LIBRARY ENCOUNTERS

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

            Modern libraries consist of much more than books, but it is still logical to assume that reading plays an essential part in the use of a library. I learned to read in the last month or so of my first grade year. This is late; it seems to me, in the light of experience with my own children who tended to read early on, and with little difficulty.

            One-room school education was still the norm in rural South Dakota when I was in first grade, and my older sister and I were sent to a Lincoln County one-roomer. She finished first grade, and although technically I was not old enough, my parents let me try first grade so that I would be only one year behind her. There was no possibility of kindergarten in these old one-room schools. My fellow first-graders were Margy, who was kind of a dim bulb, and Wayne, who was much smarter -- smart enough to wind up with a PhD and become head of a college speech department.  Neither of us had any trouble staying ahead of Margy, and I thought I was just a bit ahead of Wayne, so there was little incentive to charge on ahead and learn to read. But then the axe fell.

            Traditional moving day on the farms of South Dakota was March 1st. My dad decided he wanted to move to a different, larger farm, and since it was available to rent, the family moved, only about a mile and a half from the first farm. That was an important distance, as it meant going to a different school in Turner County. There was only one other first-grader in this school, Lucile, and she could read. I had a few words down, like "Dick", or "See", or "Spot", or even "Jane", but I couldn't begin to read as well as Lucile. This meant getting down to business; I learned to read in the short time left in the school term, passed Lucile and never looked back.

            This school, like all the other one-roomers, had a book-case in the back of the room, the "library." There were books for maybe third, fourth grade and on up to eighth, but no little kid books that I remember. Probably the Child Story Readers were supposed to suffice. These Child Story Readers were a good series of books, but they were not library books, they were textbooks. The library was small, probably fewer than 100 books, plus the "reference library" which consisted of the World Book Encyclopedia and a huge dictionary. With the exception of these last two, it was possible to read through the entire library. You would read as much as you could in the first grade, more in the second, and so on, and perhaps by the time you were at the end of the sixth grade, you could have gone through every pleasure book there. This was a matter of great pride to me, and to my cousin Luverne. He was in a different school, but the quantity and quality of the libraries were about the same.

            But then the axe fell a second time. The county decided to circulate books from one school to the other, and even buy some New Books! So it became a challenge to stay current, to brag to your cousin that you had again "read the library". We read as much as we could get by with, to the detriment of our regular assignments, as it took time to keep current, but after all, some of the new books were quick reads, and it was not hopeless.

            Then came the next blow, high school. This school was a traditional big brick building with concrete arch work over the main door with the words Lennox High School embedded in the concrete. There was, of course, a library. It was a whole room to itself! The room was probably not as large as the one room in our previous school, but it was good-sized and had full shelves of books on three walls, with study tables in the middle of the room. And there were no little kid books to skip over. How in heaven's name was a person supposed to read his way through all that? This was a disheartening thought, and to this day I enter a large (or small) library with a kind of dismayed feeling that I will never ever get through it all. Greater shocks were to come, of course, in the various college and city libraries that I was to encounter later.

Here are some libraries that I have encountered since high school.

The first one, which I did not encounter at all, was the Lennox City library. People tell me it was not much of a library, occupying a small room in the city hall, and I never went there while attending Lennox High School or at any time since. My excuse is that I was much too occupied in my attempts to read the high school library. Next would be the large library at South Dakota State College. This was not quite so horribly overwhelming now, as I was getting the idea that one shouldn't even try to read all the books. There were probably fewer than a hundred thousand books, but it was very impressive, occupying one of the largest buildings on the campus. Students were not allowed in the stacks, but there was a smaller side reading room that I loved, and I remember reading through a collection of books of O. Henry stories. If we needed books from the main collection, we consulted the card catalog (real cards in drawers, remember them?), brought the call numbers to the library student assistants, who then went down into the stacks and brought the books up to the main desk for you. That system worked OK, but there was no browsing in the stacks.

