Harmon and Randall's Voyage…

It is commonly held that fortune favors the prepared. Often unremarked is that fortune has a mischievous twin with whom she shares her secrets. Thus it is that a man can set out from Homer, confident in his months of boat work, only to be tripped up just beyond the breakwater. 

Well, not just…

After our Geographic Harbor departure on July 1, we motored all night so as to achieve Sand Point at daybreak. Here, with luck, we would catch my friend Adam, a Homer resident, a commercial fisherman, but paramount to these, a sailor who favors high latitudes. Adam was the first person I met after purchasing Mo in Homer in 2016, first because on my first morning aboard, I woke to find him staring in a doghouse window at me. I thought him a thief; he knew the former owners and thought me a squatter. The confusion was easily sorted over coffee, and it was easier still to become friends.

Weather ahead was changing quickly and not in our favor. We only had time for a meeting at the pier after Adam unloaded Yor Jim’s weight of Shumagin cod. With the intensity of much younger men we talked of boats, anchorages, the fishing season, others in the Northwest Passage fleet that had touched at Sand Point, his cruising plans and ours. He gave us freshly cleaned halibut and cooked crab; we gave him the last of our best beer and departed. 

“For a guy who doesn’t talk much, you can sure get chatty when you find someone you like,” said Harmon as we let go lines.

On July 3 and two hours out of Sand Point we hit a wall of fog. Just before it enveloped Mo, I looked astern and noticed that our wake–an indication of the autopilot course line–was unexpectedly curvaceous. The flat calm of the day should have produced a line arrow-straight streaming aft, but instead it featured a regular bump, almost like the single beat of a heart. Mine sank. The Northwest Passage is mostly motoring. We need this unit to work flawlessly for many miles to come. 

I rebooted. Same result. The pilot steered, always returned to course, but with a rhythmically inserted curve. 

The heavy, wet fog meant only the radar could see the way, and with Harmon off watch, I set the guard alarms, made a coffee, and sat down to study the problem. Soon a pattern emerged. Even a dead straight autopilot course requires continuous, small adjustments, and following these small adjustments the rudder indicator skipped and wiggled as it passed centerline, sometimes as much as 15 degrees. The rudder dutifully followed. 

Passing further into starboard produced no irregularity; neither did passing from starboard back to port. Only the move across center from port caused the problem. Over and over it skipped much like a needle skidding across a record, always recovering, but always failing in the same place.

The brain controlling the pilot I’d renewed in Homer; the ram steering the rudder had been rebuilt there as well; the pattern was too regular to be a contact problem. That left but one element.

Fog persisted through the night after Sand Point and even as we shot through the Aleutians at Akutan Pass, flying entirely by instruments at the giddy speed of 10 knots. And at Dutch, fog laid like a cold, wet blanket over the harbor, allowing only now and then a view of the bald eagle perched atop the mast. Here I replaced the autopilot feedback indicator and now the unit steers straight.

On July 7, we depart under power for St. George Island in the Pribilof group, but fog remains our escort. Two hours from the harbor, Harmon notes heavy smoke billowing from the engine room. I lift the engine covers to find fire. The positive battery cable has come loose from the alternator, sparking wildly as it flails about the engine compartment. The engine is shut down, and when the smoke clears, I see that the alternator fuse block has broken (“Mere fatigue,” pronounces my friend Gerd upon seeing the below photo). I take the alternator out of the engine circuit, Harmon lowers the hydrogenerator into the water, and we continue. That evening, while Harmon tours the island for both of us, I replace the alternator from spares.

On the reach to St. Paul that night, finally we fly sail and soon after ball bearings come raining down on deck from the vicinity of the new main. A batten car cap has broken. Fixed next day.

The engine water pump, replaced in Homer, leaks. Fixed.

The radiator cap, new last year, leaks. Replaced.

While cleaning the engine’s primary fuel filters, I cracked one of the bowls. Fixed.

The dinghy outboard, serviced and run for hours in Homer, fails to start in Grantley Harbor (in hindsight, just because I flooded it). The floor of the inflatable dinghy deflates. How to fix? More on that later.

I remind Harmon of the saw, “Cruising is sailing to exotic ports to work on your boat.” He fails to see the humor. Me too.

Half way to Nome, the fog clears, and a few days after, full sun. One tends to think of Nome, but two degrees below the Arctic circle, as the starting line for the Northwest Passage. The town claims fewer than four thousand residents, but here there are two large groceries whose prices are only double that of the states. The hardware store is small but crammed to the ceiling. The recreation center provides hot showers for $7; $6 if the attendant suggests you look over 60. The Gold Dust saloon has a two-machine laundromat down the hall. Further on such luxuries are either non-existent or prohibitively expensive. We will remain a week as warranted by the to-do list and the intransigent ice along Alaska’s north coast.