Journal Entry from 15 October 2009

Jan 26

Flew into Sitka at 5:44 last evening. Snow on the rim of the volcano, the tips of the dwarf pine branches, dusting the muskegs on Kruzoff Island. Sun clinking off the Three Sisters.

Rick picked me up from the airport. We crossed O’Connell Bridge and headed to the end of Halibut Point Road to see a steel Allen Marine boat, on sale for 10k. Used to be a bunkhouse for employees. Rusted out and Plexiglas windows – an utter nightmare.

Dinner at Roma pizza, astonishingly good eggplant parmesan. The sky purple, smell of wet alder leaves and rocks blowing off the mountains.

This morning biked into town and chatted it up with Spencer. Cedar rafters r-21 insulation ice dams tugboats harbor rats and how difficult relationships can be, how they’re always work. Couples in town fractured, couples who have remained together. B- who met someone younger, beautiful, living on an island off Bellingham, and the heartbreak it caused S- (how he hiked like a mountain goat and how clear her eyes became when she grew sick).

And the Adak.

Pieter tall and windblown, generous and sincere. We took a tour of the boat, checked out the pilot house, then sat at the maple galley table, eating Grape Nuts, Pieter answering questions on costs of moorage fuel and heat and water and amperage.

Moorage

$2400 a year for slip (100-foot in-tie)

– pay for garbage and water

Electricity

– 2 50 amp breakers (around $60/month)

Fuel

– Boiler

– 2.5 gallons in 24 hours in diesel

Heat

– Closed system

– Water from boiler heats the engine water jackets

– Functions as a large radiator

– 4-5 gallons a day on Dickinson (about $300/month)

– 1 cord of wood +/- $200

– Walls are 4 inches thick (blow-in foam)

“If you did buy her, I’d pick up a skiff – 14-foot Whaler, Lund, something to help with wood/oil/water transport. Set you back about 8k.”

We spoke about needing to haul her out in the near future, pressure wash and paint her. Allow the torrida worms, nasty bivalves bunked up in the planks, to leak out.

“Like snot,” Pieter said. “They want to be in water, so they’ll just ooze wants you dry-dock her.

Last time she was out of the water October 2005, on the dry-dock in Petersburg.

Afterward a dinner of salmon at Rick’s double-wide on the water, a kayak and an outboard, a couple plastic seats, the volcano at peace to the north…