of her boom into the water with almost every other wave, and causing Ray the autopilot to heave and strain at the tiller in a barely successful attempt at keeping the boat on course. I called up dad, and together we turned the boat into the wind, took in two reefs in the main, then swung the plunging bow back around before the wind to continue on course, still flying along at hull speed, but no longer overpowered, and with longer intervals between the boom going underwater. As it looked like we were doing fine, and I was far too happy to go below, dad went down below again, but soon the wind rose even more until I was forced to lower the #2 jib, for which I had to go up to the foredeck and pull down the sail. By this time the wind was up around 30 knots, the seas were getting pretty mixed up with the newly created six-foot waves from the wind cutting at an angle across the big 10-foot ground swell, while in all this the boat was doing great, rocketing off wave crests, surfing down the faces and throwing wide sheets of spray in every trough. As you can imagine, getting a sail down and secured on deck is quite an adventure in these conditions. First, from the safety of the cockpit, I got ready by moving the tether attached to my life jacket from the D-ring in the cockpit to the windward jackline(lines running for and aft the length of the boat and are used to clip onto in rough weather), then cleared the jib halyard and both sheets. Now came the fun part as I first slacked off on the leeward jib sheet until the sail started to flap, making a sound like a gunshot every time, then I pulled in on the windward sheet a bit to get the sail inboard a bit, and finally, I reached up under the dodger, found the cam cleat for the halyard and released the jib. Now, as the sail lost what little wind it had, it started to flog wildly, the occasional gunshot noise of before becoming the rapid-fire drumming of a machine gun, and I went up on deck. The Darwind is only 28 feet long, and from the cockpit to the foredeck is less than half a dozen steps, but in all that wind, waves and flapping sail, I was forced to crawl along the side deck between the cabin and the lifelines, until I was kneeling on the foredeck, with one foot braced up against the leeward toerail, at times dunked underwater up to my knee, and wrestling with the wet canvass, which was trying its utmost to tear itself free from my grip. I did eventually get the jib down on deck and lashed to the lifelines with some spare line, and once the boat was relieved of the sail and the flailing had finally been quieted, I exulted in the feeling of triumph and freedom out there on the wet foredeck, with my boat under my feet steering herself through all that was thrown at her by the malevolent ocean, leaping on towards her far goal across this rain swept gulf, and I lingered for a bit, just standing there gripping the shrouds, with the wind blowing my soaked hair around my face as I wiped the rain and salt spray from my eyes, and I just stood there and took it all in. And it is that moment, whenever anyone asks me what the best part of the trip was, or even the greatest moment in my life, that was it, standing on the deck of my own boat in a moderate gale, and just living.

The wind started to mellow out by 4:00am, and as I could barely keep my eyes open, as soon as the clouds showed a slight hint of silvery grey lining, I called down the companionway to wake dad, after which I collapsed on my berth and got a solid 4 hours of sleep before making some late breakfast/lunch and pottering around the cabin a bit. That day, Darwind sailed on between a wet, grey sea and a wet, grey sky under a double reefed main and #2 jib. Dad and I continued to keep a loose watch, and the wind played around with our tossing little boat, sometimes keeping us rolling and yawing from dead astern, other times pinning the boat over on a hard, fast beam reach, but at least it never strayed forward of the beam and remained between 20 and 25 knots. The seas also started to get better by later that day, due to the big 10-foot groundswell from the south starting to die away under the influence of the southeast windwaves, which were building into regular swells themselves.

That evening, soon after we passed Middleton Rock out of sight and only a few miles off the port beam, we changed course for the first time in over 36 hours, squaring away right before the wind to come onto a slightly more northerly heading to make up for too much southing we had made over the past days in order to make the ride a bit more comfortable. This second night passed much more benignly than the first, with Darwind rolling drunkenly directly before wind and waves under a double reefed main and the trusty #2 jib.

I also had a much quitter night, confining myself to a reasonable watch of only 5 hours, but I was up before dawn, just as we changed course back to due west in order to stay well clear of the rock-strewn southern point of Montague island. I took this short morning watch, during which dad and I put the third reef back into the main, but left up the #2, then I ducked back down for a few hours. During this time, dad reported the only boarding seas we encountered on this crossing, but he also said that the boat took them easily and though they were all three pooping waves, almost no water entered the cockpit.

