Hold the ice, please

     

The State Ferry Leconte heads for Juneau under a coat of ice.

The cold spell that cloaked southern Alaska a couple of weeks ago raised the recurrent realization
that if you live near big water, no matter how bad the weather gets, there are people out there offshore encountering conditions worse by magnitudes. Twice facebook users posted photographs of vessels on the ocean icing up, a dangerous situation for any vessel. It occurs when temperatures drop toward zero while wind whips up waves and as the boat crashes through them the spray that rises attaches to any exposed surface freezing to it almost immediately. That can be dangerous. Just one incident I am familiar with related to me by friends: A tug pulling a barge approached Whittier, Alaska, one January expecting to dock and at least release the barge. Ice stood in the way. The tug took on so much ice crossing the Gulf of Alaska all the doors to the cabin had frozen shut and the crew could not get out. A radio call to Whittier’s harbor brought a crew out to break the ice up enough so the crew could escape
Now as another such weather episode approaches, I am again recalling my own experience with that condition several years ago.
     I was delivering an 83-foot fish tender from Valdez, Alaska, to Port Angeles, Washington. We

Ice coats the rails on the Sikuliaq after a night
of wind and spray.

departed in early November after waiting for a week or so for a weather break. When it did, we hightailed it out. A low near Kodiak to the southwest of us was forecast to dissipate with calm seas and light winds to follow. Now I can say based on a previous experience I should have been suspicious. After all it can't happen twice, can it? 

     We had smooth sailing through Prince William Sound and turned southeast following the south coast of Alaska. Through that first night we pushed along in fairly calm waters on into the next day. We had planned to continue through the next night and reach the entrance into Southeastern Alaska the following day. That was until around the time we rounded Cape St. Elias and heard an updated weather forecast. That weakening low near Kodiak had deepened explosively (their word, not mine) and was moving rapidly to the northeast straight at us. I had heard a forecast like that once before (Singin’ them songs about them storms at sea). As the seas began rising I decided it would be better to hide out in Icy Bay, about a third of the way across the Gulf and wait out the storm. We found what looked like a suitable anchorage and settled in for the evening. What had looked good turned into a lee shore when the wind direction changed and sometime during the night we had dragged anchor dangerously close to that shore. Fortunately it turned out to be a steep shore and I was able to back the boat away from it and moved farther into the bay, this time tying off to a large buoy that was also holding a raft of logs. We spent the rest of the night and the next snuggled up to the logs while the storm howled outside the bay.
     The morning of the second day the wind and waves had subsided considerably. Supposedly we were facing winds no more than 20 knots and seas to 5 or 6 feet, nothing this boat couldn’t handle. The only problem might have been that we had to head into those waves and the temperature had dropped considerably. We headed out and into the waves. With the vessel tanked down we plowed through the waves and barely noticed the spray the bow threw up. Before we had gone too far as I looked out over the bow, something didn’t seem right. It took a while but in a few minutes I realized I couldn’t see the blue paint on the bow trim any more. I asked one of the crew to go out and see what was up and he came back shaking off water. That’s when I figured out what had happened. That spray we were throwing had hit the cold metal and frozen. We were freezing up and hadn’t even realized it.
   

The Tradition on a better day

    I knew this boat had some stabilization issues and more weight from ice topside would only add to those. I immediately slowed to about half our speed. We only had 48 miles from the anchorage to another bay and dock at Yakutat. Along the way I kept slowing in stages to keep the spray down and we proceeded across the Gulf, it took us 10 hours to go those 48 miles. Toward the end of the trip I could feel the vessel sluggish to steer and in a roll took a little longer to right itself. Then at the bay we had to cross a bar, where the sea floor rose creating waves. Now we had to cross it with a potentially unstable vessel. I tried the Coast Guard but a local answered. In a short conversation he told me where it was best to cross and we made it without difficulty though it did throw us around a little, motored into the harbor and found a place to tie off, glad to be stopped. Once safe in harbor we tackled the job of knocking off all that ice, in some places more than an inch thick.
     So, now as another wave of Arctic air heads this way, again my thoughts turn to my own brief encounter with an icy boat, and too, I think of all those mariners out there, catching our food and transporting our supplies and products under those conditions and know that here on shore I have nothing to complain about if it turns a little colder.

Go here for more information on vessel icing, causes and danger.

Messing about in boats