Free Trip to Alaska

Several years ago I was between gigs and was the on-site maintenance supervisor for a 76 unit 8 story apartment building in Seattle. We had this one seriously crazy tenant in the basement who was creating all kinds of crazy drama. Drama to the point that the police got called at least several times a week. They wouldn't ever arrest her, but at least 1-2 times a month would haul her in an ambulance to the city's mental ward. But she's just walk back to our building as they wouldn't admit/commit her. So I'm having an especially stressful week dealing with her and I just made some casual comment about it on my FaceBook page. That night I get a call from an awesome buddy who's a US Navy Seal stationed in San Diego as a BUD's instructor. I tell him the whole story about this chick and why, for various legal/mental-handicap reasons, we can't just evict her. So he tells me that he has a solution. He and another instructor are taking a bunch of Seal recruits on an arctic training exercise in Alaska. They'll be flying in a C-130 cargo plane that is scheduled to re-fuel just outside of Seattle. He offeres to help me out by using this chick as a training subject for his recruits to do what's called 'an involuntary extraction'. They'd land at McCord, a handful of them would show up at my building, drug and bag the chick, and then stow her on the plane for the ride to Alaska. There they'd just let her wake up wrapped in a sleeping bag in an alley in Fairbanks or somewhere and just let it go from there... As much as I appreciated his heartfelt and wonderful offer, I just couldn't bring myself to accept.

Learning to Earn

A gap year is a good thing. I graduated from a pretty high end high school in Connecticut where something like 96% of our class went directly into high end colleges and universities, with scholarships and funding from parents. My parents were trying to start their 'legacy vineyard' at the time in Oregon and pretty much told my brother and I that we were on our own until we took over the vineyard 20 or 30 years later. So I bopped around at a few different jobs that didn't quite work out. Finally got fed up, bailed on everything to hitch hike back to the west coast.

Ended up nearly completely broke in San Diego working the graveyard shift at the 3rd most robbed 7-11 on the west coast.

Came out of work early one morning, completely down and dejected, and just had to go look at the ocean to keep myself from loosing it completely. I walked out onto a pier and sat down on a bench next to a guy who I thought was an old homeless beach bum, both of us watching a pile driver punching telephone poles into the sand to fix the old wooden pier.

Somehow we started talking. I told him my story. He told me his. Turned out he was a semi-retired tuna fisherman named Steve. I invited him for a cup of coffee at the Burger King that I was about to start my first day as the lunch time french fry cook guy, just to learn more about tuna fishing.

Never showed up for my second job. Never went back to the 7-11, even to collect my pay for three hellacious nights working there. Turned out the 250 foot tuna seiner Steve had worked on (incidentally named the 'F/V Sea Hawk') was limping back to port in a few days after a tough bought with a hurricane in Mexico. The captain had asked him to repaint all of boat's graphics and Steve needed an assistant. I was eager to get away from the 7-11 and towards anything remotely nautical.

I grabbed my back pack from the surfer flop house I'd been staying at and moved in with Steve and his wonderful wife Beth. For about 2 weeks Steve and I got up every morning at 5:00 and rode the bus down to the harbor to work on the boat's graphics, including a full on mural of a hawk plucking a tuna out of the sea across the front of the ship's bridge.

Try as I might, doing everything I could, I couldn't get hired as crew for their next trip.  Finally, the night before the ship was about to leave, Steve and Beth's phone rang at about 10:30. Turned out one of the deck hand's wife had just found out she was pregnant and told her husband she was going to leave him if he put to sea again. The captain had a job for me if I could make it to the boat before they left at 7:00am. I couldn't sleep, gave Steve and Beth a big hug, and was at the boat by 4:30am, just hanging out on the back deck until the cook noticed me around sunrise.

15 weeks later we came back, unloaded just under 2 million dollars of frozen tuna at the Starkist cannery in Long Beach, and I had enough money in my pocket for a bus ride back to Connecticut and most of a year at Norwalk Community College. The rest of my life is the same kind of history.

