If you can imagine riding down the road to the supermarket on your folding bike, pedaling away with a very large backpack strapped to your back, on your way to get final provisions for your departure -- when up ahead your trusty old Jeep of 15 years pulls out of the supermarket parking lot ahead of you. How would that feel exactly? Confusing? Exciting? With perhaps a sense of finality of change? Well, that's what happened to me just before departing Seward. It was an odd feeling to say the least.

Now, a week or so later after a nice reach out of Hitchinbrook on the way to Yakutat, the wind dies off with the sunset. So on comes the engine, roll goes the headsail, and away we go doing that most vile of things to do on a sailboat -- the scourge of sailors everywhere -- I'm having to pay for fuel. Shiver me timbers. While watching the 2 1/2 hour sunset behind me with my back up on the dodger, trying to figure out how to finish sewing my 1/3 finished bimini and attach it around my solar panels, I hear and see a soft blow of my port stern to my right. No spray mind you, soft and quiet, almost stealthy, like a small porpoise coming to play before they get to the bow wave. Ten feet off my port stern, I look and see a pair of blowholes. How odd, my slightly weary mind slowly grinds away, pondering. Then the rest of the bulk rises and curves with such grace and fluidity it is a beauty to behold. And I'm stunned -- lingering in the moment which had already ended. Replaying the magic.

If seeing my old Jeep drive away with someone else behind the wheel was an odd feeling, then seeing a 15 ton, 35 foot minke whale headed right for my rudder is enough to put odd feelings in a whole new category. Sheer terror mixed with a primal thrill, with just a dash of camaraderie? Now, I don't know how he was feeling (was it a he?-- I didn't ask. Boundaries people. Boundaries.). Maybe he was eying my gal's buttock lines. Maybe I caught him sleeping. Or maybe, like many minkes he was just curious. But in those few seconds, when a denizen of the deep comes out of the dark twilight seas to say hello, you've got to admit -- that was cool. Which coincidentally is what I've been saying every 15 minutes or so, for the past week.