Secret Cove

There are hundreds of small islets here on the Pacific side of Chichagof Island and a maze of narrow channels between them. Most of those channels are blocked at some point by submerged rocks making them impassable, but in a few places a boat as large as Starr can wind its way deep into the mess and find a protected spot to moor. We were in one of those spots last night, with the stern tied to a tree ashore and an anchor holding us off the stones. It was completely calm in there. The evergreens surrounding the anchorage forced any wind that might be be in the neighborhood to pass harmlessly above us.

After Starr was snugly secured here yesterday we all piled into the dinghy and went exploring. We passed three sets of islets to get to the outermost group, and there we found herds of dozens of sea lions burping, barking, and basking on the rocks. They were fun to watch until we made the mistake of moving downwind and got engulfed in eau de sea lion. Yeech.

We returned to Starr by a different route, and I don't think I could have found her in the twisting turning channels without the GPS iPad plotter Don had wisely brought with him.

Last night after dinner team Starr sat in the salon looking out the picture windows at the twilight lit scenery around us, sipped Zacapa Rum, and listened to Lori Lloyd recite Robert Service poems about Alaska.

We are continuing on our way south this morning after departing Don's secret spot. A couple of minutes ago we just missed hitting a humpback whale that surfaced fifty feet in front of us. He slid by on our port side with about ten feet to spare.

Griz!

Starr powered through the calm seas across Cross Sound, the northern most entrance into the fjord land of southeast Alaska in calm conditions. Our destination for the day was Black Bay, a favorite spot of Don and Sharry's on the western side of Chichagof Island. We powered south along the coast of Chichagof for twenty miles and turned left towards the shore. A passage between smaller offshore islands appeared in front of us and the Pacific disappeared as we wound our way deep into a maze of islands and channels. Along the way we had to stop Starr to let a fishing boat that was headed in the other direction get past. The passage wasn't wide enough to handle the two of us. After five miles of zigging and zagging we crept through the narrow entrance into Black Bay.

The Stabberts love this anchorage for its protection, scenery and wild life. They've had good luck spotting critters here in the past, and even before we had the anchor down Don had a bear in sight yesterday. We found him again with the binoculars after we got settled, a large grizzly munching on grass in a meadow fronting our anchorage. We decided to skip the hiking ashore.

Scurvy was the bane of ocean voyagers during the age of discovery. It is a disease that has, for the most part, been relegated to the history books. Team Starr does not want to be the contemporary voyaging crew that brings scurvy back into the news, and we have worked hard to that end. Sharry has been making gourmet dinners for us, and nobody goes to bed hungry here. Last night she made pasta carbonara, and it was outstanding.

This morning we awoke to find a herd of a dozen black tailed deer grazing in the meadow. This place is a zoo!

Stealth Mode

The might Starr is heading for a secret hidey hole this morning. The cruising pals that told Don and Sharry about it in 1997 made them promise to keep it a secret. We are going stealth on our position tracker and AIS to honor that commitment.

If you are following our position on the tracking web site or AIS and see that Starr has disappeared, don't worry. The AIS and tracker will be live again tomorrow after we move on to the next anchorage.

Lituya Bay

Lituya Bay is a six mile long by mile and a half wide body of water that runs between the steep glacier covered mountains on the northeastern end of the bay and the ocean to the southwest. The entrance to the bay is a narrow channel only thirty five feet deep in the middle that quickly shoals on either side. With a twelve foot tidal swing, there is a lot of water that moves into and out of the bay twice a day through the small entrance. The coast pilot said that the prudent mariner only transits the entrance at slack water, and we are prudent mariners, or at least we sometimes try to be. Starr arrived off of the entrance to Lituya Bay on schedule just before slack low water and our passage through the channel and into the bay was uneventful.

