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Road to the Sea

The sailing adventures of SV Meriwether and her crew

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by Tim · December 15, 2020

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She takes pictures…

Pure glacial “blue ice” — a hipster bartende

Pure glacial “blue ice” — a hipster bartender’s frozen wet dream. Layers of snow fall on top of each other and compact under their own weight, until all of the air bubbles are squeezed out, leaving pure frozen water with similar reflective qualities to gemstones (these are from the same part of the glacier that appear that radiant turquoise). Pro and home “mixologists” alike go to bizarre measures to make ice that looks like this (I admit, I’ve tried). The one thing about this stuff, though, is it’s DENSE. The usual flick of the wrist with a spoon to crack it just doesn’t do the job.
::
(Still stuck in Hoonah. Still no starter. Still abysmal internet. But we’ve decided, even once we get the engine fixed, we just might stay. We’ve got a local internet provider coming to install a dish early next week 🤞. More on that later).

It’s just one of those weeks. They say in boatin

It’s just one of those weeks. They say in boating, you experience the highest highs and lowest lows. The past few days have highlighted both of those. After we left Glacier Bay, we anchored for a couple nights in a mediocre anchorage as far as protection, but one of the few places with decent cell service. We needed to move no later than Thursday, as big winds would start rolling in that night. We’ve been having (what we thought were) cold starting issues with the engine for a while, but have always managed to get it going. Not this time. One battery drained, Tim took the dinghy a mile away and a cab ride to buy a new one. That one came to the boat DOA. We radioed a small fishing boat moored nearby to ask for a jump, and they came and spent over an hour with us recharging both our batteries on their generator. Still no go. It became clear that our starter was fried. So at that point, Tim made a phone call to the CG, just to get a sense of what towing options we have just in case we need them. There are no official towing outfits in the region, no actual Coast Guard assets in the region either. There’s a guy who tows out of Hoonah (where we needed to get to), but we’re 30+ nautical miles away, and that tow would be over $1k from here. No problem, right? We’re on a sailboat. We can sail to the marina and just get towed to the slip. But there was no wind aside from the occasional 5 knot gust at our anchorage, though forecasts were predicted it to pick up to good speeds (on our nose) in an hour or two. So we weighed anchor and let the current push us out to the main channel, and started sailing for an hour or two with a decent 5-12 knots on our beam. Great. Then the wind died. And for hours, we were carried backward by the two knot current, away from our destination and toward the Pacific. After 2NM in the wrong direction, we got in touch with the CG via phone and they put out a vessel assist (any nearby boat) VHF call for us, which got no response. Finally, we saw a fishing troller motoring back to Hoonah, and the really nice captain of FV Ariel agreed to give us a tow. Neither of us had ever towed or been towed before, but we worked it out… [cont. in comments…]

Posting another Glacier Bay dump in an effort to c

Posting another Glacier Bay dump in an effort to calm my nerves during this long tow to Hoonah. This Glacier moonscape, where the remains of glacial retreat are beginning to sprout new life, was something my soul didn’t know it needed at the time. The vastness and harshness of the landscape filled that void of not having visited the desert in over two years now. The life, tiny sprouts, even flowers, growing amongst glacial flour and rock, reminded me of how life continues on. Even in a retreating glacier, a harbinger of what we see as doom these days, life progresses. In less than 100 years, this is predicted to be forest.

We interrupt these awesome photos of Glacier Bay w

We interrupt these awesome photos of Glacier Bay with live breaking news of the highs and lows of living on a sailboat. This morning, as we were attempting to head off and motor toward our final winter destination of Juneau, our engine starter died. And, of course, weather’s coming in tonight, and we are not at an anchorage that would be pleasant in that. So we sailed off anchor and will be sailing 25 nautical miles (as the crow flies, about 35 regular miles) back to Hoonah, where a local will tow us back into the slip we had last week until we can install a new starter. Once we got out of our anchorage, wind picked up from 2-5 knots to 10-12. We hope it doesn’t build *too* much today, but even more, we hope it doesn’t die altogether!

143' cruise ship for scale

143' cruise ship for scale

Approaching Johns Hopkins Glacier. Icebergs only a

Approaching Johns Hopkins Glacier. Icebergs only allowed us to approach within about a mile of this monster (and we turned back from seeing even bigger ones further north because the iceberg fields were too thick for too far—it would have taken us forever on an already tight schedule). We saw some minor glacier calving, but nothing like the massive one we saw on a tour boat in Valdez in 2015. That one brought me to tears (as did the Aurora Borealis). But there’s something incredible about being able to do this just the two of us.

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