Where In the World?

I appear to have settled, if you can call it that, in Seldovia, Alaska. We are a community of about 300 year-round residents, and are not connected to the mainland road system. You can only get here by boat or airplane, and so boating is a way of life here. When I’m at home in Seldovia, I go to potlucks and weddings by rowboat, get to town by water taxi, and fish for halibut with my friend Joe in his retired Coast Guard surf boat.

Joe at the helm of his retired Coast Guard surf boat, now used for subsistence halibut fishing, leaving Seldovia Harbor with his friend Les.

I’m also part of the Seldovia Oil Spill Response Team (SOS), and participate in trainings where we deploy containment boom and skimmers in exercises designed to help us prepare for an oil spill. These are actually really fun trainings, since we get to play with boats, knots, anchors, radios, charts, tide tables, and so on. In an SOS exercise in May, I got paid to drive a skiff! I am saving that pay stub, because it says I am a Boat Operator.

Madalyn demonstrates the oil skimmer during an SOS exercise. This is my neighbor Walt’s skiff, the one I got paid to drive!

Occasionally, I also work as a deckhand on the Seldovia Bay Ferry, which does the 45-minute run to Homer a couple of times a day. Twice now, I’ve helped to deliver the ferry to Seward for spring maintenance. This entails a full-day trip “around the corner” of the Kenai Peninsula, and along some of the wildest coastline in North America. We have to pick our weather window and time it just right with the tides, or else the surf and tide rips can be pretty gnarly. The scenery includes misty islands, glaciers, seabirds, whales, and sea lions.

The Seldovia Bay Ferry, M/V Kachemak Voyager, docking on the Homer side of Kachemak Bay.

For the last four summers, I have worked a different job each year, mostly bird-related, and boat-related if I’m lucky. Last summer, I used flat-bottomed jet-boats to travel the Yukon River, and even boat-camped along the river for three days while helping out with a Peregrine Falcon survey. I spent the summer of 2014 doing seabird research for US Fish and Wildlife on an island near Sitka, Alaska. I got many hours of outboard operation under my belt, as we were required to circumnavigate the island to count the birds which nest on the cliffs. Here is the ultimate recipe for seasickness: twelve-foot inflatable boat with stinky outboard, six-foot swells, looking through binoculars to count birds, aromatic guano.

Whenever I return to Seldovia after being away for a while, people ask me about Megan. They used to ask, “Where is Megan?” or “When is Megan coming back?” or simply, “How’s your friend…?” because they can’t remember her name. Heartbreakingly, the kids she befriended while she was here have started asking, “Is Megan ever coming back?” I don’t know what to say, since I don’t know the answer. But I always tell the kids that I’ll help them send a letter or a postcard to Megan if they want to write to her. (I guess we will mail it to her folks.)

Megan’s adventures have taken her about as far afield as you can imagine. And you’ll have to imagine a lot, as she seldom has access to internet or post offices. I keep track of her by getting the MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity) of her current vessel and following along on marinetraffic.com. She left Seldovia in February of 2015 and has been sailing ever since, rarely touching ground. After an introductory tall ships race from Ireland to Norway in July 2015, she joined the crew of the Bark Europa and sailed with them from October 2015 through May 2016.

The Bark Europa. Photo from their website.

On this beautiful 184-foot square-rigged tall ship from the Netherlands, Megan sailed along the east coast of South America, rounded Cape Horn, visited Antarctica several times, crossed the South Atlantic (stopping at South Georgia and Tristan da Cunha) and finally landed in Cape Town, South Africa. Megan left the ship there, and had a two-week break which allowed her to fly back to Puerto Montt, Chile, where she joined her next ship, the Abel Tasman. On this 75-foot sailboat, she crossed the South Pacific, with stops in Rarotonga, Tonga, Fiji, and Vanuatu, ending in Australia.

After a short break to explore Australia, she joined the Robert C. Seamans in November 2016. This 134-foot steel sailing brigantine does semester-at-sea trips out of New Zealand. Megan was with the Seamans until March 2017, visiting New Zealand’s north and south islands, as well as the Kermadec Islands.

The Robert C. Seamans. Photo by Jon Waterman.

