Here it is! Don’s rendition of the trip to Alaska in January aboard the Sunline. This is long. Fair warning 
Sue
Bill Applin and I left Westport at about noon and were hoping to go up the outside all the way to Alaska making the trip to Craig, AK in just under 4 days. We were taking 4 hour watches around the clock. It was rough when we left Westport. The bar was closed to boats under 40 feet. The Coast Guard was reporting 8 to 10 foot seas with occasional 12 footers. That is just what we found. The swell was from the north west putting it almost on the nose. It was not comfortable.
When we got underway I got Bill comfortable with running the boat and gave him headings and then I laid down for a short nap. Neither of us were really tired yet but I didn’t want us to get that way any sooner than necessary. It was dark when I got up to take over. The auto pilot was working great and the boat was steering very well. However, I didn’t feel so good. I was feeling sea sick and wasn’t able to shake it. I felt fine when laying down but soon after I got up and Bill went to bed I had to get a bucket. I had to use that bucket that way about 4 times for each my next 3 shifts. Bill felt fine. I didn’t feel like eating anything and I think Bill was afraid to because he didn’t want to get sick too. Neither of us ate anything at all for over 2 days.
The weather was forecast to get better by about daylight of our second day out. Well, it did get better but not until later that afternoon. Then the auto pilot decided to quit. When steering by hand I realized that we had air in the hydraulic steering system and it was no longer steering as it should. We had to fight it and it was getting rougher again so I decided to head in.
We went around Cape Scott at the north end of Vancouver Island. The sea seemed to have settled down a lot by the time we got to Cape Scott so I decided to head straight across and duck in at Milbanke Sound and thereby pass around Bella Bella and save about 50 miles. We arrived at Nowish Island just as it was getting dark. There I discovered that my old computer program that I was using with a makeshift GPS was actually delayed about 5 or 10 minutes and we were actually a couple miles farther along than the GPS said we were. I went right by the entrance to Nowish Cove and things just didn’t look right on the radar. Once I realized what the GPS was doing I turned around and felt my way into the cove in the dark. It was a very small cove that was really neat and well protected but deeper than I like to anchor in. It was 14 fathoms and not having any good experiences with my anchor winch I was uneasy’ but there was no choice so down she went. We covered almost exactly 400 miles in about 52 hours.
By this time we were both ready to EAT. I don’t remember just what we had— but I bet it was really good! Next morning that anchor winch pulled that 5/8 chain and 300# anchor up as if it were nothing. That really pleased me. We pulled the anchor before daylight and I really don’t like that in tight quarters. You can’t see anything and it takes a minute to come in from deck work to see just what the radar is telling you. We weren’t moving yet so the GPS couldn’t tell which way we were pointing because we weren’t going. It just confirmed my dislike for running in the dark. First light was about 7:30 and by 4:30 it was dark so that really shortened our days and made the rest of the trip lots longer.
From Nowish Cove (With a name like that sometimes you wonder of you should stay there) we ran up Finlayson Channel, past Klemtu, into Tolmie Channel which put us into Princess Royal Channel. Butedale is in the northern part of that and I pulled close to their dock so Bill could see the place. There were two boats tied up there and someone called us on the VHF to tell us where to tie up. I told him we were not stopping just looking.
I told Bill about how about 35 years ago they, the owners of the cannery and fish plant, decided it was no longer cost effective to operate so they walked off and left the place. They left a caretaker but that was all. They had 2, 48 inch wood pipelines bringing water from a lake above for hydro power. When they left, they left all the lights on and the power going. The story goes that those lights continued to stay on for 2 years after they left. I am sure the care taker did a little maintenance but still that is a lot of power being generated for no use.
About 5 years ago when Ervin and I made our last trip south with the Trinity we stopped in there and tied up over night. We went up and talked to the care taker. He showed us the power plant. The wood pipes have been vandalized and one is completely gone and the other has lots of wood missing from it but it still had a stream of water about 4 inches deep running down the bottom of the pipe. There was still one Pelton wheel attached to the armature of a big generator. The shaft of that armature is about 10 feet long and 8 inches in diameter and of course the windings of the armature are still there (it probably weighs several tons) and that entire armature is turning at about 100 or 150 RPM from that 4″ of water hitting the Pelton Wheel.