            I can't say I did a lot of reading while I was in the Army, but now and then I would drop into a Service Club and find there were some rather good books on the shelves. I ran across War and Peace in one of the collections and I read it, mostly to say that I had done so. Tolstoy was to make a much deeper impression on me after I had had a second and third go-round with that great book.

            My first teaching job, after I got out of the Army, was at Jefferson School, grades K-9, in Winona, Minnesota. The school building was more than twice as big as Lennox High School, and it had a library that was perhaps two to three times the size of our old high school library. I never spent much time in the Jefferson library, as the librarian was a dragon. Her name has long been forgotten by me, at least. She evidently thought her job was to make the place so forbidding that no kid wanted to enter it, and no kid did except when a class, accompanied by the teacher, was required to come in. When a few reckless students entered without being compelled, her main aim, it seemed, was to catch them at some fearsome act, and then forbid them ever to enter the library again. This woman embodied everything a school librarian should not be. She might have done better at the Vatican Library or the Bodleian Library where all the books must be protected at all costs.

            Next came the library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. This was BIG, who knew how many millions of books in how many different locations? The main library was run like the one at South Dakota State, you got one of the librarians to help get the book from the stacks. I was shocked when I was informed that we grad students could actually go and prowl around in the collection. Since I had never done this before, I had no idea how to proceed, so I took the easy way out and got the library helpers to get what I needed. Since most of what I needed was located in the Music Building I made sure to be on the good side of Katie the Music Librarian. In l953-54 and again in l959 the Music Library was overflowing the totally inadequate music building, and much of the holding was piled on the floor, only Katie knew where. She was a wonderful help to us music students, both grad and undergrad. When the new campus was built across the Mississippi, the School of Music got a new large building with fine space for a library. I don't know if Katie was still employed there at that time, but I do hope she got a chance to work in a place where you could actually find things. The new campus was built several years after my time there.

            My next teaching job was at West High School in Green Bay Wisconsin. The actual music scores were stored in my rehearsal room, and I did not have much occasion to enter the school library. My recreational reading was done mostly in the Green Bay City Library. There must not have been much remarkable about it, as it is all dim in my mind. The one horrifying fact about the Green Bay experience was that I found that the dragon librarian from Winona (Jefferson School) was now employed as librarian in one of the Green Bay junior high schools. I can't understand how she got that job, as the Superintendent who hired her had been the super in Winona previous to that time, and he should have known what sort of dragon she was.

            University of Washington library comes next, first of all in the Music Building, and then in that great Gothic and neo-Gothic Suzallo Main Library. By this time I was more used to wandering around in the stacks, and was able to find things fairly well, except when they started changing from the Dewey decimal system to Library of Congress cataloging. Even the librarians were mostly confused. But that was in the main library. At the music library we had a new librarian, a Mr. Wood, who had just gotten a degree from Harvard, and was, for the most part, impossible. He rarely talked to anyone and none of us grad students could figure out what he did locked up in his office. The music library had lots of wonderful material, but I have to say that I probably would not have done so well if it had not been for the magnificent collection of music scores that the downtown Seattle Public Library had. And those scores were not on reserve either; you could check them out. Ultimately I got my degree, with the usual travail, tears, vows of revenge on recalcitrant committee profs, oral and written tests, dissertation and the works.

            So now let us briefly back up, to the South Dakota State College library and the helpers who fetched the books from the stacks. One of them was the red-haired Barbara whom I had met in a college production of "You Can't Take it With You". At the time I paid little attention; there were said to be seven men to each woman on the campus in those post-war years and I had little hope, I thought, of ever getting a date. One day she brightly announced to me that she had broken up with her boyfriend, Bill, and implied very strongly, I thought, that she was available and willing to go out with me. So we did "go out" and after Korea we were married for 23 years before she called it quits.

