Pacific NW

Expeditions

It was a relatively uneventful sail up Unakwik Inlet to the Meares Glacier at its head. We passed a “State Trooper” boat that was busy messing with some fisherman’s prawn trap. The pot was set in 120 fathoms and they were getting quite a workout pulling it up by hand. Several large ice sheets were drifting out of the inlet, which was not a good sign. It meant that an ice sheet was still frozen in around the face of the glacier, and that spring breakup was about to occur. Meares Glacier is advancing and apparently mowing down the forest in its path. But we didn’t get to see it, for we were met by an expanse of sheet ice several miles long with the glacier around the corner behind a mountain. It was a great afternoon despite our second glacier failure. It was so hot in the sun we had to “reduce sail” to underwear and t-shirts. We drifted for awhile, ate lunch, and rammed the ice sheet a few times, dislodging parts of it. Tonight we are in “Cow Pens” anchorage. I went for a row among the islands at a perfectly light 2200 hours, which felt like the middle of the afteroon. The days are non-stop now. It is light when we go to bed and light when we wake up. Sunset lasts for hours and hours. We are the furthest north we’ve ever been in “Silent Partner”. Latitude 61 degrees North.

By god, we have gained the Cape! At 0038 hours this morning we passed through Cape Hinchinbrook and into the protected waters of Prince William Sound, after a successful crossing of the Gulf of Alaska. Way to go Silent Partner! We are at 60 degrees North now. For the first time ever, I had to crane my neck a full 60 degrees skyward to view the north star. The crossing was a total of 421 nautical miles. We have sailed over 1,949 nautical miles of water from Bellingham, WA. Sailing all the way to Prince William Sound has been one of the high points in my sailing career. All of the work I have done to make “Silent Partner” what she is today and skill I have gained in sailing her and other boats have combined to make this all possible. I have never felt more proud to stand on part of the globe as I do right now. For the next two months we will explore the Sound as I reap the benefits of all the efforts required to get me to this point in my life. Luck has been with us, and the Gulf of Alaska was extremely kind to “Silent Partner”. Thank you everybody who has helped me get to where I am today, I am extremely grateful! After dropping anchor in Garden Cove we promptly built a fire and went to sleep. I awoke well after 1000 hours and we are spending the day resting and re-gaining our strength. Dozens of sea otters are swimming around the boat, and the bay is filled with the shrieks of all kinds of birds. This place is absolutely teeming with wildlife! The landscape is fascinating. On the north slopes the alpine country virtually begins at sea level, and there are all kinds of pinnacle rock formations everywhere. I can’t wait to set out and explore!

We decided to go back to the Columbia Glacier today to watch more columns crash into the sea. First we ate breakfast at anchor and watched the icebergs drift by across the mouth of the cove like a never-ending parade of white elephants. The ice on the moraine bar had shifted during the night and we had to weave our way through a different notch. The current was very swift. Smaller bergs swept along in the current were smashing into the larger grounded-out monster bergs and exploding. It was a hot morning too, and the ice everywhere was cracking and popping loudly like bacon in a frying pan. In general the whole fjord was choked with way more ice than yesterday. The binoculars revealed that the entire face of the glacier looked nothing like it did yesterday. Further on up the fjord the ice got extremely thick and I kissed the boat’s bottom paint goodbye as we ground our way through, glancing off the larger bergs. Several icebergs were so massive that their above-waterline heights reached 2 and 3 times as tall as our mast! They were creating their own currents, calving and ice floes. Some time during the night Columbia Glacier must have experienced a full facial collapse! There was so much ice and water pushing its way out of the fjord that we were experiencing a 2.5 knot seaward current despite a flood tide. A stiff wind swept off the glacier and down the fjord as well, driving the ice out and making navigation hazardous for me. We got to within one mile of the face but we were still in big, thick ice packs. I climbed the mast and could see clear water off the face, if only we toughed it out for another 1/2 mile. I decided to abort the mission, for I worried that all the ice would seal off the moraine bar in a few hours and block our escape from the fjord. Never before have we seen so many large and numerous bergs. It was fantastic, even despite the hellish navigation and failed mission. The Columbia will have to wait for another time. Once back out into the sound we brought the engine up to full speed and wove our way around the big bergs. Many had made it out here and were drifting well out into the middle of Prince William Sound. Several colonies of sea otters were hauled out on the bergs. I’d never seen them out of the water like that before. Tonight we are anchored in Long Bay, a beautiful spot with the usual mountains and islands and coves. I went for a row and saw many river otters swimming and running around on shore. On several occasions I discovered upon looking into the water that I was floating over a swarm of Herring. The Herring balls were dense and composed of thousands of fish, and perhaps 20 feet in diameter. They would seek refuge under the hull of Modulus until I dipped the oars in the water, and then they would dart away silently. Tonight for the first time, it was warm enough that we went to bed without building a fire in the woodstove.