Wait for it...

I've had some very extrodinary encounters with whales, sea lions, and porpoise over the years in my sailing travels. In my own home waters of the Puget Sound / Salish Seas I've had some wonderful encounters with one humpback whale, one gray whale, tons of porpoise, and several incredible encounters with the resident orcas.

The most extrodinary encounter happened one fine Saturday morning as I was dialing in my boat to venture going offshore for the first time. I'd invited a special lady friend along to sail from Shilshole Harbor to spend the night moored to a buoy at Blake Island.

The wind was light out of the south, and as the tide was high, I was cutting it close to rounding West Point under power in about 12 feet of water. No worries for me as my twin keeler drew just a tad over 3 feet. As we were running the point I saw what I first thought to be a bunch of logs in the water ahead of us. But the 'logs' were moving in a linear way that logs generally don't. Suddenly I realized what I was seeing and immediately throttled back, popped my transmission into neutral, and shut off my trusty 2 cylinder Yanmar.

"What are you doing?" Charlotte asked me in alarm.

All I could say in response was "Wait for it".

A pod of between 12 to 14 orcas came straight at us from the south. They split in two around us. The alpha male swam behind us with his 5-6 foot tall dorsal fin cutting the water just a few feet behind my transom. When we looked forward we witnessed an even more incredible sight. A proud orca moma side by side with her newly born calf! I'd read in the Seattle Times few days before that someone had spotted a newly born calf in our waters way to the south. The calf was only about 4 feet long and still it's infant colors of dark chocolate brown and pink which would turn to the more familiar black and white patches as it matured over the next few months.

Wow! What a treat. Charlotte and I were completely speechless watching them swim past us and on to the North.

Rather than calling what's happening on our planet right now 'Global Warming' a more accurate term would be 'Global Weather Oscillations'. Our atmosphere and weather systems are basically a heat engine powered by the sun. The sun heats different parts of the planet differently depending on if it's land or ocean. Heat rises, hits the upper atmosphere, cools and falls in the form of precipitation and associated wind. Because we're on a spinning planet with nights and days things get more interesting and more complex than what you can duplicate at home with just a terrarium and a heat lamp.

As we trap more heat in our bigger spinning terrarium things get more severe as we begin to lose the ability to dissipate the accumulated heat the way that has been happening before.

The net effect is that what we have considered to be normal and seasonal weather oscillations are becoming more severe and more unpredictable. That wreaks havoc in the traditional ways people have been living for as long as we can remember.

I don't want to get all 'Water World' with you folks, but I think sailors are uniquely qualified, by their own nature, to survive much of what's happening climatically than the average yokel in a beach shack. (Not that there's anything wrong with that! ;) )

It was a dark and stormy night. My second major one in a row riding my little sailboat 100 miles off of the California Coast. It took a whole lifetime and 3 years to prepare for this adventure, selling everything that didn't float, saying Aloha to a bunch of friends, and Adios to a few others who thought I was inconceivably crazy.

And here I am, so worn out and tired of being continually afraid that I'm contemplating just stepping off of the back of the boat. I just can't decide if I should do it buck-ass-naked or wearing my big orange gumby survival suit with my floating EPIRB on a tether.

If I do it the first way I just disappear and my empty boat may or may not be found as part of a bigger mystery.

If I do it the second way there will most likely be a Coast Guard helo plucking me out of the water within an hour, a great ride on angle blades, and about 30 minutes later I'll be enjoying warm tater-tots at their air-base. But that route is going to involve a bunch of explanations and paperwork.

Santa Cruz to San Diego  02

Log 16oct02

The VHF radio crackles to life just before sunset.

'This is Frontier control calling the vessel at North 34 tack 40.8 by West 120 tack 43.5'

I check my coordinates and verify that this isn't me. I'm south and east of that position by about 16 nautical miles.

