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June 10, 2009 – Stephens Passage, Alaska
by Herb McCormick
(June 9): Last night, at 9 p.m. local time, the 64-foot cutter Ocean Watch motored into Chatham Strait from the Gulf of Alaska to begin the final leg of the trip up from Alert Bay, British Columbia, to Juneau. First Mate Dave Logan was at the wheel. He pointed up off the starboard bow.
“Killer whales,” he said, in the flat tone he also employs when he’s sleepy or hungry. An excitable boy he is not.
That sentiment doesn’t apply to the rest of us. Instantly, the whole crew scrambled on deck. Logan had spotted a pair to starboard, but suddenly there was a ripple in the calm sea to port, and another pair surfaced. Logan throttled back and the boat glided to a standstill. Suddenly, still another Orca poked up about 100 yards abeam. Then another trio were spotted astern. We were surrounded by a pod of whales.
Logan shut the engine down. After 54 straight hours of motoring, the silence was eerie, but welcome. North of 55 degrees now, the sun was still high in the west. Its reflection glowed brightly off the glassy sea. All we could hear were the gentle sighs of the whales, and the occasional small splash as they broke the surface. No one said a word. The Orcas did all the talking.
We’d left Port Hardy, on the northern reaches of Vancouver Island, just over two days before, after bidding farewell to boat builder Paul LaRussa, who’d accompanied us from Victoria. Ocean Watch has undergone a complete transformation since skipper Mark Schrader purchased her a little over a year ago, and LaRussa’s mighty efforts had been central to the makeover. All things considered, “Thank you” seemed pretty trite, but we said it anyway.
“Show her the love,” he said, “and she’ll show it back.”
We untied the dock lines and headed out, feeling like Dad had relinquished the car keys for the very first time. There are two ways to get to Juneau from Vancouver Island, and in the interests of keeping to our schedule, the skipper had opted for the outside route for the next stretch of the trip. Frankly, the next 48 hours of the journey were pretty monotonous. Not long into it, a thick blanket of fog enveloped Ocean Watch. For long stretches of the next two days, the interface of sea and sky was indecipherable-the horizon had vanished, lost in a seamless palette of gray.
We hoisted sails and sniffed the wind, but the angles and pressure were all wrong; the “iron genny,” as the auxiliary engine is sometimes referred to, never did get a break. Ultimately we gave up and just furled the darn things. It was better than having them slat themselves to death. On we carried, putting the Queen Charlotte Islands in our wake.
Finally, the gray slate overhead began to break around the edges, and eventually we were graced by a mostly blue sky flecked by every type of cloud imaginable. I asked Logan when we’d see Alaska and he pointed at the distant mountains to starboard.
“There,” he said.
The Canadian courtesy flag was lowered from the spreaders. We won’t require the red-and-white Maple Leaf again for a while.
Sailing aboard Ocean Watch provides me with the opportunity to reveal I’m an idiot on a surprisingly regular basis. Yesterday’s lesson was glaciers. Out of the mist, on Baker Island near the town of Craig, a series of brilliant, white, pie-shaped wedges materialized along the distant faces of the isle’s peaks. I reckoned I was having a glance at my first Alaskan glacier.
Logan looked at me like I was from, well, Rhode Island. Actually, I am, which has been my lone, lame defense on repeated occasions as I’ve gotten my first extended taste of Pacific Northwest sailing. What I was actually seeing was scorched bloody earth, the end result of a logging practice that seems, at best, shortsighted. Clear-cutting the forest to the point of destruction apparently makes it oh-so-simple to slide the timber down the slopes to the waiting barges below.
In retrospect, we’ve been remarkably fortunate with the weather so far, and though we haven’t done much sailing, we haven’t been shellacked by a gale either. The Gulf of Alaska has a nasty reputation, but our inaugural encounter with it aboard Ocean Watch was happily benign.
“This piece of water has turned plenty of fishermen into farmers,” said Schrader, as we approached Chatham Strait.
“And plenty of vessels into planters,” added Logan.
The next thing we knew, we were into the strait and our neighbors were Orcas.
Scientist Michael Reynolds deployed the underwater hydrophone from the Applied Physics Laboratory with the hopes of catching the whales in song, then switched the 360-degree Ladybug camera from the APL into “burst mode” to capture the scene in dynamic detail. This was certainly what the scientist who trained us had referred to as a “moment of opportunity.”
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| Dall’s Porpoise |
In the still waters, Logan spotted a jellyfish, and with yet another research project in mind, I scrambled aft for the net so we could capture the thing and take a sample. Alas, I was too slow and it drifted away. But on my way back aft, I spied another, different creature. It was pulsing, clear, and relatively speaking, rather large. I scooped it into the net.
We put it in the sample tray and all stood back. It sure had looked like a jellyfish in the water, but now, not so much. In fact, it was impossible to say if it was a jelly, whale snot, or, um, something else. Our resident photographer, David Thoreson, dutifully snapped its picture anyway. Reynolds somehow corralled a slice of gelatinous ooze and deposited it in a specimen bottle. Schrader shot me a dark look, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I wrapped a spinnaker around the head stay of his Cal 40, Dancing Bear, on an ocean race to Hawaii. I got the feeling I wouldn’t be wielding the jellyfish net again for a while.
The whales disappeared and most of the crew returned below. Half an hour later, a pod of humpbacks cruised by, and just before midnight, a school of Dall’s porpoises began to cavort in the bow wave. It was one eventful watch.
At the moment, as I type, we’re about forty miles outside Juneau, and have in fact spied our first real glacier, in Holkam Bay. Ocean Watch will be tied up well before the long twilight, having experienced quite the welcome to Alaskan waters.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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