Alaska

Dear friends and family, A couple of you have inquired if everything is ok, and indeed it is. Presently, I am enjoying the summer in Alaska that never arrived earlier in the season. It has been sunny for almost two weeks with little wind. The marina is mostly empty as the fishermen are still out […]

Dear friends and family, I was determined to find a silver lining to the forced return to Wrangell in the middle of my ambitious cruising adventures for this summer.  When I think back on my life I now realize that some of my most awful or traumatic life events turned out to have a silver

Dear friends and family, After three weeks back in Wrangell, the last of the parts came, I installed them, and like some sort of minor miracle, the heater actually worked. It worked three days in a row by now, so I guess it might really be fixed. It’s really hard to find the cause of

Dear friends and family, Last night was my first night at anchor, so as I expected, I did not sleep that well. I know from years of experience that it takes me a few days to get used to my dwelling being attached to the bottom of the ocean by a metal anchor and a

Dear friends and family, Now that the boat is ready, it is time to get myself ready. I haven’t allowed for lethargy here, so I am staying fit by using the local community center gym (until it closed for maintenance last week) and my rowing dinghy and bicycle and of course walking. I regularly do

Dear friends and family, I am back writing and blogging, now from Southeast Alaska. I have been up here for five weeks now with an especially bigger amount of boat maintenance to do this year. I hadn’t hauled out the boat for four and a half years, so it seemed time to haul her, check

Dear family and friends, I’m sitting here in my bunk drinking hot coffee from my special yellow mug. I awoke early, about 0555. I keep it dark in my bunk with a cloth over the overhead hatch because the sun rises so early here in the summer. I noticed an absence of light poking around the

Dear friends and family, It really didn’t take long, two short weeks of solid rain and then the barometer shows a huge rise and the sun returns. The forecast is for several days of this clear sky. Within a couple of hours in this sunny day, the boat is dry. We have been living without

Dear friends and family, A version of this quote about San Francisco has been debatably attributed to Mark Twain. It seems to fit our early start this year to cruising Southeast Alaska. It’s our first week ended and we have had rain every day and very little sun breaks. To explore we need to wear

Dear friends and family, This is what a transit day on a small boat is like in alaska: There have been many days getting ourselves and the boat ready for travel. We spent weeks doing maintenance and cleaning to have the ship systems ready and working for another season. We spent over $700 at Costco