Skiffin'

There were a myriad of reasons for the way I was feeling.

1. I was alone

2. I was wearing a hat

3. What I was doing was a little bit crazy, not a lot, but just enough

4. It was beautiful

5. I was smitten, with a girl

1. I was alone. That may not seem like a big deal. It’s not uncommon to find one’s self alone after all. However, when I work on a boat for nearly three months I find that it is quite uncommon and come the end of the season, regardless the caliber of my crew, I find myself praying for some time spent in perfect solitude without one single chance of interruption. Would you like to know what my favourite feeling in the entire world is? The thing that beats anything and everything there’s ever been in all of creation? It’s when I finally get home, whether it’s from the boat or from traveling, and I can sit alone in my car with the radio turned up as high as it’ll go and I can sing my little heart out. I’m not a good singer and I don’t sing in front of people. Not even drunk. Not even karaoke. But, when I am alone in my car, as most do, I turn into a rock star and I can let loose the tension that naturally builds up in a person. It’s the best feeling in the world, especially after being unable to do so for so long. That’s why I was happy that I was alone. I was truly alone and I could yell and scream and sing and not give a damn because the only thing anyone would hear was, maybe, a faint echoing wail bouncing off the mountains. I was going on a skiff ride. For those of you who don’t know, a skiff is a small boat that we have with our larger boat. It’s the equivalent of going on a car ride for me because it was a long skiff ride and I was going it alone. I had my headphones and a playlist ready to go as well. It was going to be a two parter and I had at least 45 minutes of ‘me against the world’ ahead of me after I skiffed by the Hoonah scow, or the scow girls as their called. That was the first part of the skiff ride, I needed to get my hat.

2. The scow is like our ‘neighbor’. Normally I am anchored up in Mite cove on the Deer Harbor II. On a nice day when I look between the mainland and Mite Island there is this little floating house with a crane anchored in the next little bite over with the Fairweather mountains sloping down to Taylor glacier in the background. That little floating house is the scow. In the Crustliner it’s about a 10 minute skiff ride and I feel like I’m sinking the whole time. In the Bullfrog it takes 5 and I’m catching air if there’s a swell. I was in the Bullfrog, and I was catching air. I had on a flannel that the girl in #5 had given me and it made me feel special, almost like I had super powers and the small skiff wasn’t what was making me fly over the water like this. I was on my way there for one reason, and one reason only. They had a hat for me. But not just any hat, a hat the girl had made for me. It’s hard to know where I’m going to be and even harder for other people to know that same thing. So she’d sent the hat over to the scow in hopes that I’d stop by sometime and they could give it to me. I didn’t feel like stopping over there as it was in the opposite direction of my ultimate goal, but I wanted, no, I needed, that hat. I gunned it all the way up to their small dock, basically some aluminum bolted to two logs with some small pink cleats running along it. I tied the Bullfrog off by the bow and as soon as Megan saw me she went upstairs and brought me down a small bundle of fabric. Everyone there knew I was there for that hat and nothing else. She handed it over to me with a ‘I should have given you this a long time ago’ which kind of made my heart sink. I thanked her, made an excuse to everyone for not hanging around, which was promptly ignored, and I hopped back in the Bullfrog with my bounty. Off I went with the hat fighting to get out of my pocket. All I wanted to do was wear it, but I didn’t look at it immediately as I was savoring the suspense. I waited until I was out of sight of the scow, or at least far away enough to feel alone, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I pulled the hat out of my back pocket to examine it. It was beautiful. Really, it was. It was layered in 5 colours. Starts out maroon on the bottom, one of my new favourtie colours, followed by a light light blue mixed with an almost grey, then a sky blue, a light gray, and a dark navy blue on top. The little tag on the side, which was made out of a piece of rubber glove, the kind all the fishermen wear, had the initials IQ on the outside and my name on the inside. It stands for Ice Queen. Not because she’s cold, but because she is damn good at what she does. She is who I was going to see in Pelican, the small boardwalk town, down the strait 7 or 8 nautical miles. I was ready to ride for an hour through anything the ocean/weather was willing to throw at me just so I could see the Ice Queen and it was all okay, because I had a hat.

