Phoenix Bay, Afognak July 31, 2012 20:31 58N524 1532W19

Our Kodiak time has been a world apart from the Aleutians. Our hikes have been limited, not just by the bear fear factor, but on closer inspection those rolling green grassy hills with shrubbery we saw from the boat when we arrived, turned out to be rolling green shrubbery with small groves of alder – a terrain exceedingly difficult to make way in without trails or a machete. The Aleutian tundra we’d been enjoying had begun to grow to a height and density that was increasingly difficult to traverse as a pedestrian, but Kodiak’s southeastern fjords were far more seasonally advanced. Putchki was shoulder height to the Aleutian Putchki’s waist height. The many white white blossoms scattered across the hillsides here were not White Anemone as I thought but giant Putchki flowers. On arrival, my entire sense of scale was way off from our boat perspective. Interestingly the rare lupine here looked dwarf compared to the fields of Aleutian lupine with their giant blossoms and leaves (at the nature center in Kodiak we learned that lupine roots are a bear delicacy, a likely cause of their reduced stature here).

As we worked our way north the landscape changed even more. First the groves of trees grew bigger, with more spruce added to the mix. Then the Alders disappeared altogether and the spruce dominated the hillsides. A short visit to the town of Kodiak shook our brains a bit more with lots of boats, cars, buildings and people. We escaped quickly, scuttling across to Afognak Island for some calm, but yesterday’s cove smelled like Home Depot, and the hillsides had been stripped of trees, a healthy logging operation. Today we’re on the very north end of Afognak in a cove with an old familiar feel of the Pacific Northwet. Dense forests, driftwood beaches lined with ochre kelp at low tide, and lots of rocks ready to trip up any unsuspecting boater (we’re always suspecting).

Our bear count is up to about 10, all at a nice safe distance, most on the beach, one mom and her two cubs up on a mountainside. The cubs were great fun to watch in the binoculars, romping and playing. We were perfectly happy not to be any closer. We’re seeing a lot more sea otters now, but not quite so many stellar sea lions. Today a huge pod of humpbacks had gathered in the bay as we sailed in. It’s not easy to count whales, but at a single moment I counted 10 puffs from blows. How many were diving while those ten were blowing? Eagles, puffins, kittiwakes, loons cormorants and fulmars are still abundant. We have not seen any albatross in awhile, but we did spot a parasitic jaeger, a new bird for us. Maybe they had them further west and we just didn’t notice in the black masses of birds there. The wildlife is wild and full of life, constant entertainment.

Tomorrow’s predicted 20plus knots of SE wind should make short work of the passage across Cook Inlet to the Kenai peninsula. We have not really done Kodiak justice. The real action is apparently on the west side, but for now we’ve seen enough action, our brains are filled with some incredible images and memories. Everyone is now distracted by thoughts of an upcoming “real” school year and lots of “what’s next” questions. So we’re making lots of short hops, and we’re now 2-3 short hops away from Homer, our new hometown for awhile. Everywhere we go people ask where we’re from, that’s gotten harder and harder to answer. I guess we get to say we’re from Homer now – we’re Alaskans.

xoxomo

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Japanese Bay, Kodiak July 23, 2012 06:36 56N57 153W41

We arrived and slept. We’re anchored in Japanese Bay tucked behind a sand spit. The waters here are as calm as a Polynesian lagoon. And it’s greener here than New Zealand. The big verdant rolling hills behind us could have been used for filming the Ring Trilogy – except for the grizzlies. I think these bears would have given the Orks a run for their money, and the actors guild probably would have negotiated substantial extra risk wages. I can see why the location scouts might have written this place off, bears and the rampant putchki plants would make staging a battle scene challenging. Putchki is a local plant that is supposedly edible, but lots of folks have a serious reaction to skin contact with it. I can’t quite picture the actors rolling in putchki and using their plastic swords to fend off grizzlies. New Zealand provides a much more benign environment. Still I do think it’s actually greener here, and what amazing lighting – when it’s not raining (too much overtime the producers would say).

There’s shrubbery here, that’s new. As we moved east in the Aleutians, we saw more and bigger blueberry bushes, and by the time we reached Unalaska there were even a few stubby willow bushes, but no head-height shrubbery. Here there’s lots, all of it about the size of a standing grizzly, their own natural human blind. Still no trees not counting a small stand of five pines that look like they once surrounded a homestead. When we arrived we saw a deer on the beach, so the grizzly diet is not limited to salmon and berries. So far we’ve had only a couple bear sightings, they were all at the creek at the head of the bay, very far from our boat, so in the binoculars, they appeared as small brown logs that moved. No one seems eager to explore the shrubbery today, despite the promise of panoramic views up the hillsides. Frank and Logan who had no trouble swimming in shark infested waters, seem content to sit in the cockpit with the binoculars. How does one go about acclimating one’s fear response to new threats? My vote is to walk the perimeter of the sand spit. The grass is knee-high to a grizzly, so we should see one coming from a good distance. I don’t think we’d come across one walking in the hills on the side of the bay; it appears that they are focused on whatever is in that river, and I don’t think the blueberries are ripe just yet so nothing to tempt them away from the river there, although that may not actually be the case here. Despite our northward progress, the weather here is warmer than south of us and not just because we’re approaching August. We no longer have the winds coming directly off the arctic, and warm currents from the Pacific heat up the Gulf of Alaska (the body of water we now face), creating a fine radiant heat system for this region. Yes all things are relative, but whether from the season or the currents, it’s now 56 degrees in the cabin in the morning instead of 46 degrees – 10 degrees is a huge improvement, I no longer wear gloves inside. So maybe one could snag a few ripe bluebs’ on a sunny slope here, we would look if we could find any situated a good distance from all that shrubbery.