Then, back on the Abel Tasman (and back to the northern hemisphere) in July 2017, for a west-to-east Northwest Passage through the Arctic! She is now somewhere near Baffin Island, or maybe Greenland, or on her way to Norway. Who knows? For remote areas like this, they only have satellite coverage through marinetraffic, and I am too cheap to pay for the extra information. Here’s Abel Tasman’s MMSI if you want to track her yourself: 518100136.

Megan checks out some bear tracks, somewhere along the Northwest Passage. Photo by Cathy Hawkins.

While on the Abel Tasman this July, Megan actually sailed right past St. Paul Island, Alaska, where I spent the summer working as a tour guide for birding and wildlife photography clients. St. Paul is one of the Pribilof Islands, way out in the middle of the Bering Sea, 250 miles away from the nearest land. Megan wasn’t able to stop and visit, but she sent me an email when she got to Nome, saying, “What a small world!”

At Anchor

Peter Bailey and Heidi Snyder sent me this photo today, from May 2013. This is the good ship Niyah, Skipper Andy at the tiller, Megan, and me. We’re at anchor, somewhere in British Columbia. Peter and Heidi, whom we’d met in Port Townsend, were anchored nearby on their “Spray-oid” (Joshua Slocum style sailboat) and snapped this photo. Thanks for sharing it!

Whatever happened to those two girls who sailed across the Atlantic?

First things first:  We are both alive and well, as far as I know.

Last things next:  This is the official, ultimate, very-last-ever Hitchhike the Atlantic post.  (I know you’ve heard this before.  We’ll see if it actually takes this time.)

I’m sure you will not be surprised to hear that Megan is STILL hitchhiking the Atlantic.  After spending some time working in the Pacific, on the Schooner Adventuress  in 2014 and early 2015,

she’s moved on to an even bigger sailing vessel.  She is now a deckhand on the Bark Europa, a square-rigged tall ship based out of the Netherlands.  As of October 17 at 20:00 UTC, she was just where she loves to be: about 800 miles from any major land mass.  (Off the coast of Africa, south of the Cape Verde Islands, next stop Brazil.)  You can track her ship by clicking here.

In early December, the Bark Europa plans to attempt a rounding of Cape Horn, sailing from East to West.  As they say on their website, “it will be a lot more difficult against the prevailing winds and currents.  We are planning this voyage with ample time to be able to fully enjoy this historical sailing voyage and have a good chance to make this epic Cape Horn Rounding successful, the tough way!”  Megan always likes to do things the tough way, so I think she will be loving every minute of the adventure.

This is Megan on a square-rigger at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, 2014.  So you can imagine her on the Bark Europa.

Now.  I have been having very different adventures, and unfortunately they have not included any sailing.  However, I am still living in Seldovia, Alaska, where boats are very much a part of everyday life.  And for the last two summers I’ve gone off to remote islands to hang out with birds.

Last summer I volunteered for U.S. Fish and Wildlife and worked on St. Lazaria Island, part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.  I was one of a 3-member team of wildlife biologists studying the seabird life on this island near Sitka, Alaska.  It was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for me, to be surrounded by sea otters, puffins, and humpback whales.  I also got to spend lots of hours driving a 12′ inflatable skiff in some crazy seas — while trying to count Pigeon Guillemots and Common and Thick-Billed Murres nesting on the cliffs.  My small-boat handling skills got a workout!

St. Lazaria Island. Captured my heart.

This summer I got an actual real paying job working for the National Park Service, at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  Again, birds and boats were the theme, as I was part of the Piping Plover Crew (protecting an endangered shorebird) and got to work on a remote wilderness island, North Manitou, for about three weeks during the summer.

Two Piping Plover fledglings on North Manitou Island. Also captured my heart.

Canoeing on the Platte River at the end of the 2015 Piping Plover season.

What will the future bring?  Who knows.  Megan still plans to get her 100-ton Master License with Sail Endorsement so she can be the skipper of her own sailing ship someday.  All her hours earned on tall ships go toward that goal.

As for me, I will keep trying to get out to wilder and more remote places, to breathe the clean air, gaze at the starry night skies, and learn about plants and critters and sea life and all that good stuff.  If I have to take a boat to get there, all the better.