            Comes now my next job, at Skagit Valley Community College in Mount Vernon, Washington. The library here was a bit heavy on subjects like welding, auto mechanics, real estate, and the like, but it did have a respectable collection of books on just about anything. The music section of the library was certainly sufficient for a college that leaned toward the vocational. There was an excellent collection of LP records, and new ones came in regularly until about the time that compact disk records became available.

            Compact disks were a development that exacerbated the running feud between the Head Librarian and the audio-visual assistant. I think the audio guy had a fancier title than that, but titles did not mean much when it came to disagreements between the two. I had been given a convincing demonstration of the superiority of the CD by one of the Mount Vernon electronics stores, and came to the library brimming over with enthusiasm for ordering CDs, and stopping the LPs except when they were the only available recording of a wanted item. The audio man was immediately persuaded, but unfortunately had to have the OK of the Head for what could have been a lavish order of CDs. Since he was for it, she was against it. When she switched sides much later, he was against it. What happened was that no new records were ordered from that time until I retired from teaching. On several subsequent visits to the campus I found no CDs in evidence. LPs were getting extremely scarce, not being in production anymore, and I wonder what my successor in the music department was doing for new records. The feud, for all I know, is still going on.

            Barbara and I and the two daughters came out to the West Coast as the result of my having gotten a John Hay Fellowship in the Humanities to study primarily in history and philosophy at the University of Oregon the summer of l964. While there, I looked at the 59 other participants from all over the United States, about half Masters and half Doctors, and thought "These guys with their doctorates are no smarter than I am." And so after a lot of applications and filling out of forms, I was accepted at the University of Washington, was awarded a Teaching Assistantship in music education which meant resident tuition, for me, also for Barbara, preference in student housing, and of course a small stipend for my teaching activities. Barbara was hired by one of the Seattle Library branches for part-time work. She enrolled in the UW graduate school of what else? Library Science. Ultimately she wound up as Head Librarian for the Northshore school district in Bothell. We lived in Everett, as it was about half way between our jobs.

            The Everett City Library was OK in many ways, but they had a head librarian who did not believe in ordering many new books, and did not seem to encourage his staff to serve the public, or it seemed to me, to even talk to them. He had to have been trained in the same library school as the dragon from Jefferson School.

            After Barbara left, and after a delightful courtship and marriage to Margaret, we lived in several different places with libraries that deserve at least a mention.  In Stanwood, there was a nice little library with friendly, helpful librarians.  In LaConner, a tiny library not open enough of the time, but having a lady librarian who, seeing me at a local bookstore looking at the latest Bernstein biography, asked me if I would like the book. I said I would, and so she bought it right then and there for the library, gave it to me, and said I could bring it to her for cataloging when I was done reading it. Let's hear it for small-town libraries!

            After I retired from teaching we were in LaConner for four years during which we made some trips up the Inside Passage to Alaska by sailboat. The Ketchikan Library: nice, and unexpectedly packed with people, probably fishermen, on a rainy day. It was a great place for Margaret and me that day, as we had just walked out and back from Saxman Village to see the totem poles in a heavy rain. We dried off with the rest of the library denizens. Petersburg library: spent quite a lot of time there, waiting for the fog to lift so we could go on. Nice library, but not much to look at, as it is on the top floor of a municipal building. Juneau Library: built over a parking garage, but good-sized with a nice view over Gastineau Channel. It has lots of books, and a helpful staff. Sitka library: The greatest view in town, next to the concert hall, looking out over the water. My first impression of it was that they had a nice collection of classical CDs. A very attractive place which almost persuaded me that Sitka was the place to settle in. Skagway library: very homey feeling, good small library and open a good bit of the time. And last of all we come to Haines, which was to be our home for the foreseeable future.