3. It’s not super crazy to skiff from Mite cove to Pelican, but most people don’t do it. It’s just that the strait is a very large body of water and the skiff is very small vessel. If I were to hit anything, a floating log or some of the other debris that frequents the straights, I could easily fall out of skiff and be lost to the cold water. And visibility isn’t always the best as fog and pouring rain can be a factor. I was lucky in the sense that it wasn’t foggy when I left. I was also lucky that the seas were nice enough for me to make the ride and it was slow enough for me to take the night off. I was not so lucky in the factor of pouring rain, but that was only to be expected. I had the Bullfrog, an extra gas can, and a warm hat. I’d bundled my raingear in the bow with a roadie and a life jacket I never planned to use. It was going to be a bit of a skiff ride, but I was more than stoked about it. A lot because of that alone feeling I was looking for, but more of it because I was off to see the Ice Queen. It wasn’t super crazy, I mean it was a little bit, skiffing to Pelican to see this girl, but it wasn’t totally nuts.

4. It was beautiful. Fucking beautiful. Behind me huge cumulous clouds were billowing above the Fairweather mountain range. They were glowing a soft pink as the setting sun spilled itself upon them from somewhere across the Gulf of Alaska. Since I was headed towards Pelican the swell was with me and it was smooth riding with the wind in my beard and cold water v-ing out behind the skiff. There were two ranges of mountains, one on either side of me, which created the inlet I was in and each mountain that was further than the next in the distance was just a little bit hazier and bluer in colour as happens with distances of a grander natures. They started out a dark green and faded to gray-blue shapes near the limits of my vision. I was singing away, more a screech than anything, and ecstatically thankful for my good fortune on the skiff ride when a dark gray wall appeared across the inlet in front of me. It’d come from nowhere, but I had expected nothing less. I throttled down and let the little skiff sit at an idle with the wake catching up and lapping against the stern. I left it in gear and took my hand off the tiller. Without my hand to hold it straight the outboard flopped to the side and, since I was still idling in forward, started driving the skiff in small circles. I stood up and put on my bibs. I put on my rain jacket as well and whipped the hood over my hat. I opened my roadie and drank it down swiftly as I watched the wall get closer and closer to me while the skiff turned itself in shallow circles. It was a heavy rain. I finished my beer and, doing like the natives, ripped the can in half and threw it over. Sat back down and throttled straight into the downpour as only a man on a mission can. It wasn’t bad at first, but soon it really started coming down and I could hardly see in front of me. It was a feat just to keep my hood from flying back and I could only look ahead with one eye as the other was being brutally battered by the sky. I passed what they call the ‘lollipop’, a marker for a shallow spot, and I could see the small island that signified a little over half way not too far off. The skiff wouldn’t go any faster, but that’s probably good because the heavy raindrops already stung my skin as I buzzed over the salt water. The coldness was dripping down the sleeve of my rain jacket as I tried to keep my hood from flying off. I was determined to keep that hat dry. My throttle hand was going numb, but I wasn’t about to slow down. I wanted to be there because it was cold and because I had butterflies in my stomach. The closer I got the more they went into a tizzy. I was determined. I was going to Pelican and I didn’t care how much it was raining and I didn’t care how cold it was. Then, suddenly, I broke out of it. I’d punctured the wall of rain and found myself on the other side of it. I could see the edge of the ice plant and the three islands they call first, second, and third (real original Alaska). I was almost there, I was going to make it to Pelican. And it was beautiful.

5. It’s that silly giddy feeling you get in high school when your crush looks at you. That’s how I felt. She’s the Ice Queen because she makes the ice at the plant in Pelican. I’m fairly smitten with her. And by fairly I mean entirely. Really, there’s not too much more I want to divulge about it. Just know I was extremely elated.

Be happy,

Beacon