(Check out Cindy’s new blog:  45to60.wordpress.com.)

Seldovia, Alaska

Last you heard from us, we were sitting in a café in Kodiak, Alaska.  This was way back on June 14th.  What’s happened since then?  Did we end up on a “Deadliest Catch” fishing boat in the Bering Sea? Perish in an Aleutian volcanic eruption, earthquake, or tsunami? Get eaten by a Kodiak bear? No!  It’s way worse than that!

We got jobs.

When we left the Kodiak café, we reboarded the Alaska Marine Highway ferry and made our way to Homer.  We spent about 36 hours in Homer, decided it was way too big of a city for us (population 5,000) and decided to take a ferry to a little town called Seldovia. Across the bay from Homer, this former hub of fur trade, fishing, and canneries was devastated by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake and is now a tiny year round community of 300.  Summer people, tourists, and retirees fill out the place in the summer months.

 

Before the Seldovia ferry even left the dock in Homer, the skipper found out about our boaty adventures and had offered us jobs as deckhands.  By the Fourth of July we were both on-call crew members, and by August first Megan started working full time.  The ferry runs from Seldovia to Homer (a 45-minute ride) twice a day.  This high speed catamaran goes 25 knots, which makes it seem like a rocket ship after all the travel we’ve done by sail over the last year.  A deckhand’s days are long, from 08:00 to 20:00, but that’s ok with Megan since she is building her sea time in preparation for taking her captain’s license test.  Since the ferry weighs in at 91 tons, her time spent as a deckhand counts towards the requirements for a 100 ton master license. Her dream is to someday work on tall ships, sailing the seven seas.  She spends her spare time studying navigation, rules of the road, knots, and “talking boat” with the old timers in town.

 

Cindy worked a full time job in July and August, leading Outdoor Education field trips for the local tribe and community members.  After two months of chaperoning teen overnights, she decided to return to the vagabond/”retiree” lifestyle and hopes someday to work on a book about the last year’s adventure.  Part time employment, firewood stacking, and baking with sourdough fill the time — when she isn’t birding, learning about marine mammals, picking berries, rowing a peapod, or paddling a kayak.

 

We have made lots of new friends in the area, including many international sailors who stop in at Seldovia.  Folks from Switzerland, France, New Zealand, and Australia have all spent time here in the last couple of months. Two of those boats got here by traversing the Northwest Passage from east to west last summer!  We’ve enjoyed hearing their stories, inviting them over for dinner or a beach fire, and helping them get their laundry done while they’re in port.

 

On the last weekend in June, we participated in the Homer Yacht Club’s Land’s End Regatta.  As volunteer crew, our navigation skills were tested as we raced in the dense fog with a .99 cent hiking compass and a car GPS as our only tools.  No accidents occurred and we placed 4th out of nine boats.  We both really miss sailing on a regular basis, and hope to get back in the habit next season, somehow.

 

In the meantime, we have borrowed a locally-built 12′ wooden rowboat which we plan to restore over the next few weeks.  We hope to get it in the water before deep winter sets in.  We live in a tiny wooden house built on stilts over Seldovia Slough.  There’s a porthole in the door, a hatch to climb through to reach the loft, the floor is painted with boat paint, and at high tide there’s water underneath the house.  We have an orange life ring on the front door, and there is the danger of dropping things overboard off the front porch.  We aren’t living on a boat, but it’s about the closest you can get to the real thing.

Kodiak, Alaska

We’ve hopped on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry, starting in Prince Rupert, BC, and now we are in Kodiak, Alaska! Foggy, lots of trucks, containers, and fishing boats. The lattes are very tasty. We won’t have enough layover time here to get out of town, but it’s cool to think about the big bears that live on this island.

This is our fifth day on the Alaska ferry, and we’ll be glad to get to Homer tonight. It’s been an amazing ride, though, with lots of humpback whales, a pod of Orcas, dolphins, puffins, glaciers, sea otters, fog, a blazing sunset over Chichigof Island, big swells on the Gulf of Alaska crossings, and purse seiners in Prince William Sound.

