Alaskan sailboat years. Part 3 of three

I got back to Kodiak and word hit the streets that I had bought a boat and was planning on picking it up and running it north when the weather broke.

A lot of people questioned me about it as most fishermen were not sailors as fish boats are generally powered vessels. However, because they make their living on the water they are curious about such matters.

I also saw a quite a few people look at me with a little more respect as they realized that there was a little more to me than the dropout living in a camper trailer.

I managed to line up some work and also got offered a job for the April halibut opening from a skipper with a pretty good catch record.

I also found myself offered all sorts of pretty useful odds and ends from people that had things kicking around their sheds and back yards.

There was also a lot of stuff I was offered at fire-sale rates including an entire spool of ¾ inch nylon rope that I bought for the price of a case of beer and a fairly new Loran-C that was given to me for doing someone a favor and baby sitting their kids one night.

There were a lot of people that wanted to see me succeed, and there were also a few that were envious and wanted to see me fail. One such sour puss ran his mouth one too many times and I quickly shut him up to the amusement of all.

He was actually trying to goad me into a fist-fight when I simply publicly told him that the reason he was acting that way toward me is that he was envious because I had something to look forward to and he didn’t.

When he asked me what I meant by that, I told him that he was probably too stupid to understand if I did explain and when the people I was with started snickering he simply stomped off.

Looking back on this, I think I got a lot of support from people because Alaskans are pretty adventurous people and I was planning an adventure that many of them had thought of at some time and the fact remained I was working towards doing it.

One fisherman’s wife gave me a pattern for a canvas pullover shirt and I made two of them. I still have them both and they were great for stopping the wind. They are in a pattern of the old Navy Jumpers. This reminds me, I ought to break them out and wear them this spring. March is a blustery month.

Somewhere along the line I was offered a pair of Danforth anchors that could be disassembled and I also managed to snag a couple of pretty good lengths of 3/8” chain which meant I had good ground tackle for her.

I also scored a piece of salmon seine which I knew I could make hammock type things to suspend in places to store foodstuffs and other odds and ends. It proved to be quite handy.

Cannery row had a lot of junk lying around and when I had a little spare time I found quite a few little useful pieces of hardware there, which meant that every trip to the Anchor Bar turned into a search for little odds and ends.

I wound up collecting all sorts of useful stuff.

The problem I saw coming was getting all of this stuff to Seattle on the airplane.

One afternoon I saw a woman I knew that worked for the airline that serviced Kodiak. If I recall, it was US Air. She was a cheerful, chunky native lass with the prettiest smile in town. I asked her what air freight rates were like and she asked me what I had and I told her.

Then she asked me if the stuff was for my sailboat and I told her it was. She simply told me to stuff it all into green duffle bags and not to worry about if she was working. She said she’d take care of it.

When I wasn’t working, I was scrounging and when I wasn’t scrounging, I was working. I painted part of a house, built a bedroom over a garage and in late April I fished halibut which brought me over the top financially.

I don’t recall where I scored 8 GI duffle bags, but I did. The travel agent also worked with me. Instead of a ticket to Seattle, she sold me a ticket to Hawaii which was on special. When I got to Seattle, I would debark and just throw the rest of the ticket away.

She knew the girl that worked at the airport and scheduled a flight for me that would coincide with one of her work days and maybe ten days before Memorial Day I showed up at the airport with a bunch of friends, each of whom was carrying a green duffle bag that weighed a ton. I must have had well over400 pounds of stuff with me.

The woman didn’t bat an eyelash, as each of my pals handed her a bag, she simply put a tag on it and put it on the conveyor belt where it clanked as she put it down.

It was funny to watch that pretty little girl haul bag after bag of iron to the conveyor, but what was scary is that she did it with ease, having grown up in a Native Alaskan village.

I hand-carried the Loran-C on board with me.

Then I leaned over the counter and gave her a kiss and she smiled and handed me my boarding pass.

Thirty minutes later I was in the air.

The arrival in Seattle turned out to be a pretty good turn of luck as there was a skycap there that took one look at me standing there piling up green duffle bags. He asked me if I needed a hand and he offered to take all of my stuff to a cheap rental car place for a reasonable price.

When we started loading the stuff onto this huge cart he seemed to have pulled out of thin air, he noticed how heavy the bags were and how they contained a lot of steel and asked me what I was doing. I told him and he seemed amused.

The rental car agency proved to be a hassle. I had no credit card. Fortunately, they would rent me a car if I had a valid airline ticket for them to hold. Thank God I hadn’t ditched the Seattle to Hawaii part of my ticket. I used it as security for the rental.

