Tuesday 3 July 2018  Appleton Cove on Peril Strait  57º25’N 135º15.7’W

In Sitka we take shore leave from the comfort of our home base on Aurora. On terra firma our minds and muscles get a different kind of workout. For the first time in ten days, Jack and I spend some time apart – more than forty feet! I ride my bike to the laundromat or the library, clear email, have phone meetings, ensure distant aspects of my life are on track.  Jack scoots all over town, works out at the community gym, and anguishes briefly over news from Washington that tumbles in all at once. We bathe in chamber music.   We walk the docks talking to crews of trollers, gillnetters, seiners, recreational boats, and large tax-haven flagger yachts waiting for their guests. We revisit favorite sites: from the deep dark forest floor we gaze up at the totem poles and the eagles circling, singing above as ravens call out to us. We spend time with Sara and Brian, Gus and Emma and pepper them with all our unanswered questions.  

We’d arrived thinking this is the last time we’ll visit Sitka on our own keel.  We leave thinking it won’t be.  

The clouds hang heavily over the spectacular peaks that rise sharply behind the city the whole week. Twenty minutes after we cast off, dawn breaks, enveloping us in its warm embrace. 

We leave as we came, spending just enough time on the buoy at Schultz Cove for lunch and naps before transiting Serguis Narrows at slack.  Going through we pass Teas for Two and wave to Helen and Ian, who call on the radio for a brief chat.   

Whales, porpoises, dolphins spout and jump. The air is bone dry. Appleton Cove’s Alaska State buoy is unoccupied.  Where are our fellow humans?  

Wednesday 4 July  2018 Baranof Warm Springs 57º05’N 134º49.9’W

Another beautiful morning on Chatham Strait.  We arrive at low tide and Jack turns Aurora 180º with inches under the keel for a starboard tie on the north side of the dock.  We head for the bathhouse and get very clean.  

Boats come and go, leaving a mostly convivial crowd for Fourth of July celebrations. The exceptions are a couple of larger boats with commercial guests and generators running.  While barely audible above the roar of the falls, they spew fumes. Ted, the retired resident who helps collect moorage for the Sitka Harbormaster, requests they desist and they do. But after dark when the last of the outdated, disposable marine flares soar above the bay, the gensets come on after we go to bed. (Which inspires Jack to complain to the Sitka Harbormaster, who replies that a sign with the rule is a good idea.)

 

Friday 6 July  2018 Cannery Cove in Pybus Bay  57º18’N  134º08.7’W

There are a dozen seiners in the Bay when we leave Warm Springs, their crews sleeping off a couple of days of fishing. It was so much fun the last time when these big ships flouted the rules and rafted side by side from the float out across the Bay.

Saturday 7 July 2018 Unnamed Cove on Tracy Arm  57º48.5’N  133º38’W

 

Monday 9 July 2018  Cleveland Channel

Rather than go on to Portage Bay on the south shore of Frederick Sound, we decide to break the trip to Petersburg in two passages of approximately 5 hours each. So we drop anchor in  Cleveland Channel at southwest end of Stevens Passage just north of Cape Fanshaw.

When we check the weather during before dinner drinks, all reports have been updated.  It seems rapidly moving low pressure system is on its way, predicted to blow though and wear itself out in about 36 hours.  We’re okay with small craft advisories of 15 to 25 knots of wind. This report, however, specifies gusting to 40 knots.  And we are not yet around Cape Fanshaw at the point where two huge bodies of water meet: Stephens Passage and Frederick Sound.

We go to bed with the prospect of having to spend a day waiting out the storm and expecting to be awakened by wind starting in the middle of the night.

Tuesday 10 July  2018 Petersburg

We wake up early to the eerie calm that proceeds a storm. It looks like we’ll have no trouble rounding Cape Fanshaw and getting into Frederick Sound.  By 5am the anchor is up and we’re underway.  Before leaving Stephens Passage we see a couple of humpbacks, the only whales we see in days on two vast bodies of water known for their whales.  On a previous trip through Frederick we had to wend our way through dozens of half-sleeping whales.

Soon enough it begins to rain and we lose visibility while neither the wind nor the sea state is troublesome. We don’t see a single ship until we approach Petersburg and find ourselves in the company of a large fuel barge on starboard and a tug and tow on port.  Looks like everyone is on target to enter the Wrangell Narrows on a high tide at slack.  No sooner do we enter the channel than the tug skipper, who had been shortening his cable, announces to “all concerned traffic” that he’s coming through.  We scramble into low water on the side as the huge tug and barge slide by a boat length away.

We head for the fuel dock where the enormous tanker is already unloading gas and diesel. We fill up to ward off winter condensation that will put water not our diesel.  I ask the attendant how the fishing is.  Not too good. And where are the whales?  “Yes. Where are the whales?  I’ve been here ten years and a couple of times each week would see groups of humpbacks or orcas head down the Narrows.  Not this year.”Aurora’s new home is stall 106 right in front of Ocean Beauty’s huge fish processing operations.