'Frontier Control this is Pacific Orion'

'Pacific Orion go channel 6 alpha for Frontier control'

'Pacific Orion going 06'

I switch the VHF radio to channel 6, intrigued by what this is all about.

'Frontier Control this is Pacific Orion'

'...Yes Pacific Orion, this is Frontier Control, you are in safety zone 4 which is currently closed. We have an event happening at 19:00. I'm going to have to ask you to move 4 miles to the north or 4 miles to the south until the event is over'

'Roger Frontier control, how will I know when I can cross zone 4?'

'Sir, we have a single event scheduled for 19:00. It will be quite visible and when it is over you may proceed through zone 4.'


Now I'm really intrigued. I deduce that Frontier Control is Vandenberg Air Force base's marine vessel traffic control and that they'll be firing a missile at 7:00 pm. It is now 6:30 pm and getting dark quickly.

What a day its been. I left Santa Cruz on Saturday and it is now Monday evening. 'Kattituade' has been shadowing me since I passed them in Monterey. They've been harbor hoping down the coast while I've spent the nights off shore. They're about 12 miles behind me now, (right on the edge of zone 4) and we're headed for Santa Barbara. My ETA should be about 3:00 am and it's going to be a long haul because the wind is getting erratic as I've passed Point Conception and the wind is 'cwocking' and 'madawating' ('Weather Ralph' in Toronto) around to my nose. I've been flying my sails wing to wing for the past two days and soon I'll have to take them down and turn on the engine. I'm not happy about that because the dang auto pilot is giving me problems in spite of the $250 bucks I spent in Santa Cruz rushing it to Raytheon to get it's little chipmunk brain tweaked. I've changed it's name from 'Ray' to 'Sybil' because I've come to realize it's psychotic and is trying to kill me.

As I rounded Point Conception I had some whales messing with me again. This time it was two grays who charged at the boat. They sounded about 8 feet away from my forward port quarter and I have no idea how they managed to slide under me without grazing the keels. I had seen a school of them frolicking and feeding just off of Point Conception. They'd come up from a dive and hold their heads out of the water with water gushing through their baleen filters, then slide back down. A big male and his sidekick went by me a few times at about 50 yards. I kept a respectable distance and then these guys decided to take a closer look at me. In hindsight it was a great show.


At 19:05 I notice a meteor rising out of the hills North of me.
It starts like any other 4th of July fireworks show. Just an orange bright sparkly meteor except it's rising up into the sky. Arcing out over the Point and above me in the Channel. I suspect that it's just some kind of defense missile as it burns it's solid rocket fuel booster. It'll probably die out and splash 100 miles out in the water, a ship will pick it up and they'll take it's own little chipmunk brain back to the lab and analyze the numbers.

At about the apogee of it's trajectory, the point where it's pretty much horizontal to the ground, it's solid propellants consumed, it should stop spewing out it's fiery red and orange smoke, loose it's fight against gravity and start falling back down to earth.


'Into the distance, a ribbon of black,
Stretched to the point of no turning back,
A flight of fancy on a windswept field,
Standing alone, my senses real,
A fatal attraction is holding me fast,
How can I escape it's irresistible grasp?
Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky.
I'm tongue tied and twisted,
Just an earth bound misfit'.

-Pink Floyd, 'Learning to Fly'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn4_zur5hjw



At the point where I figured the show was over, a faint white light suddenly grows in intensity from the middle of this thing, issuing out an expanding white aura that grows in size and intensity. It looks like a huge sperm cell with a transparent head and long dark tail stretching all the way back to the ground. The glowing vapor blob grows and elongates along it's trajectory. The white light gets brighter and brighter until it turns a beautiful greenish blue and the rocket seems to take a left turn and recede away from my line of sight (very fast given the telemetry math I'm trying to fathom in my head) and gradually fade away as it arcs over the horizon. The thing must have been so high up that the halo and tail and greenish-blue cloud glowed in the dark sky for about an hour from the sun beyond the horizon.

