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.