We have some more blogs for the past few days, but for now, I wanted to mention the terrible weather that we were so clever to avoid by sitting in Sitka harbor.

We're in the harbor now, safely tied up and connected to electricity, so we have our 120 V lamps out and electric heat. The city of Sitka has sponsored free city-wide internet, so there's free wifi here at the boat. Not rocket fast, but fast enough to watch the new Castle episode by streaming from Hulu.com and all the Netflix movies we could want.

Outside, well that's another matter entirely. The mast head anemometer readings can be intercepted by our small hand-held repeater so we can monitor the wind gusts: steady at 18 knts with gusts to 35 kits. In the gusts, the boat heels hard, even though she's tied to the dock: an amazing show of the force of wind. It's also raining hard. Altogether, it's a bad day to be anywhere at sea. We knew this was coming and dived into the harbor early to avoid it. The VHF NOAA weather channel notified all mariners early in the week about this 40 kt gale (the first of the season and the reason we're not going any further south this trip), and we're glad that we heeded the warning.

We posted some photos of our trip to Sitka and I'll post the first photos of Sitka later today.

There will be some checks of the dock lines, and I think we'll place a few more fenders alongside the dock where we're rubbing, but Wings seems to be doing well in this. If you wish to phone or use iChat, now is a good time.

I posted a graphic showing the wind speeds around this gale, with Sitka's location indicated with a arrow. Quite amazing.