Gart and Deb say that bears don’t actually come hunting for humans, and that if one heard us coming it would normally run the other way unless we came between a sow and her cubs. We’re not their preferred diet. But people say sharks don’t much like humans either, that doesn’t stop them from doing a taste test now and then. I hated lamb and liver as a kid, over time, trying small amounts occasionally, I’ve actually grown to appreciate both, in small quantities. Who’s to say these bear’s buds have not evolved too? Go Bruins!

xoxomo

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Pacific Ocean/Gulf of Alaska July 22, 2012 01:18 56N05 153W31

We finally left the Bering Sea. We’ve taken a big leap ahead, skipping the Alaska Peninsula altogether, jumping straight from the Aleutians to Kodiak. There are a dizzying number of bays coves bights and inlets all along the Peninsula. We could have hopped from cove to cove for a good section of the coast, but recognizing that our preferred pace is to stay in a place and explore, we decided against lots of little stops, opting for more time in Kodiak. Also some nice light S/SW winds followed that last blow, so we jumped on the downwind train going east a few days ago. This morning (yesterday morning officially), pulling even with Kodiak Island, we turned north. It’s been a busy passage, we’re on the main freeway between ports in Vancouver/Seattle and Japan. Vive le AIS! But there are lots of fishing boats too now that we’re closer to some kind of civilization, and they don’t all have AIS. That and some patchy fog has kept us on high alert during watches.

Looking at the charts for Kodiak has my head swimming with options of coves and bays too. On paper it’s a tattered and lacy bit of land. If we had a dartboard and a spare paper chart of the island, it could make the selection process easier. Right now we’re aiming for a promising looking all weather anchorage on the southwest side of the island, arrival sometime tomorrow. Maybe I’ll write again after a nice long rest. Even an easy passage can wear you out.

Bear country, here we come.

xoxomo

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Lost Harbor, Akun Island, Aleutians July 15, 2012 23:20 54N14 165W37

Dutch Harbor was an amazing place to provision. The main store in town is a giant cross between a ship chandler, a hardware store and a food and clothing warehouse store, with each section pared down to just the items required for a long voyage, in high latitudes, by an international crew. They had shackles big enough to lift our boat, 5 gallon containers of diesel engine oil, a wide selection of baking mixes that did not require fresh eggs, and the produce section had everything from taro root and banana leaves to cilantro and corn. The Asian aisle and the Mexican aisle fought each other for shelf space, while the freezer had pigs blood for sale next to squid. At one aisle Frank and I watched two scruffy, well-tattooed, muscled guys grab 10 of the largest containers of peanut butter I’d ever seen, then walk on to discuss the finer points of which brand of packaged breadcrumbs tasted best on both chicken and fish, “that stuff worked great last time, everyone liked it, and it was easy.” One said pointing to his preferred brand. The other replied,”Not easy having that boiling pot of oil if the seas are big.” They grabbed a couple armloads of packages anyway.

We too brought home armloads of stuff. There’s a feast or famine mindset that emerges in me after over 2 months without a store, as we run out of the things that made the crew happy, and turn to the things we’ve been avoiding, the mood onboard darkens and when I hit the aisles of a well supplied store with decent prices, even I’m amazed at the things I put in my own cart, we try to limit the cart to what we can carry, but sometimes we go overboard and the short walk home with too much of the heavy stuff becomes a very long slog.

There were more eagles than inhabitants in town, and the birds hung out at the fish packing plants, keeping an eagle eye on the loading and unloading process, ready to dive on any pollock that jumped the hopper. It was a busy season in a very busy international town. Fishing boats arrived and departed 2-3 per hour round the clock. Workers from countries across the world come for the backbreaking opportunity to make a relative fortune. The dorm room windows displayed flags from Mexico, the Phillipines, and Ethiopia. In the streets we heard Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish. Two Samoans in shorts and flip flops in a beat up old 20 foot sport fisher pulled into the dock next to us; it looked like there last stop could have been Pago Pago, except for a few missing tons of fuel. Each packing company has a campus of dormitory buildings to house these seasonal, or temporary workers. The town of Unalaska across the bridge from Dutch Harbor has a small number of saltbox houses in the same hues as Atka’s houses. Another green-onion-domed, white Russian Orthodox church was the main architectural feature of the town. The one other cruising sailboat we met there were on their way over the top to conquer the northwest passage. They were a fun and eclectic group of gents. We joined them in the pub a few nights and picked their brains for the where/why/how of it – maybe we’ll follow in a few years, a pirate-free fast passage to Europe – as long as the ice breaks up.

