Chernabura

In a world of only two people, an enormous ocean and nowhere to go for a walk, we create little ceremonies aboard Traversay III to brighten our passage.

Mary Anne tends to produce elaborate and extremely tasty dinner dishes on her cooking days notwithstanding that the extreme motion causes the task to approach the impossible. My somewhat lesser contribution - my dinners being mundane - is the "noon announcement". We get very excited at the recital of the day's statistics - position, miles sailed in the last twenty-four hours, water temperature, miles to go and the location and distance of the nearest land.

For the last eight days that nearest land has been in the Hawaiian chain, typically Kauai. Today, though, we had a special treat: the nearest land was Chernabura in Alaska. This foggy, windy rocky outlier of the Shumagin group was 1040 nautical miles distant to our north-northwest at noon!

There is no possibility of visiting that distant place on this trip, but we passed nearby twice as we cruised amongst the Shumagin Islands on earlier voyages. We stopped in 2013 at the end of our Northwest Passage from London to Victoria and again in 2014 while touring the Alaska Peninsula at a more leisurely pace.

Long ago, before we had daily access to detailed weather forecasts, Chernabura was briefly featured as the nearest terra firma on three returns from Hawaii on Traversay II. The climatological information we did have suggested that we must go north for a long way from Hawaii before turning east and that we must reach our destination latitude well off the Vancouver Island coast. Our somewhat naive choice of route was in each case remarkably similar to the carefully planned route we are following now.

From here on, the land gets closer. Tomorrow at noon, the nearest land will be Chirikof Island just southwest of Kodiak Island, Alaska followed Cape St. James at the south end of Haida Gwaii BC a day later. At this moment, Cape St. James is 1120 miles to our northeast and shrinking by over six nautical miles every hour. In the days that follow, that nearest place will shift daily to various points on the west coast of Vancouver Island as we approach the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Those Alaskan names speak of the long Russian occupation of Alaska before it was purchased by the US. The curious, by consulting Google, will discover far more about the history and geography of these place names than I could possibly include in a blog posting.


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At 2018-05-20 02:21 (utc) our position was 38°51.05'N 150°08.90'W