Hello.

Nice to be here and be able to write this.

I¹m ok, bruised and humbled (just a little), with a few more gray (or are they white?) hairs.

The boat is ok, although I¹m sure it has loads of new stress cracks. Amazingly, nothing broke nor tore, and I didn¹t even get to test the boat¹s built-in flotation nor the parachute anchor.

We made it here under our own power, thank you.

The bikeboat is ok and happily tracked the motherboat through everything.

The trip from Craig, Alaska, to here will remain in my memory for a while.

When I get coherent, I¹ll write about the passage (I had been up for 42 hours straight and am still weaving a little).

In the meantime, right now there is horizontal rain here - Alaska has no monopoly on that score (I notice one of the windows on the boat is now leaking - probably the results of the wracking to which it had been subjected). Anyway, the following is what I wrote while being holed up in Craig during some of this interesting weather we¹ve been having. I didn¹t get away from Craig until Saturday, the day after the storm, and sailed straight from Craig to Prince Rupert, trying (uh, unsuccessfully) to beat another weather disturbance.

If this horizontal rain turns vertical or at least blows horizontally from the north, I plan on heading south in the morning.

Boy, did I get drenched just now coming here from the boat into the Prince Rupert Rowing and Yacht Club (like the sound of that) - actually, I¹m killing three birds with this one trip off the boat - sending this e-mail, taking a shower, and not having to use my ventilated porta-potti in the cockpit :-)

Craig, Alaska, August 26, 1998

 Hi All!

 I just realized that I had the wrong date on my previous transmittal: I was in Sitka on August 21/22 and not August 27!

 Well, it is howling outside while I am cozily encamped in the boat¹s cabin - my stove-top clay pot heater raised the temperature from 51degF to a warm 65degF which, coupled with some Alaskan fleece loungewear (or whatever it¹s called), makes it quite comfy (a glass of California wine doesn¹t hurt, either). With some bagpipe music by Brother in the background, life is good... (mind you, I recognize that this perspective would probably not be shared by most of you). Hmm, I just had to bulldog-shut my forward facing Lewmar deck hatch because of the water being driven into it - it is pouring out there! Guess I¹ll have to turn the stove off...

 The weather predictions are getting better - this disturbance had been predicted for almost a week. What¹s coming on Friday is a real live storm! For those of you non-nautical types, a storm is worse than a gale, and has winds of 48-55 knots.

 Incidentally, I understand that the apostrophes in my text come out as ³=B9². I¹m using a Mac and plain old Courier 10 font and Claris E-Mailer Lite program, so if anyone has any suggestions on how to rectify this, please let me know. I will attempt to not use apostrophes until I can fix this, uh, anomaly.

First the Boring Travelogue

 On Sunday I had a marathon sail down the coast from Sitka to Port Alexander - I had originally planned on holing up in one of the coves along the coast, but once I realized that Port Alexander was achievable then it became a race against darkness and the next day¹s weather - the darkness won, but my trusty computer and GPS led me through the tricky channel into Port Alexander where I rafted up with dozens of fishing boats and sat out Monday¹s accurately-predicted weather disturbance. Yesterday, I sailed all the way down from Port Alexander across some large sounds and outside Coronation Island, and down to Craig, arriving in the evening, once again barely beating the weather - this time-dependent dawn-to-dusk travel is getting nerve-wracking! Not having any other migrating pleasure craft in the harbor should give me a clue...

 I am now beginning to understand why the Inside Passage is preferable here in Alaska: it¹s rough out there! The winds weren¹t bad - in fact they were too light so I had to motorsail much of the time; it¹s the waves that are strange - coming down yesterday there were at least two distinct incoming ocean swells (about 45 degrees apart) intersecting their reflections off the coast, topped with a wind-induced chop riding on top of tidal currents coming from the Sounds and Straits. Something akin to sailing in an area outside the Golden Gate called the Potato Patch. Messy, and the boat was not happy.

 Navigation

I¹ve always treated navigation as a fun activity and continue it on this trip - when in sight of land, at least once every hour I try to take a round of hand-bearing compass readings which I then plot on the chart and then compare to the GPS readings. It¹s interesting to note that each of the navigational electronics gives a different version of what is going on - on any given course, the Loran and three GPS units all say different things, with courses being sometimes quite strange (errors of 30 degrees). I suspect that one of the GPS (an older unit) and the Loran don¹t have properly programmed corrections for the 28-degree magnetic variation (nautical term) up here.

 Wheeee, a gust just rocked the boat, and this is a multihull, and they¹re not supposed to rock! - and this is just a disturbance, not even a gale or storm...

Some random musings -

 I¹ve taken to eating a lot of bread lately - it sure takes the chore out of dishwashing when most everything can be slurped up with the bread first - after all, I don¹t have a cat or dog aboard to clean the dishes.

 Speaking of cats, I was told up here that a tried and allegedly proven technique to see if the shellfish you collected is not poisonous is to first feed it to your cat and then wait a few minutes to see if there¹s any reaction...

 My observation is that most everyone in Alaska has a pickup truck, a dog, a gun, fishing gear, and a skuzzy powerboat and wears rubber boots, jeans, and flannel shirts. A girl whistled at me the other day when I walked by wearing bright red shorts.

 Having won the battle with black dots inside the boat (did you know that mildew remover is merely watered-down Clorox - I now have random white spots all over...), I was amazed to find lots of black spots growing outside the boat ... only to discover that it is soot from the diesel-fuel stove/heater stovepipes on the fishing boats (another reason to put the sailcover on while at the dock).

 Do you realize that my boat¹s living space is about 1/3 the size of unabomber Ted Kaczynski¹s cabin, and the Feds were going to use that size as proof of his insanity...

I¹ll end on that note :-)Joe Siudzinski siudzinski@telis.org