There’s only so much dreaming, sight-seeing, local color watching, and provisioning a family can do, so after a week we sailed half a day north. Where we’ve spent the past couple days bouncing between Akutan and Akun islands, at first rushing to take in a cove with dunes and ruins and a two-mile beach, and another sweet town this one with boardwalks instead of streets. But now that we’ve done the place justice and are ready to move, we’re stuck waiting for another low to pass. Gales will be blowing and we’re in a pretty good spot for that now. We managed to pick up a cold or bug in Dutch, and neither of us is ready for a couple of all-nighters in a gale, so we’ll hang tight and maybe skip the lower portion of the Alaska Peninsula, and make way for Kodiak on the back of this next system. Since we made landfall in Adak, we’ve only gone 440 miles, as the crow flies, and we still have over 600 miles to go to Homer. Between finding places we don’t want to leave, then weather that keeps us there when we are ready to leave, the summer is rapidly blowing by, the miles are not – ‘course now I’m ready to go another 2 months before the next grocery run. But Logan has officially expressed an interest in trying out “real” school, and it probably wouldn’t hurt Kennan either (and it certainly won’t hurt me to have someone else responsible for stuffing their brains with knowledge – or maybe it’ll just change the nature of my educational nagging); and school starts before the end of August, a month away now. So we officially have a schedule to keep.

ah ah ah achooo xoxombo

P.S. I did get two new photo albums up in Dutch Harbor. I tried to include more pics of the guys, but the flowers and scenery are prettier:

Unalaska https://plus.google.com/photos/103820103700153271920/albums/5762112139230129297

Igitkin and Atka https://plus.google.com/photos/103820103700153271920/albums/5762108109782486449

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Naginak Cove, Unalaska Island, Aleutians July 4, 2012 21:41 53N52 166W33

Just got connected, and the radio is not working well these days. I wrote this on the morning of the fourth:

Happy fourth of July! Our national bird watches over us, just knowing he’s there makes me feel patriotic, although I think he’s expecting us to serve up some fresh salmon guts, I hate to disappoint him today of all days, but we suck at salmon fishing. We have not yet found the trick for catching in Alaska, a couple of cod and some rockfish are all we’ve managed to pull from these waters (and some big ugly many legged spiny seastars – Logan says they’re sunstars). We continue to hope for salmon, crab or halibut. Just one halibut could feed us for a month. For now we have to suffer with reindeer (tough life, I can tell I’m not earning any sympathy on this point).

We spent nearly a week in Naginak Cove, I could have stayed a month, maybe even a year. It was protected from all sides, had a thousand possible directions to hike up, a sky that changed the snowy peak view daily, and more sun than we’ve had anywhere else. I think the peaks were so high, they carved a little hole in the sky to mainline the sunshine, while it was rainy all around we enjoyed calm sunny weather. We had just enough cloudy weather to let our muscles recuperate from the strain of crashing down the mountain above on boogie boards (yes I joined them for a session, more as documentarian than participant, although I did try a few runs). A few new flowers popped up each day, my latest favorite, first spotted day before yesterday are the Lady’s Slippers, now there’s a flower that deck’s herself out well before hitting the slopes. I think she has a sense of the dramatic too, waiting to make a late arrival splash.

Yesterday we beat our way out of our bay then had a great fast downwind run around to Dutch Harbor. The change in scenery along the coast kept us entertained all day. First the old sharp granite mountains with their deep wide valleys and bumpy glacial moraine terrain below, then big broad volcanic mountains with long steep smooth sides and a few cinder-cones mixed in. The snow on top is melting at a fast pace so the lower slopes are gushing water; millions of tiny creeks merge with thousands of streams which feed hundreds of rivers that end in dramatic falls, all carving the slopes in a net of snaky white lines accented with a bright vertical flourish at the most impressive valleys. From the thickness of some of the glacier edges visible on top, the flow will not stop before next winter, even with global weirdness, it would take a few years worth of summers to melt it all – a sobering thought.

Dutch Harbor is a huge fishing port, the harbor master put us out on “the spit” far from town. When the wind dies down we may get to move into the small boat harbor, but for now yesterday’s 25 knots of W/SW winds seem to be holding and we’re safe at dock so we’re staying put for now. There’s a British boat on the dock with us, our first sailboat sighting since Hawaii, so we’ll go find out what they’re doing so far from home.

Nope mom, no internet at all yet and we probably won’t find anything open in town with the fourth holiday, so we won’t be calling a cab or renting a car to do a town run today. The weather is supposed to improve this weekend; we may just wait it out and move the boat closer to the resources then. With some fairly intense days of play behind us, we’ve got plenty of school catching up to do. We need to finish this school year so we can start a new one. We’re about 3 weeks behind.

xoxomo

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