The first thing you notice after entering are the two toned evergreen trees surrounding the bay. Between the water's edge and an elevation of about 100 feet the trees are all a lime green color. At higher elevations they are all darker green. The line of demarcation between the two groups is distinct and obvious. We had already done our research and knew that the lime colored trees were all new growth since the lower elevations were scoured by the1958 tsunami.

As we approached the head of the bay the line of demarcation started climbing the slopes and topped off at over 1,700 feet opposite the landslide area that caused the tsunami. It was surreal to look up and see how high the water had climbed.

The second awe inspiring feature we noticed was the change in topography since the landslide. The chart, which was drawn in great detail prior to 1958, shows a "T" shaped bay with two half mile long by 300 foot deep inlets at the northeastern end of the bay beneath the glaciers. The inlets are gone now, completely filled with rubble to well above sea level. The amount of material that had to be moved to make this change was almost unbelievable.

With a new found respect for Mother Nature, we turned back towards the entrance and anchored for the night off of an island in the middle of the bay.

We wanted to get an early start this morning so got underway just after 4AM. This wasn't slack water though, and as we approached the bay's entrance we could see through our binoculars that ignoring the Coast Pilot's advice was not going to be a good idea. Waves were breaking across the entrance and there was a large standing wave where the water rushed out at the throat of the channel. We reanchored, went back to sleep, and tried again at 8AM at the change of tide. Sorry, no harrowing tales to tell once again.

As I write this we are running along the coast watching the scenery slip past. La Perouse Glacier is coming up beside us. This afternoon we will be entering the fjords of SE Alaska, practically home turf for Don and Sharry. Don grew up aboard a boat in these waters and they have been cruising here together since the mid '80s.

I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Good

Lady Luck has decided to stay aboard Starr as a member of the crew so far on this passage across the Gulf of Alaska. She has given us more than a day of glassy ocean out here as we head for Lituya Bay. Lori Lloyd, who is quite susceptible to sea sickness, is our canary in the coal mine and so far she is having a great time.

Good luck is important out here. I got an email from Clay yesterday with details on the loss of the sloop Kalaerin off of Seattle ten days ago. Kalaerin belonged to friends of Clay, competent sailors on a seaworthy vessel that were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a riveting story, and you can find all the details in Don's blog at Mvstarr.com.

Don and Sharry are taking one watch and Lori and I the other. Since there are two of us on watch together, we're sitting longer four hour watches now which gives those with time off a little longer sleep period. The watches go faster when there is someone to share them with and they are more fun. Last night Don and Sharry spent their watches listening to classical music. Lori and I listened to podcasts.

The sky cleared for a few hours last night and Team Starr enjoyed the full moon at the 11PM watch change. We hadn't seen the moon since leaving Hawaii a month ago.

Vigilance on watch is important out here as we've seen a number of large logs. We haven't had to alter course to avoid hitting any yet on this passage, but Starr has had a couple of close calls. Many of them are large enough to bend a prop or damage the hull. Fortunately, the twilight is still lasting all night so we are able to see what's ahead of us twenty four hours a day.

Vessel traffic has disappeared since Starr left Kayak Island behind at 4PM yesterday afternoon and turned in toward the coast. The shipping lanes to Seattle and points south are now further offshore so we are all alone out here. Our only company is the occasional puffin, gull or albatross.

Starr remains on schedule for a slack tide 8PM arrival outside Lituya Bay this evening.

Flash Mobs

After some terrific glacier viewing we picked our way back out through the ice cubes to clear water. The spot where the ice ended was right over a submerged moraine, the ancient limit of glacial ice where rubble carried by the ice was deposited creating a shallow area. The moraine was very popular with the Otter. There were multiple rafts of as many as thirty of them floating around. It looked like some kind of a community meeting or perhaps a love-in.

Wells Passage is a bottleneck in Prince William Sound that separates the northwestern fjords from the rest of the sound. As Starr came around Pt. Esther and into Wells Passage we ran smack dab into the middle of a fleet of hundreds of fishing boats drift net fishing, our second flash mob of the day. With that many boats out we suspect it was opening day of the season and an especially popular fishing spot. It was nerve wracking zigging and zagging as we picked our way through the long and hard to spot nets. The fishing looked good with lots of big salmon coming up as the boys retrieved their nets.

