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A Windy Day

You always expect it but you never really want it to happen. We’d moved the boat the day before with reports of the wind going southeast. We’d been in the anchorage before and knew it had a good holding bottom. Of course, during the whole day it only snowed--the straight down kind and lots of it.

Towards late afternoon, a breeze picked up and was blowing snow under the blue tarp we’d put over the freshly skinned and now partly butchered deer hanging on the back deck. The deer got lowered into the fish hold. Later the tarp came down but not before we had waited until one of the eyelets had pulled out.

It was definitely more than a breeze now and it was coming out of the west northwest. We both commented that we should have stayed where we were. “Too late to move now,” I told Cindy as we carefully marked our position on the plotter and set the depth alarm. Standard procedure when we knew wind was coming. Dinner was rather simple. A bit of salad, fresh BBQ venison and a small slice each of our left-over cherry and pumpkin pies from our Thanksgiving feast two days before.

The first real gusts came just after I’d stepped out on deck to make sure things were secure. “That one hit 40,” I heard Cindy saying from inside. The gust had knocked a 5 gal pail out of my hand and I slipped around on the snowy deck trying to grab it before it went over the side. Now it was definitely blowing out of the northwest. The other anchorage would have been better. At least there was no rock to blow onto there. We got the spot light out and checked the rock’s position once again--directly behind us. So much for weather reports.

Cindy working on a quilt project.  The generator makes possible the stronger lights for this kind of close work.

As I was about to crawl into bed, something bright flashed outside the porthole. “What was that?” I asked aloud. And then we heard the rumble. A thunderstorm! Wow! We both got up and looked out but it was too far away to see much. Just as well because we had enough problems closer at hand with the wind and the rock without having to worry about a lightening strike as well. And so it went the whole night through. An especially violent gust would shudder the boat or the alarm would go off and one of us would get up to check things out.

Sometime in the early dawn when I’d finally given up on sleep altogether, I got up and looked about. All was well. We were exactly where we were when we first dropped the anchor. “Boaters must be a insane,” I thought. A person living in a house on shore would never even think of suspending his home from a cable that was attached to an anchor that he hoped would stay stuck in the mud let alone do it during a storm. Perhaps there is a better term to use than insane but if so, I can’t think of one.

Winter Cruising l Starting Out l We Get Visitors l Winter Comes l A Windy Night l A Special Day
Rhythms l Back to Civilization

Skipper Ted Mattson is an Alaska sailor with broad experience in Bristol Bay and especially his home, the Alexander Archipelago, Alaska's panhandle.  Ted operates popular adventure sailing cruises with guests in the summer months aboard the Skookumchuck.