An incredible day of ice today. It began when I thought I saw the bridgedeck of a freighter on the horizon. It turned out to be a mammouth iceberg, spawned by the nearby Columbia Glacier. Then there were more, and more, and more. The Columbia Glacier is the second fastest-moving glacier in the world, flowing down the mountain at 68 feet per day. Not only that, but it is also the fastest-retreating glacier in the world. The result is that it drops gargantuan blocks of ice into the sea–bigger than skyscrapers–constantly. We had to pass over the old 1967 terminal moraine to enter the new fjord. Icebergs were grounded out on the bar, clearly marking its location. The icebergs here were so massive that they grounded out in water 190 feet deep, their tops towered above Silent Partner’s mast. The glacier itself was eight miles further up the fjord than indicated on the chart, due to the massive amount of ice disgorged in the past few years. Even from this distance we could hear the glacier thudding, creating small earthquakes that shook the boat. It was much louder and more sustained than thunder. It sounded like huge bombs going off. The glacier created its own sea-swell caused by the ice pillars collapsing. The swell was constant. We proudly wove our way through the ice packs for several hours until we were at last 1/4 mile off the face of the mighty Columbia Glacier. This is as close as we dared get, for the columns coming down all around us were shooting ice missiles easily out that far. Almost immediately upon reaching the face a triple-pillar let off with a thundering crack! The piece was as big as the entire face of the Sawyer Glacier. A sustained and deafening roar ensued as the mass of ice lowered itself into the sea. Missiles of ice launched 500 feet into the air leaving trailing streamers as they soared to incredible heights. This is not a glacier to mess with, it means business! The face today was 2 or more miles across and perhaps 400 feet tall. The water at the base of the glacier was 10,000 feet deep. A really big one! An hour later in the same spot as the previous major collapse, another collapse of even greater proportions occurred. What happened next is beyond description but I will try to provide a rough idea here: Relieved of the weight of the massive pillars above, a giant underwater section of the glacier surged up from the depths below. Before our eyes, a mountain of ice literally rose from the sea! It just kept rising and rising and rising and rising, until it rocketed to a height of 400 feet. God only knows how much remained underwater. Once it reached this grotesque height it began to tip over and collapse under its own weight. It simultaneously exploded, collapsed, and erupted in hundreds of directions. I’ve never before seen so much mass moving at one time. The mountain began to rotate on its axis like a giant horrible wheel, and the whole earth shook. By this point Neptune and I were screaming and shouting because it just seemed like the only appropriate thing to do. Giant pinnacles of ice the size of apartment buildings shoot forth from the rotating mountain and exploded into the sea with terrific clouds of ice and frothing tsunamis. And that’s just about all that’s needed to be said for today. We’re anchored in Emerald Cove, another one of those places that could pass as the “most incredible place in the world” for its beauty and majestic scenery. We are sitting warm by the fire and just enjoyed a great dinner with fresh vegetables from Valdez. We can scarcely believe our eyes and will never forget what we saw today. No words of mine could ever do justice to the awesome spectacle that we had the privilege of witnessing.