Alert Bay, British Columbia

We are in the town of Alert Bay, on Cormorant Island, near the north end of Vancouver Island. Still loving British Columbia, although it has been raining on and off for five days. We’re 220 miiles from Port Townsend, WA and 330 miles from Ketchikan, Alaska. Not quite halfway but getting closer! This coast is amazingly beautiful and rugged, and we’ve been seeing lots of wildlife: brown bears, a Minke whale, porpoises, Rhinocerous Auklets, Marbled Murrelets, Bald Eagles, kingfishers, hummingbirds, and wee midgies. Thrushes sing to us from the trees when we are anchored in little coves. Internet connections are few and far between but we will update you when we can.

Cruising the British Columbia Coast

Always have loved a wee boat! Rowing in Smugglers’ Cove.

Andy realizes that it’s ok to have crew — now he can take naps while someone else steers the boat!

NIYAH anchored at Smugglers’ Cove, British Columbia.

Vicarious Roots

We weeded the blueberries and raspberries, and made way for zucchini and the winter garden.

Lisa’s amazing backyard garden has lots of edibles: artichokes, asparagus, chard, kiwis, blueberries, rhubarb, chives, strawberries, apples, and much more!

Today was Mother’s Day, so of course we both called our moms. Megan’s folks are planting grape vines for their new vineyard and winery, so her mom has been working hard getting the vines in the ground — in between snow storms this spring in northern Michigan! My mom has been busy working on quilts with her quilt club. They make quilts which they donate to several different causes, giving quilts to kids in the hospital, wounded veterans, and people who are in need of a “warm hug.” We are both so proud of our Moms! They are brave, strong women who have taught us a lot about how to make our way in the world. They have especially taught us how to be kind and generous to others, and how to leave each place we visit in better shape than we found it.

We’ve been very fortunate to have made a couple of new friends in Port Townsend who definitely qualify as Fairy Godmothers. Nancy Fowler and Lisa Marks have both taken us in, given us comfortable places to stay, shared good food with us, lent us bicycles and cars, let us do laundry, and on and on and on… We aren’t quite sure how to thank them enough, except that we’re quite happy to be Shed Girls again whenever they need us!

We helped Lisa weed her garden for a while this afternoon, and it felt so good to dig in the dirt. Being a traveler on the move, and especially on boats, one is denied this pleasure of growing food and flowers, and generally feeling rooted in a place. Usually on Mother’s Day, I help my mom in her garden, weeding raised beds or spreading compost. So it was wonderful to be able to spend time with Lisa in her garden, honor our Moms and think of them, and live vicariously through someone else’s roots for a while.

Sea Serpent

We finally found our vessel north! Megan’s at the wheel and Cindy’s on watch for logs, deadheads, container ships, growlers, and bergy bits. (Photo by Ruth Brede.)

Ebb and Flood

Tonight we took a break from sailing, and instead walked down to Hudson Point to watch the Friday night race.  We ate ice cream cones and listened to the race commentary by Satch, one of the race organizers.   It was a nice change of pace, and we enjoyed seeing the boats flying their spinnakers on the downwind legs.  We could see the current in the bay and how it affected the speed of the boats.  Sometimes they just got stalled, even when their spinnakers were filled with wind.

I can relate.  To tell the truth, we are a bit tired out.  The last month has been hard, mostly due to the fact that we are back in the U.S. and we aren’t used to it.  So many lawn mowers, weed whippers, motorcycles, jet planes….  why does it have to be so LOUD here?  People have been friendly and generous, we have been welcomed into the Port Townsend community, and have made some great new friends.  But we have also spent a lot of time trying to arrange our trip north, preferably on a sailboat.  Twice this has fallen through. We’ve put energy into other leads that haven’t materialized.  Sometimes it has felt like there’s some kind of invisible wall keeping us from getting to Alaska.  We haven’t given up hope yet, but yesterday morning I hit a low spot.  I suppose it’s a bit like slack tide, the bottom of the ebb.  Going with the flow can be challenging when your gooey mud flats are exposed and you’re just sitting there amongst the stranded sea stars and anemones.  But once you bottom out, it’s inevitable that the tide will come flooding back in.  Won’t it?