I read in the Santa Barbara paper the next day that what I had seen was a $100 million 'Sky Wars' test. The rocket that I saw flew to up 140 miles and over the South Pacific. It was shot down by another rocket launched from the area of the Marshall Islands. A high altitude balloon was also launched to try to fool the 'killer' missile but it managed to find it's intended target and the test was deemed a success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_phenomena

http://www.spacearchive.info/vafbview.htm

Whales in the Night

Whales in the Night

(c) Kai Schwarz 2010

I'm in Crecent City, CA. "A harbor of desperation, not destination" as one of the locals calls it. Well, certainly not desperation, but it sure was nice to dry out the boat and catch my breath after a few exciting days on the edge of out of control on the ocean. A couple of big gray whales had waved their tail flukes at me just outside of Newport, OR just as the sun set and I was putting to sea few days before. I headed out to the 125 degree longitude line and met a few ships there. GPS's have made it too easy to follow a line in the water. I tucked back inside about 5 miles through following seas and with the winds steadily rising.

I put first one reef on the main, then two and then downed the jib altogether. I tried a downwind reach with the main, a silly idea given the conditions, but it was way too wild to dose the main and put up a small jib. So I rode her like that for two days.

I saw bursts of speed in the high sevens and one 9.3 knot ride (according to the GPS) as I surfed down some of the steep following waves. Though theoretically impossible for a 26' foot 4 ton displacement boat with a hull speed around 5.5 knots, 'Desire' must have been planning the water with the shallow flat part of her hull between the two keels. She handled it like a champ, carving across some impossibly steep slopes without any noticeable side slip. I made for Crecent City on the morning of the third day just to get of the craziness for a while.

The harbor master has me tied up in the midst of the fishing fleet, all stinky and rusting with a few proud boats here and there. The cruising boats were on the other side of the harbor but there's a tribe of it's own over here.

After a day or two I'm well dried out now and ready for another round on the ocean. But there is one weather system after the other marching across the Pacific right now. I wait a week until I finally see a window big enough for me to head South for a few days.

I get the boat ready for offshore again and head out into a sunny windless day. The only clouds I see are a thin band on the horizon and I keep motoring farther out and slightly South West. Six miles out I hit a very low fog bank. It's now all silvery and bright with blue skies above as I head right for the sparkly 2'oclock sun under engine power.

With a cotton candy sunset on slow rolly seas I stop the motor and raised the sails in about 3 knots of wind. Then the wind stalls and it gets real dark and wooly. I keep popping on the radar every 10-15 minutes just to have a peak around as I bob in the foggy dark.

Vega and a handful of her closest neighboring stars are directly above me. I call a few fishing boats in the area on the VHF but nobody can tell me how far out this fog bank goes. I'm out of the coastal shipping lanes, so I decide to just bob in the fog for the night.

I go below, light the liquid paraffin in my Dietz oil lamp and cook some grub in the warm amber glow of the light. At one point I stick my head outside and see a growing glow in the dark fog. Ship? Fishing boat? Las Vegas? I turn the radar on and cycle through several of the settings, not seeing anything but a few fishing boats about ten miles away. I finally realize it's just the moon, just before full and glowing orange and yellow in the fog bank, carving it's own golden canyons with honey covered ridges and hollows as it rises through the varying densities of fog.

I had just finished my meal when there are wet sounds in the dark behind the boat. The distinctive sounds of mammals breathing at the surface of the sea. Seals? Porpoises? Maybe a wandering gray whale? Then, in one of those Kodak moments you see on a postcard, that Madison Avenue or Disney could not have crafted any better, a resounding wet blow and a pair of big dark slippery backs glide through the inky black water 150 yards to port, right between me and the golden moonlit fog canyons.

The two whales circle around in the dark in front of me and I loose their sounds in the fog thinking they have headed South. I go back to cleaning up after diner. Suddenly I hear a big wet blow outside, real close on the starboard side.