At 0200 hours I was awakened by the boat shaking unnaturally. Sometimes she shakes like that in high winds, but tonight it was dead calm. Then came the sound of ice grating against the hull and I shot up on deck in my underwear like a lightening bolt. A huge block of ice perhaps 100 feet long and 75 feet wide was pressing against the hull! I scrambled for a flashlight and discovered our plight: the ice had become fouled in our anchor rode which was pulled under the sheet and bar-taut. The sheer momentum of the ice was dragging the boat and anchor off the moraine and into deep water. I hopped into Modulus with my axe and began hacking away at the ice, being careful not to chop through the rode. But much longer the ice would have done the severing anyways. We were about to lose our anchor (good thing I pack two spares!). The block was much thicker than it appeared–about 5 feet deep. How this huge chunk of ice made it through the narrow river, and didn’t break up in the rapids, I will never know. It was a hundred times bigger than anything else that came out of the river. We payed out all of our rode very rapidly and finally I managed to free the rode. We had dragged a few hundred feet into deep water, but still seemed to be holding well and the night was calm. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Each time a chunk of ice collided with the boat I jumped up on deck, but none were as big as that big one. I finally got to see the night sky again, as those silents sheets of ice drifted past the boat and out to sea, all night long. It sprinkled a bit when we pulled into Valdez. It was a spring rain and smelled like a thunderstorm during a mid-western summer. We are really far North!

Some day I will return to Landlocked Bay and spend more time there. Today our original plan was to go to Valdez. But the weather was so good and we took one look at Shoup Bay and couldn’t pass it up. The landscape in Port Valdez is crazy. We are at 61 degrees North now. There are little to no trees anywhere and snowline comes right down to the water. Shoup Bay, like the rest of the area, is walled by massive peaks and has a huge glacier at its head. We anchored off of a moraine field that leads to the lake that the glacier calves into. There is quite a current coming out of the stream through the moraine field. In the afternoon (our afternoon we consider 1700-2100 hours) Modulus and I went on an expedition to the glacier. I worked my way through a series of back channels and kettle ponds, and hauled Modulus over much of the extensive moraine field. The shores still had about 10-15 feet of snow, but a thin forest of huge cottonwood trees was budding through it all. I will never forget the sight of that bright green against the white of all that snow and ice, not to mention the sweet smell the trees gave off. I finally made it to the lake, but no further. I tied Modulus to a willow tree and climbed up a steep rise, filling my boots with slushy snow. At the tops of all the prominent points I found piles of Kittiwake feathers and blood along with heavy eagle tracks surrounding all these places. Below me was the vast Shoup Lake and Glacier, all frozen up. The lake was in the process of spring break-up. Massive ice sheets were breaking apart and flowing out the river, where they were ground up and discharged into the bay where we were anchored. One of the islands in the lake was completely swarming with Kittiwake gulls. Apparently it is the largest Kittiwake rookery in Prince William Sound. Their shrieks were deafening and ceaseless, and they appeared to be in a constant state of agitation. I have never seen so many birds in one place before! The blinding sun, roaring Kittiwakes, and booming glacier combined to make quite the spectacle. I hauled Modulus over to the main river and we shot the rapids amongst the chunks of ice from the lake, where we were washed back into the bay and to “Silent Partner”. I had a close encounter with a porcupine later in the day, who was eating away at some willow trees. He didn’t care that I was there, I could have reached up from Modulus and touched him.

