kicking off through the Turnagain Arm

it was all set. months of planning and we were booked to fly on May 16th, 2008, silently hoping the weather was going to settle down and spring would come. the seas those 3 weeks prior were huge. I watched the weather while at work, hoping for a change. nothing, continued S and SW seas of 25 knot winds, with 20' swells on the outer coast. this was common. I never thought to think that our container with our boats, which was a big raft strung to a sister raft, would be a week behind schedule because the tugboat pulling them from Seattle to Anchorage just didn't have the mustard to keep pace through those seas. it set the mental stage for the trip, I think we all expected that we could be in some large seas beyond Homer.

our boats were delayed a week due to weather. we all pushed back our return dates as far as we could in July. Matt and Djuna went up on schedule to visit. I stayed back in Seattle a few more days to catch a special birthday and make more lists. with luck and thanks to very timely bagels to the shippers, we got our boats right before the Memorial Day weekend, just before doors closed for 3 days. we had our "unwrapping ceremony" immediately after - (gentle sigh) NO DAMAGE!! I remember sitting on Point Possession days later all talking "we could have gotten our boats only today!".

that first supply in Anchorage was all sorts of emotions. we kept spending money which seemed to never end. we had to go through meal estimations, bagging them, then adding more food. we left optimistically with cabbage and cauliflower, a bit of fruit and even a bag of chips. I bet our boats were the heaviest of the the whole trip that first day. the Anchorage prep was fun, but still arduous preparations that we were all ready to put behind us. eventually we fully packed our boats with all our kit. everything fit, remarkably.

the trip was easily cut into 3 leg - Portage to Homer, a resupply, Homer to Seward, another resupply, then Seward into Whittier. some 450nm (or around there, we weren't really tallying the total mileage). we planned roughly 10 days for each leg, and factored food according based on risk of having to sit bad weather out.

we thanked Steve and Noel so many times but still not enough. a good base each resupply is truly essential. one that comes with a warm shower, amazing meals, endless support and great knowledge sharing is optimal. in future resupplies in Homer and Seward we had thoughts of making it quick "get back on the water" stop. it never worked, it really can't. take the time, enjoy a shower, move on at a healthy pace.

we launched on May 24, 2008.

because of the delay, the tides were on the half moon in the Turnagain Arm, I'm not quite sure if that was too our advantage or not. we still paddled 28nm that first day. we still had to carry our boats up steep beaches to stay higher than the 25'+ tidal change. we still had dreams of giant bears. our boats barely had the word "organization" anywhere near them.

the Turnagain Arm is fabled and unique. the Turnagain arm was beautiful, magic, scary and celebratory all in one. its bottom is a silt mud that Matt could explain the geology of better. each year someone gets off their 4-wheeler as the tide is out, gets stuck up to their ankles in the silt, and even with the help of the fire department is stuck, sinks, and suffocates. we heard these stories, and the last thing we wanted was to get into this situation.

we put on the water on the slack before the ebb, so the water was high. but as we drove to the put in (and after driving back to look at the lines again), we could see how there were channels of mud. once on the water this mud was hard to distinguish between wet mud and water. it was slightly unnerving, and looking back was definitely some of the most dangerous paddling on the trip. we cruised that first day. we had a lot of energy and excitement, in addition to a full belly of sourdough pancakes that I've never seen eaten so completely.

toward the end of the ebb we slowly started running out of water. Matt stood on between Djuna's and my boat a couple times to get the extra 3' of perspective to help pick our lines. at the shallowest point we had a half a blade of water, once we had to walk. thankfully the sand was more firm there and we continued to our first night's site. it wasn't known then, but that was once of our favorite sites, for many emotional reasons.

the first and last pictures in this blog entry are from the plane as I flew in. the first ones are looking at Prince William Sound - check out all that snow! the very last picture here is the most western spine of the Chugach Mountains looking south. it's amazing how quickly they end into the flatlands of the Kenai Peninsula.











in this last picture, to the right, or west, is the eastern side of Chickaloon Bay, which is where we'll continue the writing on after we all chime in about this first special day.