Harmon and Randall's Voyage…

Leg 2

Blog 2

July 1, 2024

A mere 68 miles from our last stop at Anton Larsen Bay, Randall wants to stop for the night and explore Geographic Harbor. I do the math – 6,000 plus miles to go for a successful completion of this Leg means we’ve got a long way to go and personally, I think life will get really interesting on the other side of the Aleutian Islands. But with a name like “Geographic Harbor” who could say no? So in we go and disappointment was not to be on today’s menu.

The passage in was quite narrow and shallow at times. Randall spotted a distant Brown Bear at the entrance welcoming us, but we did not reach our anchorage at the very end of the bay until 8:30 that evening. We dropped anchor, made dinner and went to bed. The next morning we got the Geographic Bay “experience”.

A misty morning…

Even though it is 8:00 AM, the sun is still not shining through.

Finally the mist burns off..

Time to take the drone out for a test flight. Randall added this essential piece of equipment some months ago, and has taught himself to “fly”. I am still “not cleared for takeoff”. Randall offered to let me fly the drone, but as I have never successfully flown one, I was afraid I might land it in the water. I need to practice on the hard first.

A morning ritual as important as first coffee is checking the engine fluids. No dip stick here as Randall inserts his index finger into the coolant receptacle to get the fill-level just right.

A big day of firsts – today after three days of Randall demonstrating, I got to climb into the anchor locker to draw in and lay down the 210 feet of chain that we let out the night before. Randall only had to get up once in the middle of last night to check the anchor as the wind clocked and picked up to 15 knots for just a few minutes.

We couldn’t quite figure this one out. What is the brownish cover on the mountains? There were boulder tracks, dirt and rocks on the surface. At first we thought it was last year’s snow cover, but as we got closer, it didn’t quite look like that. Perhaps it was a bald spot on the mountain? We looked through our binoculars, sent the drone on a reconnaissance mission yet we are still not sure. Any thoughts out there?

On our way out, Randall took Mōli through a narrow passage. Out of the brush came this teenage Brown Bear – not too concerned with us. Just out for their morning walk.