An Alaskan summer idyll
Issue 46 : Jan/Feb 2006
What are your favorite sailing memories? Do you flip through last summer’s mental photo album searching for a scene to replay that’ll get you through a string of cold winter days? Does smiling remembrance of that sparkling beam reach as the afternoon sea breeze filled in banish the November in your soul? It sure does mine, and I get lots of practice living in Alaska with its abundance of winter.
But one image always returns to the November theater inside my head. I call it Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Roll the scene . . .
It begins in Prince William Sound’s Serpentine Cove, halfway up Harriman Fiord. The diesel heater is aiding and abetting the folly of two warm-blooded humans and a tiny puppy trying to spend a comfortable July night amid billions of tons of ancient ice. Flocks of nimble scoters and murrelets rise and fall and fly like wind-driven leaves over the submerged moraine that bounds the cove. Drifting past them is an occasional seal draped luxuriantly over a bergy bit, like a movie starlet in an icy spa. Serpentine Cove is safe for anchoring Minstrel, a Pacific Seacraft Dana 24, because the glacier at its head has retreated and now calves on the beach. Still, beach-combers need to be careful.
What passes for “night” in midsummer Alaska soon brightens into a still morning, and we are alone in a water-color wonderland. Bergy bits from last night’s calving of Harriman and Surprise glaciers fill the turquoise fiord like a free-form crystal sculpture garden. It’s full of animal ice shapes just waiting for our imaginations to find them. On such a reflective landscape, there can be only one theme: go slowly.
Unmarked channel
So slowly we weigh anchor. (Alaska’s deep waters really do make you “weigh” it.) Slowly we pick our way to the shallow unmarked channel over the bar and leave the cove. Slowly we dodge this way and that around blue ice sculptures, pausing to admire the most fantastic shapes. Slowly we arrive within a mile of the gigantic tidewater confluence of Barry, Cascade, and Coxe glaciers.
We shut down the engine, and slowly we drift to the sound of . . . huh? Rice Krispies? What a surprise to hear the familiar Snap! Crackle! Pop! coming from every bergy bit all around Minstrel. OK, time for breakfast! Lacking Rice Krispies, we opt for hot oatmeal and coffee. We chill orange juice that doesn’t need chilling, with hunks of 10,000 year-old ice. Even the cool blue air is so crisp and clean and good we swear we could gain weight just breathing it. Alfresco dining in a boat cockpit couldn’t get any better than this.
Another surprise . . . glaciers are noisy. Booms, rumbles, and cracks punctuate the Rice Krispie melting sound. It’s like breakfast at a construction site. But the scene is a stunning blue ice visual. Surrounded by floating crystal, we decide it’s more like Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
A third surprise . . . amid a flock of seabirds in shoal water half a mile away, suddenly appears a sustained exhalation that looks like a geyser. We can’t fathom what kind of creature, in this kind of habitat, could breathe like that; we are 80 miles inland from the open ocean. But then one, another, and a third humpback whale surfaces, swimming in a tight circle while seabirds dive through their hanging mist-breath columns.
Complete silence
We are in an awesome cathedral. It stuns and humbles us into complete silence. We drift, watch, listen, and dream for an hour as the massive freshwater outflow carries Minstrel and her rapidly shrinking bergy companions south down Barry Arm toward College Fiord. We feel the first gentle puffs of glacial wind, that have been blowing overhead until now, sinking to the water’s surface to blow us home.
Wordlessly, we raise the mainsail and pole out the genoa and sail wing-and-wing out of this place that defies description. We have been given an extraordinary gift of summer wind and blue ice to be savored and treasured for the rest of our lives, especially in winter.
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