Leg 1/Shakedown, Seldovia-Sitka: 630 miles

Departure day at last! After three years of preparation, the actual beginning of the trip ended up becoming a very last-minute affair. For just under two weeks, after returning from Bristol Bay and a brief glacier-ski interlude in anchorage, I had been busily working on getting all of the critical projects ready to go, finishing the engine well, repainting the dodger, sealing the leaky hull-deck joint, and by Tuesday I thought that I might be able to depart by Saturday at the earliest. However, on Wednesday night, the forecasted southwest wind started blowing a day early through the rigging at 15-20 knots, and there was no way I could pass up such a positive omen, and such a beautiful wind. Thursday morning came and I had managed, by dint of staying up through 4am, to get every project necessary to sail more-or-less completed, and the boat cleared and stowed for an offshore passage.

            Over breakfast, I told my mom about my plan to leave that day (Thursday) and, surprisingly, she agreed, saying “You’ve got to go when the wind is right.” I had been worried that she would have insisted I wait for my dad and sister to come down to say goodbye on Saturday, but she knew that they would understand, after all, my dad’s favorite phrase after “anytime can be naptime” is “wind and tide wait for no man.” After that, until departure at 2pm everything was a frenzy of activity, including riding my bike to a friends house to cut one last part for the engine well, until at 1:45 I was finally as ready to depart as possible. My mom, and a few other very close family friends came down to the dock to say goodbye and cut the last dock line. (a sailor’s tradition for good luck at the start of a long voyage) This small gathering and quiet farewell was much better I think that the bigger send-off my mom had been planning, but as I was slipping out of the breakwater about to raise the main and cut the engine,  I looked up at a burst of loud cheering coming from the deck of the Boardwalk, where more friends and Seldovians were waving a long banner and shouting their farewells, a gesture that broadened my smile and erased the last doubts or apprehensions about the coming passage as the sails filled to pull me out of Seldovia Bay and towards the horizon.

 

Day 1:

            As I left Seldovia bay, running downwind under main and genoa, I quickly had to switch the large jib for the smaller, heavier, “#2” jib, and slowly hardened up the tack until I was close hauled, with spray flying and the bow burying into almost every oncoming wave.  This wet tack took me all the way out into cook inlet and around dreaded point Bede, whose swift currents and infuriating winds I was not sorry I would never have to round again, before I swung around onto my true course to shoot straight out Kennedy Entrance between the Chugach and Barren Islands into the Gulf of Alaska. Flying on a beam-to-broad reach at over 6 knots, and riding the last of a 3 knot favorable current, I was having a blast and Darwind was sailing at her very best. Just before the sun set in the wake, as we were clearing the last bit of land for the next 600 nautical miles, a pod of orcas, the male with a dorsal fin at least six feet tall, passed going the other way. The rest of the night passed without much sleep as I kept an eye out for any traffic through Kennedy entrance and played with the sails until finding the best compromise between speed and safety running under just the #2 jib on a very broad reach.

Day2:

            When I woke up the next day, I realized how hard it really was to spot and be spotted on a small sailboat as I picked up a ship on the AIS with a CPA (closest point of approach) of 1.75 nautical miles, yet I could only just barely see it even at that short distance, although this could have also been due to the heavy haze still lingering from the forest fires still burning on land. After the ship passed, the only boat I would see until Sitka, I spent the day, slightly queasy without my sea legs, resting under the sun on the one dry spot on deck, wedged between the mast and the life raft and watching the last of the mountaintops dip below the horizon, until about 4pm, when having not eaten since 2pm the previous day I made a quesadilla then took a nap below. At one point I tried raising the triple reefed main, but quickly dropped it, as it only caused the #2 to flop in the wind shadow and didn’t improve the speed enough to be worthwhile. That evening, however I was greeted by an old friend, the albatross, skimming low over the waves on a motionless, six or seven foot wingspan.

Day 3:

            By the very first hours of the morning on the third day I had found my sea legs at last, and after a night under an incredibly starry sky as can only be seen at sea, I also found my rhythm with the boat, the sea, and the sails. And of course, with sea legs and rhythm comes appetite! Dinner was a gigantic pot of spaghetti while watching one of the most incredible sunsets I have ever seen, either on land or at sea, and with the ever-present albatross whirling and skimming above the crests of each 8-foot swell, I was riveted to my place in the cockpit until the last bit of light faded from the horizon. That night, too, when I went on deck again just before midnight, I was surprised to see some of the best phosphorescence I had ever seen! There had been some the previous night, and I knew it existed in Alaskan waters, but had never seen it so bright so far north before! I spent hours staring at the spectral glow of the disturbed water, especially watching the phantom blade of the Aries carving back and forth through the wake, blazing with green-blue light and leaving a sparking comet tail trailing almost to the next wave! And then when a big breaker overtook the boat, she seemed to be floating for a moment on a huge glowing carpet of whitewater surrounded by black nothingness. Eventually, however, the chill night air forced me below for a nap, and so I climbed into my bunk a very happy sailor.

Day 4:

            As the wind abated somewhat, I raised the double-reefed main wing-on-wing with the #2 poled out on the opposite side of the boat, and so rolled directly downwind for most of the day, still making incredible time and an average speed of over 5.3 knots! We ran this way all day and through the night, with only a brief interlude to heave-to (stop sailing) in order to fix a loose bolt on the Aries self-steering gear, but this was quickly accomplished and we were back underway within 10 minutes of noticing a problem with the steering. – All in all the perfect day of sailing, I felt I could continue like this for weeks, and felt regret that the passage would be over in only a couple of days.

Day 5:

            When I woke up from one of my naps, I realized with a shock that for the first time we weren’t making 5knots, and kicking myself for not noticing and waking up sooner, I jumped out of bed to raise the rest of the main and switch the #2 for the much larger genoa, until we were once again cruising down each wave with roaring foam at the bow. However, the wind continued to abate, and the Aries, possibly still not in 100% condition after my hasty underway repair was not steering as well in the lighter winds that came and went in frustrating, drawn-out squalls all day. Around midday, I sighted a whole pod of humpbacks scattered around the boat, one huge one startled me by surfacing only 1 wave behind the Darwind, but other than that the rest were never closer than a ½ mile. After glancing at the chart plotter to see that we were less than 100 nautical miles from the Sitka docks, I felt a mounting excitement for my first landfall and the successful completion of my first offshore solo passage, yet at the same time a twinge of regret that the voyage was less than 24 hours from completion; I felt that it was too bad that just as I was really getting into the rhythm of an offshore passage it was already over.

Day 6:

            On the morning of the last day of the passage, the wind was even lighter and continued to die through the day, until by the time I passed through a fleet of over three dozen small sport fishing boats around Cape Edgecomb, I was ghosting over a glassy swell at barely three knots, and after passing through the fleet and into the even calmer waters of Sitka sound, I finally had to suck it up and start the engine which had sat silently on the rail since clearing the breakwater of Seldovia harbor six days before. After that it was a quick, calm 2-hour motor up the sound and inside the harbor where the anchor chain rattled over the bow and the boat swung to the tide in the utter silence that always follows a long passage, full of the rush of water, creaking of blocks and lines, and the whistling of the wind.