Thirty minutes later I was on the road to Port Townsend and my boat.

I checked in at the harbormaster’s office and let him know I was planning on readying the boat for sea. He looked the boat up in his file and made a comment about the possibility of some sales tax issue. I figured maybe the previous owner had found out where I had the boat and ratted me out for a little revenge.

I reached into my pocket and forked over a valid Alaskan registration and told him I had a receipt from Victoria, BC as proof that I had left the state with the boat. He didn’t ask to see it, though. He simply commented that there were AK numbers on the bow and along with my registration that was good enough for him.

I never figured out how this issue came up.

I emptied the rental car and stowed all of the gear and sacked out on board after a hasty dinner. I was tired.

The following morning I returned the rental car and I forgot how I got back to Port Townsend, but I was back a little after noon and started right in on things.

A friend of mine had offered to accompany me on the voyage and was supposed to meet up with me in a couple of days. He was the same guy that had loaned me the little station wagon I had used when I was searching for the boat the previous January.

The first thing I did was to empty the boat completely and de-junk it. I found a small inflatable boat stuffed away and tested it. It had a small leak, but for some reason I kept it. It eventually came in handy later on when I was cruising around in Kodiak.

Some airhead bimbo invited herself for a boat ride and I wasn’t thinking and took her. It didn’t take long for me to find out I had made a mistake. She proved to be a coke head so anchored a little out of town and sent her on an errand in the raft.

It held enough air to get her ashore safely, but not back to the boat. Last I saw of the raft it was on the beach near Kalsin Bay Inn next to a girl with a long face as I sailed off into the sunrise.

I replaced a seacock and repainted the bottom and cleaned her up pretty good and got things squared away. I rewired a few things and replaced a few things and made repairs.

I made a set of duckboards for the cockpit and installed a gas tank there for the Honda 9.9 auxiliary. I believe it was a 12 (maybe it was an18) gallon tank and I bought it from a guy in PT for next to nothing. Another place sold me some nylon webbing. I think it was GI surplus and I used it to make belts to hold the gas tank down with it. I stitched a couple of brass rings on one end to use as a buckle and they served me well.

There was an older guy a couple of boats down and he was pretty deaf and had a voice like a fog horn. He was a real character and drank a bit and chased women. He made me laugh a lot and he taught me some damned good things to know about staying comfortable in heavy seas.

When I told him I was planning on removing the head, he told me it was a smart idea and showed me where to reinforce the grab rails to go over the side if it was too rough to use the bucket I had reserved for that purpose. He said a wet ass was better than having an overturned bucket.

The sail maker came by and delivered my new main and storm jib and I paid him. Some homeless guy offered to help me out if I fed him and bought him some beer and I took him up on his offer and he scraped and painted the bottom and actually took his time and did one hell of a good job.

I spent some time with him and found out he was an Ivy League grad that had made a killing at an early age and had set himself up so he didn’t have to work. He liked hanging out in the boatyard. He was an odd duck to say the least, but he was very enjoyable company and did good work for practically nothing.

A couple of people working on their boats asked me why he would work for me for free, but not work for them for pay and I had to admit I didn’t have a clue.

I wore out a pair of shoes chasing parts down, but made it a point to have enough time to spend with the people I did business with me. I was friendly and it paid off. They not only treated me well, but a couple of times steered me to some gently used parts that saved me a lot of money.

What I found odd is that gently used parts were so cheap and new ones were expensive. I finally figured out that there is a lot of snob appeal among the weekend ‘cocktails at the yacht’ set and none of them would be caught dead using anything that wasn’t brand new. It was my gain.

I had also been dragged into live aboard politics even though I was still in dry storage. There were a number of weekend types with unsecured stainless steel halyards and when it was windy, they would slap against the mast and make a terrible racket.

Some live aboard made up a bunch of bungee cords and I helped sneak aboard the vessels and secure the halyards. It made things at night a whole lot quieter.

There was a pretty good greasy spoon in town that served one hell of a breakfast for short money and it was a good deal. The couple that ran the place was pretty good to me, too, after I helped them unload a truck one morning.

The marine sanitation device (head) was removed. It took up too much room, and had through hull fittings to worry about. A 5 gallon bucket would suffice as a toilet. It was actually more sanitary and didn’t smell like a marine toilet generally does.

I installed a new VHF and fathometer. The latter I put in with a plastic blister from the inside of the hull and that way I avoided having to drill a hole in the hull.

Then I mounted the Loran and the antenna.

I was getting close to putting her into the water when my friend showed up. He was just in time and he helped install the cheek blocks on the boom so as to make reefing the main easier.