Neptune and I are getting into a new rhythm on the voyage. We go to bed late, get up not-so-early, and proceed slowly to the next fantastic anchorage where we spend the rest of the day exploring. Landlocked Bay is one of our all-time favorite anchorages. It sits in a bowl at the base of incredible mountains. Copper mountain is especially striking. It has everything a mountain should have–dozens of waterfalls plummeting thousands of feet through the air off its summits, sides too steep for snow or vegetation, blasted by ice, and has numerous overhanging cliffs. And at its base it is ringed in a thick cloak of old-growth spruce and speckled with mineshafts from the 1900’s. I climbed up one of the tailings piles and explored through the ruins of the mine. One of the shafts went way back into the mountain and branched off in several directions with rails coming out of it. But I was soon turned back due to a noxious odor that was blowing from the tunnel. It made me dizzy and weak and I quickly abandoned the mine. Next I had great fun pulling Modulus up another river lined with purple stones. These “river runs” are my new favorite afternoon activity. With great effort I was able to pull and drag the boat way back up the valley until I reached a point where a log jam blocked any further progress and my pants were soaked. Shooting the rapids and small winding channels through the tundra and muskeg was one of Modulus’s finest moments.

We resolved to get the boat under weigh early this morning before breakfast. The decision was revoked, however, when I pulled up the crab trap I’d set yesterday. In it were three flounder and one giant purple-and-orange starfish, that had 19 arms. Two of the flounder were big enough to eat! The cockpit became slaughter-house, and soon we had fresh filet of sole in our frying pan. It was delicious! After our unexpected meal we steamed out of the bay and into the sunny calm waters beyond. It is unbelievble how tranquil this entire sound is! All across the waters and up and down the beaches were millions upon millions of birds. We passed by endless strings and rafts of sea otters, and of course a few whales too. Everywhere we look there are animals in great number. Entering into St. Matthews Bay we passed through a swarm of bald eagles and Kittiwakes. When there are so many birds together they don’t seem to be afraid of us or the boat, and get alarmingly close. St. Matthews Bay is another gem of an anchorage. Again we ran into more bear hunters. They were extremely polite and told us they’d come back tomorrow so we could have our “peace and quiet”. I made a failed attempt at telling them we would not mind the presence of other people for a change. Perhaps it is a weekend and we appeared to be weekend boaters looking to “connect with nature”. At any rate, they left after warning me that there were a lot of brown bear up the river. I pulled Modulus up the river at sunset but didn’t see any bear. But I found lots of animal bones–salmon skeletons in the tundra everywhere and a huge bear’s femur bone.

Today is Neptune’s birthday! It is his third passed aboard “Silent Partner” while we have been voyaging. We took a traditional day of rest– and Beartrap Bay was a great place to be, a true Alaskan paradise. We passed the hours away reading, fishing, and exploring a lagoon. In the afternoon I procured a chocolate cake which I had smuggled aboard in Cordova. The cake was nearly gone by sundown, which occurred sometime around midnight. The days are so long that we don’t know darkness anymore. Even at 0400 hours it is totally light out! I miss the stars. I pulled Modulus up the river that empties into the lagoon quite a ways, until the channel got too small and divided to float in. Then I hopped in and went for a wild ride, shooting over the gravel bars and careening off the river banks. Once back into the calm waters of the lagoon the birds protested loudly of my activity. The bottom of the lagoon is lined with green stones and thousands upon thousands of salmon jaws. At the bases of all the prime bird-perching rocks lay heaps of the submerged jaws.

We awoke to yet another warm clear morning, not a cloud in the sky all day. The emerald-green water of the ocean was like a vast sheet of glass, and on it played hundreds of sea otters, birds of all sorts, and a few whales for good measure. There was not a breath of wind and we motored all the way to Beartrap Bay. It is beautiful here! Countless waterfalls plunging off the high peaks, avalanche chutes come right down to the waterline, interesting islands and lagoons to explore, etc. The geography is so stunning and fascinating that it’s fun just to sit in the back of the boat and stare at the scenery. Lots of fish, birds and river and sea otters in the bay. Another boat came by and landed ashore. They were hunting Grizzly bear up the stream, but they left at midnight. I think they may have been put off by the woodsmoke from our stove, which was hanging low and filling the valley with a light blue haze.