Day 39 - Gone Fishin' ; Rod

We wound our way through the Wrangell Narrows today. twenty miles of mostly 20-25' depth.  We found it reasonably easy to follow the navigational aids like breadcrumbs through the forest.  Several range markers along the way provided guidance through the longer stretches - we steered the boat to align markers on the far shore and stay centered in the channel.  The biggest challenge wasn't the depth (even though we entered the narrows near low tide), the width of the narrows (150' for some stretches), or the navigation (while exercising due caution); the crux was dodging skiffs full of fishermen, standing in their boats, who were focused on their fishing, and not so much where their boats were drifting as they wandered around in the middle of the channel.

There was a lot of salmon in the narrows.  We went through at the right time apparently because we saw a lot of them jumping out of the water and several being reeled in by the fishers.  Frederic made a valiant effort to land one by trolling a lure, but the salmon were unimpressed.

Exiting the narrows we slid past Petersburg checking our emails without stopping.  From there we crossed Frederic Sound and did some whale watching on our way into Read Island Cove for the night.  It's a beautiful cove, picturesque and secluded, if a bit tight.  There's barely enough room for one boat to swing.

Photos by Frederic

Lavanya and Jason have made awesome dinner meals the last couple of nights since boarding in Wrangell, arms loaded with fresh vegetables.

Day 38 - Charting the Wrangell Narrows; Rod

We're staged to transit the Wrangell Narrows tomorrow by anchoring in Deception Point Cove tonight. These narrows are twenty miles long and likely to be full of commercial traffic. The rules of the game are to follow the navigation aids and chart closely, stay out of the shallows and out of the way of other traffic. Standard navigation really, just a lot of it. We'll proceed slowly and do our best, following a course set on the plotter while Frederic follows our position on the paper chart. The plotter has an identical (up to date) rasterized version of our (out of date) paper charts. Having the paper charts along gives us the comfort of redundancy in case something goes wrong with our electronics at the worst possible moment.

The chart plotter is not infallible. It spontaneously cycles power occasionally, requiring a minute or two to reboot, probably owing to an intermittent power connector on the back. I've also notice that there are some levels of chart detail that fail to update properly and leave the screen blank until we zoom in or out a level - a problem with the purchased map data. For the most part, however, the chart plotter has worked quite well and serves to get us from one anchorage to the next without any problems. Even so, it is prudent to have a healthy distrust of the technology.

Should the plotter stop working completely we also have a full suite of charts and a redundant gps on a laptop, the paper charts, and as a last resort, a hand held gps. The handheld gps uses the least amount of power, so it's the one that is always plugged in and serves to warn us during the night if the anchor moves.