            The first time we saw the Haines library was in January when we flew up to see just what Southeast Alaska was like in the winter. The library was not open when we were in Haines, but there was a lot of new snow on the ground, untouched, and John and I ran around in a huge circle to make a "fox and goose" track. This is a game of tag, where the fox tries to catch the geese who must run anywhere on the circle or the various spokes that intersect it. I suppose we must have noticed the sign on the left of the library, "Dedicated Site of the New Haines Library". The old library was small, heavily used, and the reading room had to double as a community meeting room. The Head Librarian was continually hampered by lack of office space and the difficulty of getting things done when interruptions were many. Anyhow, this promise of a new library intrigued Margaret and me, and was a factor in our decision to make Haines our home.

            Some person on the Haines library staff must have heard, not long after we were settled in town, that I had been a music teacher. At that time there was a lot of fund-raising activity going on for the projected new library building, and they asked me if I could get a singing group together to perform for one of these fund-raisers. This was the "Sweet Themes" music and dessert show on the Chilkat theater stage, and I wanted to do it. Matt Davis was known to me as a willing first tenor; he and I had talked about singing before, and I had also talked to the high school principal, Darold Kludt. Darold had been the music teacher and was a fine musician. Those two, with me as baritone, made up three-quarters of a quartet that had potential. But we needed a bass, and I finally asked Steve Thomas, who had a great voice, but was not so proficient at reading and learning music. So we agreed to meet and rehearse in the high school band room. We had hardly started to vocalize when Bob Krebs, who now had Darold's old job as music teacher, started singing along with us. So the quartet became a quintet, and we performed at the "Sweet Themes" fund-raiser. As a result of that performance, we picked up several more singers, and the "Gentlemen of Note" became a reality. Later we figured "Men of Note" would be good enough.

            After about six years had passed, holding our breath, waiting for money grants for the new library, the Men of Note sang at the ground-breaking ceremony. In the breath-takingly short period of less than a year, our gorgeous new 2.1 million dollar library was complete and the Men of Note sang at the grand opening. This was a proud day, with the library, huge as it was, jam-packed with people all talking at once. There was some speech-making, award-giving, and thanking of everyone and his dog, but little of this was heard over the hubbub of the crowd. No PA system. When it came to the turn of the Men of Note, I do not want to claim that the crowd became dead quiet, but most of them did stop yakking and we were heard by just about everyone that had any interest in listening. We felt very proud that we were the only group that the audience shut up for.

            The actual library building is somewhat strange because it is built in an X form. There is a part parallel with the street, and the part that crosses this part is set at a 55 degree angle instead of the 90 degrees you might expect. This allows the huge glass end of the crossing part to be aimed squarely at the beautiful Cathedral Peaks of the Chilkat Mountains. There is new furniture throughout the building, meeting rooms, plenty of room for computers, stacks for the books that are not hopelessly jammed, and the lighting is so good that we now can see all the titles on the lower shelves. The lighting in the old building was a major complaint, as it was nearly impossible to read the titles on the small collection of videos they had at that time. This is such a wonderful place, so inviting, that I told the head librarian that since we lived close to the library, I would sleep at home and eat at home, but the rest of the time I would just live at the library.

            Margaret is a volunteer helper at the library, daughter Holly is now children's librarian, and I, along with a greatly increased number of Haines citizens check out books and use the library in a number of ways that the dragon in Winona would never have dreamed.

THAT FINAL CONCERT

That Final Jefferson Junior High School Concert

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

            I had just been hired to teach at Jefferson Junior High, and was a bit surprised to learn that they wanted me to start immediately after the Christmas holiday break instead of waiting for the semester to end.  I wondered why the rush to get me started.  I found out why, not from the school administrators, but from my landlady on the second day I spent in her house.  If I had known why, I probably would not have taken the job, as I had two other opportunities in my pocket.

            "Did you know" said the landlady (wife of one of the high school teachers), "that there were two people ahead of you on this junior high music and English job?"  Well, of course not; I had assumed there was one, and that that person had quit for some good reason before the end of the school year.  The landlady was enjoying this. 

            "Yes, there were two men.  The first lasted only four weeks before he quit, and the second was asked to resign by Christmas.  The kids were too tough for them; they were completely out of control."

