Since our “adventure” passage from Seattle to Wrangell in January, MV DavidEllis has spent 4 months on the hard getting sandblasted and new bottom coatings, and another 5 weeks at the dock in Wrangell putting things back together; we are finally underway again. We made a near perfect (as far as the tides/currents in Wrangell Narrows), and absolutely freaking gorgeous (in regards weather) passage from Wrangell to Petersburg Tuesday afternoon 21 June.

We planned only an overnight in Petersburg, but then we don’t have any real schedule either until meeting our former Hong Kong boat neighbors, Warren & Heather, at Gustavas 2 July, for a couple of days cruising in Glacier Bay National Park. So when we realized the freezer temp was creeping up, and had been for the past week, we decided to get into it here in P’burg. Both the freezer and refrigerator units are little 12VDC NovaKool units – pretty bomb-proof really. After Dorothy took apart the locker in which the freezer compressor is housed, I found that the main cooling fan had stopped. Several years ago in the Philippine Islands, during the SW monsoon, we found that both units had difficulty keeping up with the high temperatures. With help from Ray Wolfe’s guy Sandro, we installed auxillary cooling fans and created a clear ventilation path with fans pulling air in one passage, and blowing out another for both units. Not needed so much in SE Alaska… Anyway, it turns out that there is a Radio Shack upstairs in the Petersburg grocery store, and they had a couple of 12V cooling fans of the right size. Good thing they had two, as I immediately broke one of them. It’s been about 30 hours since completing the fan replacement job on the freezer, and the temp has now dropped 9 degrees F, and should take a couple more days to get down to it’s usual stable temp.

So while in a fixing things mood, we stayed another day and so finally got the newly modified engine room bilge pump unit installed; complete with soldered connections, amalgamation tape and heat shrink tubing. Sounds like a small job, but took a solid 8 hours due to the small working space and my not-so-coordinated fingers.

The slip we’re tied into is in the north (oldest) harbour, just in from the channel – lots of current runs through there, at times making it interesting to dock. Our first experience in Petersburg was into this very slip, where the current (and my own limited abilities) made it difficult to get right up to the finger pier. Our trusty crew, Craig C, made the leap of faith for the dock, and came up short, right into the water! As Craig himself wrote just the other day: “most ordinary mortals might have come down with PTSD after experiencing such a difficult time. But not to worry; after clawing myself onto the dock, all was well”. I believe they’ve named the Petersburg municipal swimming pool after Craig and his heroic effort; and also think I can see the claw marks, 2 years later on the pier. This time, for whatever reason, Dorothy merely stepped daintily from DE to the dock saying “see Craig, that’s how it’s done”.

Lots to see from this slip as all kind of craft are transiting up and down the Wrangell Narrows – pleasure and commercial craft, tugs, barges, sailboats, wave-runners, skiffs, trollers, seiners, gillnetters and crab-boats. There’s a public fishing dock at the end of the pier we’re on, where at the right tide standing on the dock, one is virtually trolling in the current.