Around midmorning I took over the watch, and within an hour I could see a darkening patch in the fog up ahead and to starboard, which soon resoled itself into the definite features of rugged Montague Island, before the brief glimpse of land was obliterated by the next rainsquall. This was the first land we had sighted since leaving Yakutat, even though for the entire voyage we were never more than 50 or 60 nautical miles from land, and with the 15,000 foot peaks of the St Elias and Alaska range mountains, in clear weather we wouldn’t have been even close to being over the horizon. In fact, I almost resented this intrusion into the featureless ocean, as a great lump of dirty rock trespassing into Darwind and I’s little universe, proof that the voyage was almost over and that the long-forgotten land actually still existed. As we approached the crags of land, the wind started to pick up, as did the seas, and one of the first things I did when I came on watch was to go up on deck to douse the jib, though halfway through this exercise, Darwind suddenly took one of the huge, building seas right on her beam, and then the mainsail gave a shudder that sounded like the a machinegun going off, and I realized that Ray, the autopilot must have fallen off the tiller while trying to deal with enormous amounts of weatherhelm created by the surfing conditions we were experiencing. I yanked down the last bit of sodden jib, then scrambled back to the cockpit where I shoved the outmatched autopilot into a corner of the cockpit and took the tiller, bringing Darwind back on course and surfing down the faces of some truly huge waves, just barely under control under only the triple reefed main.

I hand-steered Darwind for the next 2 hours, reveling in every moment of wild surfing, until we were around the Island, and the waves died down in its lee, though the wind, hovering right around 30 knots, was still howling down out of Price William sound, directly across our course. This was too good an opportunity to pass up: all that wind but practically none of the usual waves that make a boat so hard to control. As soon as I was sure Ray could handle it, I plugged it back in and went back up onto the foredeck to clear the #2 again, unfortunately, the wind proved to be a bit too strong for the extra sail, but as I didn’t want to sacrifice half a knot of speed towards our destination, (by now I had a serious case of channel fever, despite my earlier reluctance) so I went below to dig out the storm staysail, which I spent 15 minutes rigging before I could get it up and drawing. Unfortunately, in the unthinkingness of channel fever, I forgot to tie stopper knots in the sheets, and as soon as the sail was up, the heavy flogging of even this small, immensely heavy sail tore the sheet from my hand and soon had it hopelessly twined around the shrouds, lifelines, and itself, so that I had to go up on deck and try to sort that mess out, which though it didn’t take very long, was extremely unpleasant and painful, with the sail still flapping with enough force to leave a bruise, and the sheets I was trying to untangle were even worse. Eventually, with the help of quite a lot of four-letter words, both sheets were led back to the cockpit with a figure-eight in the end of each, and the addition of the tiny sail soon had Darwind sailing faster than she ever had before, leaping across the choppy water like a racehorse, sheeting spray all along the decks, and rarely taking her port rail out of the water for more than a few seconds at a time.

I was having so much fun, and was so infected with channel fever, that I stayed on, coaxing every last fraction of a knot out of the boat, for 10 hours, before the cold and wet finally got to me, and I went below, giving dad instructions to wake me when we were approaching the entrance to resurrection bay. Almost as soon as I had peeled off my foul weather gear, the wind, which had blown steadily at around 30 knots for the past 10 hours, suddenly dropped, until we were just bobbing along and dad was actually forced to start the engine, after shaking out all of the reef points and raising the #2 yet again. However, as soon as he had gotten the motor going and the boat underway, the wind came back at 20 knots for just long enough to kill the engine and get it back up on deck. After that I went to sleep, but dad told me that the same thing happened four more times, but that he had had enough wind to sail beautifully around the point into resurrection bay before the wind died and he put the motor back on, completely forgetting to wake me until we were less than ½ a mile from our friend’s dock in Humpy Cove, and he only called down for me at the last moment to ask where the fenders and docklines were! Anyway, we got all the fenders and lines rigged, pulled up to the tiny float at a friend’s vacant cabin, and promptly collapsed.

That whole evening, from 5:25pm when we tied up, until we went to sleep, we did nothing but cook the most delicious meal of beef tenderloin and baked potatoes and relax. After what they had been through over the past three days, we figured the sails and rigging could wait 12 hours at a quiet anchorage. Shortly after dinner, and once we had both settled down into our luxuriously still bunks in the perfectly silent and deserted cove, we were confused to hear footsteps on deck, which I at first though must be dad, until he called back to ask me what I was doing up on deck. At that I jumped up and soon discovered the trespassers to be a family of river otters come to check out the new extension to their dock (it now became apparent why the weathered wood had been so slippery). I ducked back down, and grabbed the good camera to take some pictures, and despite their reputation of extremely shy animals, the otters seemed more curious than scared, and one even seemed to be challenging me. After watching them for a few minutes they seemed to get bored and all 7 of them jumped back into the water and swam off to another float across the cove. All in all, we had a pretty good ending to an almost perfect crossing.