            You couldn't tell if she expected me to resign on the spot or wait until I had failed miserably.  So that was the start of my eight-year "tour of duty" at Jefferson.

            The first half year (their second semester) I managed to pull together a passable bit of music from my choral groups.  There were plenty of kids who wanted to be in the choruses (girls only, boys only, and mixed), but not necessarily to sing.  Perhaps some came because they wanted to participate in the forced departure of the third guy, me.  One of the two English classes was a disaster as many of the students had been promoted to the ninth grade just to push them out of the system.  Several of them could not read more than "is", "the", and perhaps "he."   The other ninth grade English class was made up of regular kids who could read, write, think, and enjoyed doing it.  The seventh grade General Music classes were not brilliant, and not brilliantly taught either, but both the students and I learned a lot.

            Probably the Superintendent of Schools and the Jefferson Principal took some heat from the public and the School Board for the chaos in the school, so I was in good favor with them.  I actually signed up for another full year.  That year showed a good improvement in the students' attitudes and we got some music and English taught.  I use the word "we" because beginning teachers like me learn more than the students.  The following year I asked for, and got, a year leave of absence without pay to work full-time on a Master's degree at the University of Minnesota. When I returned I was pleasantly surprised to find that the year-long substitute teacher had done a fine job and I had some good singers coming up.

            But problems arose.  The first was that there was a big statewide push going for remedial reading classes, several years too late for that first English class of mine unfortunately, and I did not want this push to take me out of music, worthy though the cause might be.  And I had no confidence in the materials that would be required.  The next thing that irked me was that when the high school choral music teacher resigned to move to St. Paul and I applied for that position, I was turned down for some outsider.  This happened, I found out, in part because the Jefferson Principal said he did not want to break up his successful team of teachers.  This was mildly flattering, but not enough to keep me aboard.  I resigned in February, to take effect at the end of the school year.

            I did not want it said of me that I sloughed off work, now that I couldn't be fired anymore, so I put a great deal of effort into all my teaching and especially my mixed choir.  It was really fine, and I had a couple of ninth grade basses who could sing a low E flat, plus a good number of others who could hold their own on the medium and higher bass parts.  Tenors were never a problem as the younger seventh and eighth grade fellows had not completely changed voices and were capable of gloriously high tenor notes.  We could always find a substitute note, or a different octave for the low notes they could not sing.  Altos and sopranos were not a problem either; they all had had note reading experience in my general music classes.

            So came the night in late spring which was to be my farewell concert.  The instrumental students played first, but I had no hand in the teaching of instruments.  Then came the various choral groups, boys, girls, and lastly the big mixed chorus, the Jefferson Choir.  Forty boys and forty girls.  These were not picked out to make the numbers match; it just happened that there were equal numbers of boys and girls.  All the music was four-part, and probably a third of it was sung without accompaniment.  I thought we would blow the audience away.  They were blown away, but not quite as I expected.

            I had the kids come up on the step risers from both aisles, and climb up from both ends, just like the fine college choirs in Minnesota do.  The piano accompanist came next, and then I followed, thinking proudly of the dignity, the musicianship, the poise of these young ladies and gentlemen.  This was the way to go out, right?

            My wife and my two young daughters (two and four) were seated in the first row of the small balcony of the gym.  There were probably around two hundred fifty people in the audience.  I put the music on the stand, signaled the choir to be ready to begin, the audience became very quiet, and at the dramatic moment when I should have dropped my arm for the down beat of the first number, I stopped dead in the middle of the gesture to listen to my two-year-old saying, loud and clear from the balcony, “Dats my daddy down dere!"

            The audience was indeed blown away with laughter and fun, but all settled down in the due course of events and we had the concert that we had worked on for so long.