Later on we picked up the Polar Endeavour, a tanker headed from Valdez to Barbers Point, Oahu, on the AIS. Now we know where our gasoline in Hawaii comes from.

We ducked into a couple of coves along the way where Don and Sharry had a look at two oil spill response barges that they are considering investing in. These 400 foot long by 100 foot wide barges are staged in a couple of places in Prince William Sound to provide quick response if there is another accident similar to the 1989 Exxon Valdez mishap.

We stopped for the night in Garden Cove, the closest sheltered anchorage to the eastern entrance to the sound. We wanted to be ready to begin our dash across the Gulf of Alaska toward Sitka first thing this morning. We found a small motor sailer, Shearwater, anchored in the cove when we arrived. Don remembered meeting the owners a few years ago while cruising in the Pacific Northwest. They had just arrived from Sitka and are looking forward to spending a couple of months in the sound.

The mighty Starr has lucked out again with the weather, at least so far. This morning we are thirty miles down the track toward SE Alaska in flat seas and zero wind. We are running along next to the shipping lane, and there is a lot of traffic out here. We've passed a number of tugs pulling barges, a cruise ship and a couple of fishing boats. The visibility is exceptional. We can see a glacier abeam thirty miles to the north and Kayak Island came into view when it was fifty miles ahead of us. The forecast looks good all the way to Sitka.

We timed our departure this morning so we will arrive off of Lituya Bay at slack tide tomorrow evening. This was the site of the largest tsunami in modern times. The 1958 tsunami washed out trees on the hillsides around the bay to an elevation of 1,710 feet above sea level. A couple on their fishing boat, which was moored in the bay at the time, miraculously survived the onslaught. We can't pass by the site of this historic event without sticking our nose in to have a look.

Indecision is the Key to Flexibility

Starr's course wavered as she headed north, but we finally decided on Disk Island off of the mainland. On the way there we set our shrimp pots in 350 feet of water hoping for better luck than our first drop. We saw a small boat sitting stationary nearby and headed over to speak with them. They had just landed a thirty five pound halibut and gave us some tips on where to find more. We tried following their advice but only caught a number of rockfish, which we threw back. Discouraged by our lack of luck fishing, we headed into the anchorage at Disk Island for the night.

The entrance channel into the Disk Island lagoon was even narrower than the one into 29 Fathom Cove. With nerves of steel, Don maneuvered us in using bow and stern thrusters to keep Starr off of the stones. Our fiberglass fishing poles, angled off of the stern, acted like those flexible metal fender feelers you used to see on cars back in the '60s. The poles never touched the vertical rocky sides of the channel, but they came close. Once inside, we found a calm protected anchorage for the night.

This morning we picked up our pots and found another meal's worth of shrimp. Not bad, but nobody would call us great shrimpers.

The title of today's blog is one of Clay's favorite sayings, and it seems appropriate here. The ability to change the itinerary at a whim is one of the advantages of voyaging by boat. This morning team Starr discussed the course ahead. Lori and I had planned to depart for home in a few days from Wittier, a small port on the western side of Prince William Sound. That would give Don and Sharry some time alone to enjoy the area. However, while the wind Gods have been kind to us, the cloud and temperature deities have not been as friendly. It has been dreary, completely overcast, and cold for nearly the entire time we've been here in Alaska. There also has been a surprising lack of animal life here in Prince William Sound. We've seen lots of sea otters and the occasional whale and seal, but have yet to see any four legged critters ashore. The scenery has been spectacular, but we aren't seeing much that is new and different from the day before. As a result, Don and Sharry have decided to take Starr to Southeast Alaska ahead of schedule and have invited Lori and me to stay aboard until the boat reaches Sitka. We are looking at our calendars to see if we can make it work.