Navigating in the Fog
Some say traveling is easy, but we say it depends on how much spray is trickling down your neck or if you can see further than the bow of your boat. Surrounded by a volatile mix of North Pacific waters, our remote Kodiak Island home - way off the grid – is sometimes made even more isolated by the weather swirling around us. Warm southerly currents mix with lows coming off the Bering Sea, bringing us plenty of wind and rain, all of which make traveling a reminder of our place in the elements. No matter the weather, late last week it was time to head to town and civilization so we could get to Minneapolis to start sharing our fish.
The 60-mile skiff ride from our little home to Kodiak can be either smooth as glass or, like this trip, rough with the 23-foot open skiff throttled back, jarring with a thud as we pounded off the tops of seemingly endless waves cresting feet apart. Holding on to something was a good idea, as was keeping our heavy-duty rain jacket hoods tucked tightly over our foreheads, shedding most of the spray kicked out from the bow and flung back in our face by the northeast wind. Crash, spray, rinse, repeat. That was the first half of the trip.
A wooly blanket of impenetrable dense fog made our life interesting for the second half of the journey. About an hour out from town we hit the wall of pea soup – murky muck with zero visibility. Even the bush planes weren't flying and, though we know the route by heart when the coastline is visible, we had to be glued to our GPS to make any headway at all. This modern-day tool allowed us to shave margins closer than when Adelia was a child. More than a few times she and her dad had to turn back or wait out the wall of white to be able to safely finish their water route.
Not many have that sort of fragility when commuting to work. If our outboard hiccuped with bad gas or had a mechanical failure, it wasn't going to be good. Likewise, if the GPS cut out, we would truly be lost, heading for, possibly, Hawaii. The thick fog, giving away no sign of the rocky shoreline, magnified the sense that the endless deep-ocean roll passing under our keel was our entire world out there. If we hadn't been trying to get somewhere in a timely fashion, the fog might be seen as peaceful and blanketing instead of a looming swath of navigational hazard.
Finally, the rocks of Spruce Cape came into view, and with them a sense of relief that from there we could nose our way to town by sight alone if need be. The bull kelp waving in the swells and the clanging of the navigational buoy bells in the channel marked our passage to the safety of port.
From this calm, we entered a whirlwind few days of family visits and tasks – visiting our niece’s 3rd grade classroom to talk about how weather affects our lives, arranging shipping for our frozen salmon orders, lining up printing of labels, and getting the skiff out of the corrosive ocean water for storage. This last chore involved repairing damage done to the tongue of the trailer. Keeping on top of ongoing maintenance ourselves is a continuous theme of our lives, always balancing the time and cost of short term versus permanent repairs. Do we do the temporary fix of making the tongue shorter or the more complex fix of replacing the tongue with other steel? This time we went with the tried and true bush Alaskan fix: temporary but permanent. Shorten it for now. Replace the steel later. Maximize use of everything and talk to other people about what they have done, all while making forward progress.
When it was time to fly south, though Kodiak had been shrouded most of this month in the mists of North Pacific fall weather, stranding some air passengers for as long as a week since our runway is short and ends either in the ocean or at a 2,000-foot mountain, the fog lifted just enough for the Alaska Airlines jet to squeeze under the clouds, land, and get us out. Now, let's share some salmon!