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Road to the Sea

The sailing adventures of SV Meriwether and her crew

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- Sailboat blog
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- Tim & Kerri
- Meriwether
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by Tim · July 9, 2019

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She takes pictures…

Photo dump of our weekend trip to North Bight, jus

Photo dump of our weekend trip to North Bight, just an hour and a half motor down from our slip in Hoonah. Last year, once we settled into our winter slip in Port Townsend, we had very little desire to move for the entire season. I don’t know if it’s just the psychology of not being able to move for a month (just fixed the engine starter a few days prior to this!), maybe it’s just how beautiful it is here, but even though it’s colder, rainier, and generally more uncomfortable to go out here, we couldn’t wait to untie the dock lines for the weekend, and are looking forward to the next clear weekend we can do it again.
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This time of year, even on a weekend when hours of laptop use isn’t draining the batteries, we only have a weekend’s worth of house battery power to spare. The battery and solar system that, the rest of the year, gets us by indefinitely without having to plug in to recharge only lasts a few days once the sun barely peaks its head above the horizon, the days get shorter, and the cloud cover rolls in.

The many moods of this mountain whose name I do no

The many moods of this mountain whose name I do not know.

While we’re out here with easy forest access by

While we’re out here with easy forest access by dinghy, we supplement our firewood supply with downed wood. We don’t use driftwood in the stove, as the salt water it takes on is toxic when burned. Instead, we look for downed trees along the shoreline that have fallen above the waterline and take their branches with our little battery-powered chainsaw. The “logs” they make are perfect tiny wood stove size.

Occasionally, over the last few years, we’ve had

Occasionally, over the last few years, we’ve had other boaters approach within a couple hundred yards of our boat by main boat or dinghy and then turn around and leave. We just now realized that it’s probably because they’ve seen our chimney smoke and were coming to make sure our boat wasn’t on fire. 😆 It happened again this morning. The smoke’s particularly white lately because we’ve been burning a boat neighbor’s not-so-pure construction scraps.

The last photos and stories I posted from the ding

The last photos and stories I posted from the dinghy ride were on a 17' tide. Here’s what the same place looks like at a 5' tide. That low part of the breakwall is where we had dinghied over to the wetlands beyond.

Tim’s back! And we had a sunny day, so walked ba

Tim’s back! And we had a sunny day, so walked back out to Icy Strait Point while no cruise ship was in, but we’re still unsure about entering based on the posted MARSEC rules, so we turned on around. A bit later, we took a dinghy ride right over the marina breakwall, of which part can be crossed at high tide, and explored the wetland inlet nearby.
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So much of remote island living is still a mystery and foreign language to me. I read the village Facebook page, and there’s so much that’s just normal talk to the residents that I don’t understand. Case in point: as the ferry won’t be running at the right time, some one was organizing a boat run to shuttle people to Juneau for PFDs. Lots of people wanted in. In the boating world, PFD means “personal flotation device”, aka life jacket, and this being a boat-centric town, I just couldn’t figure out why so much of the town would suddenly need to go get life jackets! Turns out, in AK, PFD also stands for “Permanent Funds Dividend”—the payout Alaskan residents receive for a portion of the state’s oil revenue.

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