There were several small gas generators that had been torn down and were all junk showing that care takers of the past had used some power for a few lights, a radio and a freezer. These looked to be about 1500 watt size, nothing like the several hundred kilowatts the original generators put out. Anyway, this care taker had been there for a couple years and he saw that armature turning and decided to use it. He put a V-pulley on the end of that shaft that had several diameter pulleys on it. he had selected the second largest and with that he had a V-belt turning an automotive alternator that was connected to a car battery. He had a 1000 watt inverter connected to the battery and with that he ran 2 radios, 3 or 4 lights, and 2 chest freezers. He said it had been running for about 6 months.
Oh well, back to our trip: These channels are very long, narrow and deep. There are very few places to anchor because they are so deep. It is a beautiful passage. However, when we went through the clouds were more than half way down the mountains and it was raining or snowing most of the time which gave us very limited visibility and almost no view of this beautiful passage, so Bill just has to take my word for it. At the north end of Princess Royal Channel is another main channel going to Kitimat, BC. We crossed that and anchored in a little bite by Hartly Bay at the south end of Grenville Channel. We covered about 70 miles running from before daylight until we could just barely see to anchor.
The next morning we were up and going before daylight again. And again Grenville Channel is a very long, slightly curved, deep, beautiful channel. And we still couldn’t see any of the beauty. We did, however, see quite an accumulation of ice on our boat. Bill had to go outside several times to scrape the snow off the windshield. Ice built up on the railings and anchor winch and half way up the furled head sail. The roller furling system at the bottom had about an inch of ice covering it. We had very little wind in those channels and nearly a flat sea but we kept hearing of storm warnings for wind blowing hard out of interior passes. We picked up the ice when crossing those passes.
That afternoon we anchored in Chismore Passage just short of Prince Rupert. We only covered about 58 miles but there were no other anchorages that we could reach until long after dark.
The next morning we headed out hearing these storm warnings and I knew that Dixon Entrance was not going to be nice. But you never know until you go and look so we started out. Chatham Sound is a big body of water in front of Prince Rupert and runs from our anchorage all the way into Dixon Entrance. It was not nice. The wind was blowing right on our nose. And as we went it kept getting worse. That was the roughest part of our entire trip. Fortunately it was warm enough that we weren’t adding much ice. In fact by about 11:00 I could see that we were loosing some of the ice. But we sure had a lot of green water running down our decks.
The night before we had tied a reef in both the staysail and the mizzen sail. I wanted them up to stabilize the boat because I knew that crossing Dixon Entrance the wind and sea would be right on our beam. The sea kept getting bigger and by the time I got to Green Island I was looking for all the places I could go to get out of it. But the boat handled it very well and we kept going. It continued to get worse until we were actually in Dixon Entrance and then we changed direction a little and so did the wind. Then we were getting it right on the beam. I think the wind came up a bit there but the direction was better. However, we weren’t very far out into Dixon Entrance when the staysail tore. It tore from the leach at the tied place for the reef and then it flogged it self badly. I wasn’t about to go outside with the wind and spray to take it down. We arrived in Ketchikan well after dark after covering 97 miles.
Sue met us at the dock and was surprised at all the ice build up. She should have seen it about 10 hours sooner! The boat was listing heavily to the port and I thought it must have been ice, but the next morning when it was light, I looked and there was a little more ice on that side but not that much more. I finally discovered that I had both fuel tanks feeding the system and when we were heeled to the port for so long crossing Dixon Entrance and Chatham Sound a couple hundred gallons of fuel slowly shifted from the high starboard tank to the lower port tank. We were in Ketchikan for a couple days and during that time it shifted back into the proper tank so we were no longer listing.
I tried to find someone to repair the autopilot with no luck. We spent two nights and one day in Ketchikan and then headed out again about an hour before daylight. There were still high wind warnings blowing out of interior passes. I didn’t want to go back into Dixon Entrance again with the cold weather and high wind causing freezing spray so I decided to go around the north end of Prince Of Wales Island. I was worried about crossing Behm Canal getting back into Clarence Strait with the wind blowing out of the interior passes, but it hadn’t come up yet as we crossed. It was just getting daylight as we passed Guard Island just out of Ketchikan. Clarence Strait can get really nasty with a southeast wind or a northerly but with that northeast is was fine. It got a bit lumpy as we crossed in front of Earnest Sound and really didn’t settle down until we got behind the Blashke Islands close to Whale Pass. We had lots of fog and limited visibility because of rain and snow, so we saw almost nothing all day long. It seemed as though I should go into Whale Pass, but I decided that it would just be two hours out of my way, so we went on and anchored in Exchange Cove just as it was getting dark.
