Change of Plans
In adventure travel, plans change all the time: the weather changes, your needs aren't what you expected, transportation or lodging doesn't work out.
The ability to accept things-as-they-are is a perspective enabled through consistent attention to food and sleep needs. In some ways, that's the point of a challenging trip: needs are distilled and made central. Priorities become clear, and you find you can drop everything else.
On Wednesday, I gave a conference talk; on Thursday, I took my data science final; on Friday, I finished up my work week and hastily packed. Now it's Saturday night, and I'm lying in the muggy, rough-carpeted hull of a fishing boat. I’m on the way to a place I've never heard of, thinking about how nice it is that the wounds on my face have closed so I don't have to worry about getting grit in them if I turn in my sleep.
I had a bike accident three weeks ago, flipped over my handlebars on a downhill and grated my face on the asphalt. Now one of my teeth is partly fake and my energy has been half of normal while my body heals. It was unfortunate, but the damage was largely cosmetic, so it's not that upsetting. It's been interesting learning how resilient my body can be. I asked all the doctors and the dentist if they would worry about taking this trip and they all said I'd be fine — and sure enough, my lips and cheek knitted together well enough. I have to keep UV rays off my face for a year to reduce scarring, so it's good luck that the new little outboard motor we picked up in Juneau (only an hour later than scheduled) came with a baseball cap. We’ve been planning this trip for a long time, and I’m grateful I don’t have to miss it.
The plan has changed five or six times today. When we left for the airport (6:15am Seattle time) we were hoping a relative would get us at the airport, we'd figure out how to pick up fuel, get the motor, test the new dinghy, maybe load our gear totes onto Charley's boat. We weren't sure where we'd sleep, but we figured it would be on the floor of somebody's house in Juneau.
Right now, it's one of the few dark hours in Alaska's May days, and we're already en route to Dundas Bay for probably a week of camping.
Our maps and charts are for Glacier Bay and Lituya, but the wind there changed from five to thirty knots, so I think that means the Fairweather grounds outside Lituya are too choppy to fish. Then we were going to camp onshore, but I got tired and lay down, and when I woke up I guess it had been decided that we'd run the boat through the night: tight quarters for six in this little boat cabin.
We haven't had nailed-down plans at any point, since our ride is essentially prearranged hitchhiking. Charley is a commercial fisherman, and I don't know a job with more uncertainty. Licenses and permits for different kinds of fish open and close with hard-to-predict windows of time. You have to be where the fish are biting, when the market is right, with the right gear, when the season is open. We'll go wherever is convenient for them.
Charley and his son and deckhand spent two or three hours baiting long line gear in the drizzle while we sat in the cabin keeping an eye on the autopilot. I'd help if I could, but I'd only slow them down: quick hands check lines, cut broken ganions, repair bent hooks, spear the chopped and frozen chunks of bait. Ready gear coils in bins to be tossed out onto the grounds in the night.
My face aches, we skipped dinner, it's been a fifteen hour day of trip prep, and I'm dead tired. I'm staying out of the way. It's no chore to curl up in this padded triangle of floor by the warm engine and wait for whatever comes.
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