Coldest winter I ever spent was summer in Southeast Alaska

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 our full rain gear in the dinghy. To sail, we mostly stay in the pilothouse except for leaving and arriving at our anchor spot.

Like the song says” Hello muddah, hello faddah

Here I am at Camp Granada,

Camp is very entertaining,

And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining”

The good news is that our terribly leaky window appears to not leak at all this year. Our fix took!

The boat is really cozy inside, with heat and plenty to eat and read. 

We have lots of time for learning and writing and eating. We bake bread, cook great meals, read and even exercise in the pilothouse. A big interior space has it’s advantages.

Am I complaining? After the three months of excessive heat and sun this past winter, it will take some while for me to wish for more sun or heat. I’d like enough sun to power our solar panels so that we don’t have to use fossil fuels ( running our engine) to charge out batteries. 

When I was sailing in my 30’s (during the 1980’s) I could not imagine some of the newfangled technology that we use each day.

Imagine turning on an electrical gadget that would show a little icon of a boat, our boat, on a picture of a nautical chart. And it is our boat on the chart of where we are. Just think of that technology! Prior to this would be a large nautical chart and a constant plotting using parallel rulers. I would take a bearing on a mountain or headland annd then put the parallel rulers on the compass rose of the chart of that bearing, and then walk the rulers down to that feature of the chart and draw a pencil line. Now I knew we were somewhere along  that pencil line. Do the same with a feature opposite us annd draw that line annd know we were probably at this intersection. Only had to make sure I was plotting the RIGHT mountain for instance. Navigators are famous for finding verification marks in sight to match what appears to make sense on the chart, to find out later they were all wrong.

If wrong, the consequences are high. We could run aground and be stuck. We could hit rocks that could pierce the hull and sink us (less likely with our steel hull, but wasn’t the Titanic steel as well?)

This little gadget moves the chart under us as we move across. It shows land, water, rocks, and even depths. Something maybe Jules Verne might have invented. Couldn’t be real life.

Another use for this imagined technology is for sleep. How could anyone ever sleep, knowing that their floating home is loose on the water except for the attachment to the bottom with a steel hook ( annchor) and a bunch of feet of chain. Your home, your investment, your life, all hanging on. How can we possibly sleep? Turn on the ‘Anchor alarm”. This app sounds a loud and blood curdling sound (if you hear it when you are otherwise sleeping) to roust one from a deep sleep into checking out how far one has drifted from the original “dropping the hook” spot. If too far, that means that you are “dragging”, which is a nautical term to mean that you get an adrenaline rush and a chance to engage your engine  before resting on the nearby shore, where the boat can dry out with an outgoing tide, potentially on her side, since there is nothing to hold the ship upright with our thick keel, kind of like those Russian vodka glasses with the pointy bottoms that won’t stand up. 

In those old days of sailing, to fill the water tanks I had a tarp that I sewed a funnel into and attached said funnel with a hose to a water jug.i  allowed the first few minutes of collected rain water to run off, then, assuming the tarp was rinsed, collect the remaining water. If it was too windy the tarp would wrinkle and not catch water or by the time I rinsed it, the rain squall would end.

When sailing across the Atlantic, about at the halfway point, I heard water sloshing around our bilge. Shit! Trouble!

First thing to do is taste it to see if salt water or fresh. I did so, and it was fresh water. Phew, we weren’t sinking, that was good. But an inspection of our fresh water tanks showed one of two 50 gallon tanks had burst, leaving us extremely short of fresh water. Yes, I could rig my tarp and hope for rain. Wasn’t much rain in the Atlantic that time of year. Then I remembered: I had bought over 100 cans of Heineken in the Canary Islands where it was super cheap. Now we could arrive at Grenada hydrated and happy!

Turned out that with rationing we didn’t need to drink a single beer for survival.

Fast forward: as long as we are in science fiction, how about a machine that turns water into wine. Like Jesus, hidden in our bilge. Ok, let’s go one harder-salt water into drinking water. Ok, you know it’s not possible, but go with me on this. Turn on a switch and (in our case) seven gallons of fresh water, that was formerly salt water, drizzle into our tanks every hour. Jeez, you would never get thirsty, maybe even take the odd shower. Yup, on a small sailboat. No Heineken needed.

I’m off to enjoy all this technology which allows me to more easily enjoy what Southeast Alaska offers with a LOT less risk and the anxiety that could follow.

Sending love,

Charley