The next morning the wind was blowing about 25 knots right out of the cut on the east side of Exchange Cove. The forecast called for storm warnings with 50 knot winds blowing out of interior passes. That is not good for northern Sumner Strait which is where we needed to go. But we decided to go look. Red bay was just around the corner to get out of it if it was too bad.
We got up an hour before daylight and I turned on the spreader lights which light up the entire deck very nicely. As the anchor came up I herd a glob of mud plop back into the water and the anchor wouldn’t come over the roller. I dropped it back down a couple fathoms and brought it up again and again I heard more mud plop back in and it almost broke over the roller but not quite. More mud plopped back so I tried once more only this time the anchor nearly came over but instead the roller chain inside the anchor winch which connects the hydraulic motor to the anchor winch drum broke which put the anchor and all its chain freewheeling to the bottom. With that wind blowing across the bay like it was the boat would be on the beach in no time if I didn’t get that anchor rode stopped in a hurry. I dove across the winch to crank down the drum break and got it stopped after all the chain and about 100 feet of cable went out. The anchor stopped us going backwards a couple hundred feet from the bank but there are 600 feet of cable on that drum so I sure wanted that break to stop it going out.
By this time I was cold and decided to go back inside and wait until I warmed up and it got light out. Using the halyard winches on the main mast, Bill and I spent the next two and a half hours pulling the boat into the wind and piling the anchor cable on deck in order to get to the end of the chain. Once we had the chain up I tied a rope with a buoy on it onto the end of the chain and unclamped the cable from the chain. So now I had a 300 pound anchor and 90 feet of 5/8″ chain on the bottom of Exchange cove and we headed out again.
This time as I turned the corner heading west down Sumner Strait my options were severely reduced. I could not go into Red bay to hide, or at least if I did I could not anchor. I could turn around and go into Whale Pass and tie to the float there but that was going backwards. We had about a 6 foot chop quartering on the stern which is most uncomfortable in most boats but Sunline handled it very well. We continued on and by afternoon we were heading into Shakan Bay. Rusty and Holly Nix are caretakers at the mine at Calder Bay at the head of Shakan Bay. They are friends so I called Rusty on the radio. He was surprised to hear from us and told us where we could tie up.
It was just getting dark as we arrived and Rusty started out by telling me that they had a place for me to tie up until yesterday when the ice took out their floats. What a blow that was to me. With no anchor and nowhere to tie I would have to keep going in the dark. We were right at the entrance of El Capitan Pass and were planning to go through. El Capitan Pass is a challenge in the best of times but in the dark when I hadn’t been in it for 30 years–I sure didn’t want to– but then Rusty told me I could tie to a barge there. He would meet me there and show me exactly where to tie.
It was a big, steel, ocean going barge that had been permanently anchored for ships to tie to. It had 3 huge bumpers that were about 100 feet apart and were cylindrical in shape and about 8 feet in diameter. Rusty was there to meet us and I pulled in between the bumpers and had to toss my lines up to Rusty. He tied us up but the side of the barge was about 10 feet above our deck. Rusty had brought a ladder with him which he put over the side and we were able to climb up it. There was about a foot of fresh snow on the ground. Rusty drove us back to his house where he fed us a great meal. Both Rusty and Holly are great cooks. We had a very pleasant visit with them that evening but as we were leaving I realized that we could not leave without Rusty coming down to untie us and take his ladder. So he graciously did that for us in the morning a bit before daylight, and we were off again.
El Capitan Passage is beautiful any time but especially in the winter. It was gorgeous! But, boy was I glad I was not trying to navigate that at night with the radar. I probably could have made it with the combination of the radar and the GPS but I would have been a stressed out wreck. As it was we were out of all the stormy weather in the east-west channels and had almost no wind until the Gulf of Esquibel just out of Craig. There we had another hour of rolling around but it was not bad and we were nearly home.
When we finally arrived in Craig they had us tie in a slip with no power. It was 3 days before I could move to where I could plug into shore power. What a relief to know the batteries are going to stay charged. The boat is completely self contained but the furnace draws more 12 volt power than I thought so it meant charging batteries every day. That furnace sure works well though. It keeps the whole boat toasty warm.
Now we are settled in here at Craig with 50 amp, 220V shore power and I have been working on the interior of the boat.
