Lost Harbor, Akun Island, Aleutians July 15, 2012 23:20 54N14 165W37

Dutch Harbor was an amazing place to provision. The main store in town is a giant cross between a ship chandler, a hardware store and a food and clothing warehouse store, with each section pared down to just the items required for a long voyage, in high latitudes, by an international crew. They had shackles big enough to lift our boat, 5 gallon containers of diesel engine oil, a wide selection of baking mixes that did not require fresh eggs, and the produce section had everything from taro root and banana leaves to cilantro and corn. The Asian aisle and the Mexican aisle fought each other for shelf space, while the freezer had pigs blood for sale next to squid. At one aisle Frank and I watched two scruffy, well-tattooed, muscled guys grab 10 of the largest containers of peanut butter I’d ever seen, then walk on to discuss the finer points of which brand of packaged breadcrumbs tasted best on both chicken and fish, “that stuff worked great last time, everyone liked it, and it was easy.” One said pointing to his preferred brand. The other replied,”Not easy having that boiling pot of oil if the seas are big.” They grabbed a couple armloads of packages anyway.

We too brought home armloads of stuff. There’s a feast or famine mindset that emerges in me after over 2 months without a store, as we run out of the things that made the crew happy, and turn to the things we’ve been avoiding, the mood onboard darkens and when I hit the aisles of a well supplied store with decent prices, even I’m amazed at the things I put in my own cart, we try to limit the cart to what we can carry, but sometimes we go overboard and the short walk home with too much of the heavy stuff becomes a very long slog.

There were more eagles than inhabitants in town, and the birds hung out at the fish packing plants, keeping an eagle eye on the loading and unloading process, ready to dive on any pollock that jumped the hopper. It was a busy season in a very busy international town. Fishing boats arrived and departed 2-3 per hour round the clock. Workers from countries across the world come for the backbreaking opportunity to make a relative fortune. The dorm room windows displayed flags from Mexico, the Phillipines, and Ethiopia. In the streets we heard Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish. Two Samoans in shorts and flip flops in a beat up old 20 foot sport fisher pulled into the dock next to us; it looked like there last stop could have been Pago Pago, except for a few missing tons of fuel. Each packing company has a campus of dormitory buildings to house these seasonal, or temporary workers. The town of Unalaska across the bridge from Dutch Harbor has a small number of saltbox houses in the same hues as Atka’s houses. Another green-onion-domed, white Russian Orthodox church was the main architectural feature of the town. The one other cruising sailboat we met there were on their way over the top to conquer the northwest passage. They were a fun and eclectic group of gents. We joined them in the pub a few nights and picked their brains for the where/why/how of it – maybe we’ll follow in a few years, a pirate-free fast passage to Europe – as long as the ice breaks up.

There’s only so much dreaming, sight-seeing, local color watching, and provisioning a family can do, so after a week we sailed half a day north. Where we’ve spent the past couple days bouncing between Akutan and Akun islands, at first rushing to take in a cove with dunes and ruins and a two-mile beach, and another sweet town this one with boardwalks instead of streets. But now that we’ve done the place justice and are ready to move, we’re stuck waiting for another low to pass. Gales will be blowing and we’re in a pretty good spot for that now. We managed to pick up a cold or bug in Dutch, and neither of us is ready for a couple of all-nighters in a gale, so we’ll hang tight and maybe skip the lower portion of the Alaska Peninsula, and make way for Kodiak on the back of this next system. Since we made landfall in Adak, we’ve only gone 440 miles, as the crow flies, and we still have over 600 miles to go to Homer. Between finding places we don’t want to leave, then weather that keeps us there when we are ready to leave, the summer is rapidly blowing by, the miles are not – ‘course now I’m ready to go another 2 months before the next grocery run. But Logan has officially expressed an interest in trying out “real” school, and it probably wouldn’t hurt Kennan either (and it certainly won’t hurt me to have someone else responsible for stuffing their brains with knowledge – or maybe it’ll just change the nature of my educational nagging); and school starts before the end of August, a month away now. So we officially have a schedule to keep.

ah ah ah achooo xoxombo

P.S. I did get two new photo albums up in Dutch Harbor. I tried to include more pics of the guys, but the flowers and scenery are prettier:

Unalaska https://plus.google.com/photos/103820103700153271920/albums/5762112139230129297

Igitkin and Atka https://plus.google.com/photos/103820103700153271920/albums/5762108109782486449