So, another week in Wrangell, Alaska. We’ve continued doing things to get the boat ready for haulout and the work to be done. I spent an afternoon up the mast with mixed success at dismounting items to make the boat “shorter” (so to hopefully make it into the boatshed here without having to drop the mast). VHF antenna and wind-vane came off easily, but the lightning spike screws (being stainless steel) were pretty much welded into the cast aluminum mast head. Outside temperatures were such that neither blue tape nor gorilla tape would stick requiring both the tape and the material to be taped to be warmed with a heat gun. A nuisance working on deck – a damned nuisance trying to wrap things up the mast. After a half hour spent hanging upside down – like “the man on the flying trapeze” – under the big radar trying to manage plastic wrap, tape and the heat gun, I gave it up. This’ll have to wait until we get into the boatshed and/or have a lift available from which to do the work.

Daughter Kate, purchased a new I Phone to replace mine which jumped overboard a month ago. It arrived by FedEx making Dorothy very happy – she doesn’t share well.

We’ve been looking for lodging to cover the period sand-blasting and spray-painting of DE’s hull will require the boat to be sealed up. Only one place was willing to consider having Rusty with us, and they were already booked. The family friend I mentioned in my last post – Tiger – arranged for us to use a friend’s travel trailer, which is greatly appreciated.

The weather has ranged from rain, to inches of snow, to low temps turning that snow to ice, to brilliant sunshine and back to rain again. At various times the inner harbor has been completely frozen over, and half the fairway span in the outer harbor as well.

The reporter for the local newspaper – Wrangell Sentinel (reminds me greatly of the ICO up on the Sonoma–Mendocino Coast) – spent an evening with us. She’s doing a story about our bringing the boat up from Seattle to do the work. The Marine Service Center, where our work will be done, has only recently opened and Wrangell is hoping to bring new business to the area. The reporter was an interesting person – birth and elementary school in Beijing, China; middle school in Hong Kong; high school in India. Then to the US. Her parents now live in Trinity County, CA and they frequently eat at the restaurant in Hayfork my brother Terry’s in-laws operate. Always a small world. And speaking of small world stories, a fellow working for Don Sorric, the marine contractor who will do our bottomwork, is from the Point Arena / Manchester and remembers me from my resident deputy days on the Sonoma North Coast. No, I never arrested him. We had a great time remembering the Hay Ranch raid – “JC, when are you gonna grow up?!”

Dorothy and Rusty had their shared birthday. We wandered all over town in the snow; looking for a store or restaurant where we could get a birthday dessert to celebrate. But it was Sunday, and it’s a small town…

Dorothy has found a knitting group, of course! LaDonna, the harbormaster (or would that be ‘harbormistress’) has a group at her home on Monday evenings.

As it was while we lived in SE Asia, modern technology keeps us connected with family and friends in the lower US and back in Hong Kong.

There’s a fishing vessel which came in the last couple days, and a story about the single-handing skipper that this past year he ended up marooned on an island for 16 days, without heat, without food in December. Maybe I’ll get the chance to hear more specifics.

I’ve been doing some work preparing for a lecture I’ll give in March to USACE rangers. It’s been a couple of years since I gave a formal presentation on this topic, but before retirement I was very involved with our department’s peer support and critical incident debriefing programs, as well as those of other San Francisco Bay Area agencies. The lecture will be pretty much a standard “inoculation”, but I’m enjoying re-visiting issues I’d put so much previous effort into. Thinking about post-trauma stress, I am thoroughly grateful to have completed my policing career with only modest physical and/or emotional damage.

We took Rusty to a vet who travels between Petersburg, Wrangell and sometimes Juneau. He’s developed a skin condition, likely secondary to some kind of allergic reaction. Rusty also needed an official “okey-dokey” to fly out of Wrangell on 22 February. He got a pedicure too.

Our latest haulout date is tomorrow, Friday 11 February. I can say “no problem” in many languages… semper gumbi.