Faith

One of Lori Lloyd's and my favorite pastimes when cruising is beach combing for glass balls, the Japanese fishing floats that drift around the Pacific and occasionally wash up on the shore.  We have a collection of about a hundred of them in our Hawaii home, and each has its own fun story to tell about how it came into our lives.

Forty four years ago I found sixty of them on a Niihau beach in ninety minutes.  It was a good day.  Two of the balls I found that day sit prominently on our dining room table, half filled with water, begging for dinner guests to speculate on how the water got in there.  We've found found five glass balls on Moku pe'a in the past fifteen years, including one my daughter Kara picked up on that same Niihau beach on her sixteenth birthday.  The last one Lori and I found was back in 2010 when we got a twelve inch diameter green ball in the middle of the Molokai Channel while sailing home from Molokai.

The Japanese stopped using glass for their fishing floats in favor of the lighter, cheaper, more durable plastic balls sometime during the second half of the twentieth century.  Glass balls are getting harder and harder to find as those that are left continue to wash up on beaches around the Pacific.  We have faith that there are still some out there though, and we continue to look for them at every opportunity.  We looked unsuccessfully on our South Pacific voyages in 2011, 2014, and 2017.  We are looking here in Alaska on this trip too.

Yesterday Thankful passed close to Patterson Island as we departed Kasaan Bay.  On the island's leeward side we spied a nice looking cove and decided to check it out.  It wasn't written up in either the cruising guides or coast pilot, but the unnamed cove was deep, protected, beautiful, and full of seals.  We anchored at its head end in fifty feet of water.

Further down the coast of the island looked like it would be a good spot to pick up a halibut, so Matt and I launched the dingy and powered down there to fish.  His two pieces of herring bait only lasted about thirty seconds on the bottom before they were stripped from the hooks, probably by some harbor porpoise that were close by.  In on the coast we noticed a large orange fender among the driftwood on the beach.

After returning to the mothership in the newly named "Thankful Cove", Matt and Vicky went out exploring in the dinghy.  They returned to our fishing spot to check out the fender on the beach.  While ashore there Vicki found a gorgeous ten inch diameter glass ball complete with net!

I believe the Thankful crew has identified its favorite Alaska anchorage.

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