He also replaced the grab rails, too and did a professional job using some scrap mahogany he snagged from a high-end cabinet shop.

Toward the end of the day, we put her in the water and she rested well on her lines. That night one of the live boards came by and borrowed my cable cutters.

A minute later, several boats down I heard a clatter as a halyard hit the deck. The constant ‘ting…ting…ting’ had been replaced with silence. A minute after that, the cutters were returned. I said nothing and put them back in their holder.

One of the weekenders had gotten upset over the bungee cord and announced that nobody told him how to run his boat. He had left his halyard unsecured, so the liveaboard that had borrowed my cable cutters had simply cut the offending halyard. Dockside justice in action.

I never figured why a guy like him would be such a jerk. Besides making a racket, a stainless cable whacking against an aluminum mast really isn’t very good for the mast. I guess the reason he wouldn’t use the bungee is because he had some kind of big ego problem.

If he didn’t want to use the bungee, he could have just wrapped the halyard around the mast a single turn.

I knew there would be a horror show when the owner returned and saw what had happened, but it was not my problem.

Frankly, I was glad I would not be there to see it even though I had no problem with someone cutting the halyard. The slapping of a stainless cable on an aluminum mast is the Devil’s tattoo. The offending boat owner had been given the tools to work with, but decided to be inconsiderate and someone decided to do something about it. Too damned bad.

Incidentally, over the next few years I was to see dockside justice dealt out a few more times. Although it seems harsh and was de facto criminal, I never saw it dispensed unfairly.

The next morning we went to the greasy spoon and we both helped unload another truck. I introduced him and told them we were planning on leaving soon. They told us that on the morning we left that breakfast was on them!

After breakfast the old guy from the yard came over to inspect. Port Townsend is somewhat of a yachttie type town and a few of the things I had done to the boat didn’t seem to please sensitive eyes, but the old guy was a cruiser and not a weekender.

He gave the way we had set things up a very approving eye and noticed that the emergency gear was not stowed in some dark, forgotten locker, but fastened to the bulkheads with quick-release clamps. It didn’t look like a cocktail lounge weekend boat, but one ready to go and do some serious voyaging.

He looked at the cable cutters and commented that they looked like they had been used recently and I told him I had loaned them out the other night.

He simply said that the guy that had gotten his noisy halyard cut had it coming and that after the way he had been a pain the last couple of years it was a wonder his boat hadn’t been sunk. When he asked who had borrowed then, I told him it was some guy wearing blue jeans. That made him laugh out loud. He knew who the culprit was.

Another blue-water cruising type stopped by and told me he liked the way I had things set up. He had done a circumnavigation and knew his stuff. He told me to ignore the ‘cocktails on the yacht’ set.

By the third of June we were just about ready to go but a strong whiskey front moved in and we wound up spending most of the fourth under the weather. That evening a fair maiden I had met earlier came by and told me her room mate was going to be away that evening, so it looked like I was going to have to put departing off until D-Day.

We spent the night of 5 June on board and at 0600 D-Day went to breakfast at the greasy spoon. They were good to their word. They bought the breakfast and they made sure the helpings were huge.

The old cruiser was in the greasy spoon and had some last minute advice as we were leaving. In a fog horn voice, the deaf old sailor told us, “Don’t take no broads with you across the Gulf of Alaska! They’re nothing but trouble!”

The entire restaurant broke out into laughter.

At 0715 we cast the lines off and hoisted the main and the Genoa and headed off on the beginning of out voyage.

When the sails filled, I took the tiller and looked ahead. After a few minutes I handed the tiller to my shipmate and told him I was headed below to think a minute.

I was 33 years old, had a high school diploma and a little college, I had skills, a willingness to work, no job and none in the offing. I had very little money, but enough grub to last a while and the tools to fish or hunt to supplement what I did have.

I was now responsible for the life of my shipmate. This didn’t tread lightly on me. I now had to think for the pair of us.

Everything I owned except for a fifteen year-old rusty pickup and a few tools was with me in the boat.

I was now literally the captain of my own ship and the master of my own destiny.

I had a ship to sail, and a star to steer her by. It felt good, but there was also the burden of responsibility, too. I also knew I had to get my skills honed as I lacked a lot of sailing skills and I knew that crossing the Gulf of Alaska meant a 600 mile open ocean crossing.

I came above and took the tiller and trimmed the main sail a tad and sailed for the next few hours, alone in my thoughts.

It was a day that left me a changed man. No one would know it but me, but for the first time in my life I felt fully in charge. I also had a sense of direction and a future to look forward to, no matter how it turned out.

First scheduled stop: Friday Harbor.


my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/