I dart my head out of the companion way hatch to see the wake and bubbles 16 feet next to the boat. Then a snort and a big wet black back behind me about 20 feet. Then, two big wet backs 10 feet off the port! They circle again and I get the camera and try to get them as they round the side and back again. One whale is about 30 feet long and the other one nearly twice as long as the boat at around 50 feet!

My camera's flash produces and loud snort, of disgust or maybe surprise. I think it's probably not a good idea to startle them again, given how close they are to me and my fragile craft. My other hand backs away from the engine switch.

They circle around again. I've got one hand on the Gumby (survival) suit now and the other bracing myself in the companion way. One little brush against my hull, especially around the prop and steering, and 'Kodak Moment' lends itself to a whole new meaning.

What do you want of me? I know I must be a heck of an enigma to you. Here 20 miles offshore, in the calm fog and dark, under a golden moon, seeming to be a whole lot like a whale and yet not. A shackle on my leeward shroud acting like a sliding thumb on a big base guitar string, all of the creaks and rustlings that my boat and flopping sails are making.

Suddenly I remember 'Desire' has a heart beat! The depth sounder makes a periodic throbbing sound that you can hear when you hold an AM radio close to the instrument's display, a periodic pulse very much like a heart beat.

Even my hull is trying to mimic a whale, with her round pudgy hull and twin keels jutting out like flukes.

The bigger guy slips by the dark starboard side again. He eyes me sideways as he hangs off the transom for a bit. Then he disappears into the inky liquid black sea.

A few moments later he is back on the starboard side, his head rising out of the water right next to the cockpit!

There are so many shiny knobs and folds on his head I can't find his eyes but I can feel them look straight through me.

After a few tense moments, just me and him on the ocean, he let's out a resonate trumpet of sound. I'm close enough to almost touch him and his sound goes right through my body, right to the core of my soul. It's kind of like an elephant's trumpet, but a much lower tone with an incredible amount of resonance and power behind it. Had I been in the water, I'm sure my bones would have liquefied from the intensity and powere of that sound.

My spine turns to jello anyway, but a death grip on the companionway edge holds me there. He slides back down into the inky black depths beside my boat. I loose my grip on the companionway and roll into a ball on the floor, tears streaming from my face.

How the heck can something so fundamentally real and beautiful be so frightening at the same time? Nothing in my life has prepared me for the intensity of this moment and the wide range on emotions coursing through me. Primordial powerful beauty so close and dangerous, yet so gentle and compassionate at the same time.

I regain my composure and stand up, slowly reaching for the VHF microphone and turning it to channel 22 (for non-emergency Coast Guard communications).

'US Coast Guard, this is the sailing vessel Desire'

'Go ahead Desire, this is Coast Guard'

'Good evening sir, this is Desire. I am at North 41 degrees 25 tack 7 by West 124 degrees 23 tack 7 minutes. I've had a couple of large whales circling me for the past 15 minutes and just wanted to let someone know I was here. I wish to report a pon-pon situation at present (non-emergency concern). If I am not heard from again in the next 10 to 15 minutes please send assistance.'

'Roger Desire, you are at North 41 degrees 25 tack 7 West 124 degrees 23 tack 7 and are reporting that you have seen whales?'

'That's affirmative'

'Roger'

*silence*

'Desire back to 16'

I wanted to scream that I hadn't just 'seen' whales but that they were intent on sticking there big wet bulbous heads into my fragile boat and treating me like a pool toy! (I did call back later to report that I was OK)

I put the mike back on the clip and pop my head up to see what my wet friends are up to. Due East of me, silhouetted in the golden moonlit fog canyons I see a big black fluke with white and black bumps all over it, sticking straight up out of the water 50 yards away. It slowly flops back into the sea. The dark body beneath it slips forward in the water and disappears in the foggy dark ahead. I decide to motor back to Crescent City in the morning and wait for some wind to push me South.