Pacific NW

Expeditions

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!