WISHFUL NAVIGATING

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker 

When Margaret and I finally decided to make our first trip to Southeast Alaska in our new boat, “Greta,” we did not have radar or GPS (Global Positioning System). GPS was not in general use in 1993. We figured that if Margaret’s father, an Illinois kid fresh off the farm could navigate a fish-boat to Petersburg from Washington without any high tech gadgets like radar and GPS, we could, too. We had a forty-pound stack of marine charts, a compass mounted on the boat, another hand-held compass, dividers, parallel rulers, good binoculars, the good old-fashioned stuff that will get you where you want to go.

Bob, the captain of his own ship.

All went well, up to a point. From LaConner to the Canadian Gulf islands, through Georgia Strait and across Queen Charlotte Sound, we were feeling plenty smug in the shelter of Calvert Island, northbound through Fitzhugh Sound.

So on a truly fine early summer day, we were motoring out of Fitzhugh into Fisher Channel, expecting to make a left turn into Lama Passage that would take us to Bella Bella, a native village and refueling stop for us. John, our nine-year-old son was struggling to get his assigned math problems finished so that we could mail them back to his school in LaConner. To jolly him along, I offered him imaginary rewards of thousands of dollars if he could finish by the time we came abeam of the next channel marker on the left.

John worked away; we kept getting closer at our six-and-a-half-knot sail-boat speed, closer and closer. When the mark was on our port beam he had not quite finished, so we agreed on another chance, at the very next port-side mark. Back to work he went, concentrating partly on the problems, mostly on sighting the next mark. I consulted the chart and kept watch for the mark as well.

When we reached this next mark, I saw that it was very near a left-turning channel, decided that this was Lama Passage and turned into it. The next mark would be on the right-hand side of the channel, and it was, but it appeared to be just a small bit out of place. It could have been the angle at which I was seeing it, so I started looking for the next marker on the left side of the channel. There it was, but even more misplaced. The following starboard mark was even worse, but still within the boundaries of what I thought could correspond to the symbol on the chart. Still another disquieting factor was that the boat’s depth sounder did not show the same water depth as was on paper. We pushed on.

Of course I was guilty of mentally trying to reconcile the differences in marker placement, water depth, heading, land formation and all, with what my eyes should have told me was dead wrong. When we got to a very sharp turn to the right, so sharp it looked as if we were running into a rock cliff, and nothing approaching that configuration of the channel showed on the chart, I finally got the message: we were lost. Margaret, who had been below, fixing lunch, knew at a glace. Lost.

Now the dilemma: if the location of the boat is not known, how do you follow the directions on a chart to where you want to be? Fisher Channel has, I believe, three possible left-turning channels branching off from it, each of them sharing a few similar features. Lama Passage, where we should have turned, has some shoals but no truly dangerous obstructions. The others, according to the chart, were strewn with potentially lethal rocks. They were shown on the chart, but if you do not know what channel you are in, it makes no difference what rocks are indicated. There were no identifying signs except for the channel markers and I had persuaded myself that the first three or four were close enough to be correct. If it had not been for the number of rocks and other dangers shown on the chart plus the fact that we were getting low on fuel, we could have relaxed and waited for another boat to tell us where we were. But it is hard to relax while searching for a panic button to push. Our rascally son was having a belly laugh or two because Mom and Dad were lost. For him it was just part of the whole adventure.

We cautiously moved ahead to the rock cliff, looked through the hole-in-the-wall to the right, and miraculously, there was a fish-boat in the narrow channel about a quarter of a mile off near the dead end. We approached, asked him where we were, and were told that we were in Roscoe Inlet. We looked for Roscoe Inlet on our chart; no such place. At last it was found on a different adjoining chart, as we had unknowingly sailed off the first one. Knowing our location, it was not easy to find a short-cut, Troup Passage, to reach Dryad Point, a place just above Bella Bella where we could get the next fill-up of diesel oil.

The ironic part of this adventure was that John and I were concentrating so hard on the correct mark, but using that awareness as being only the foal for a math problem and the imaginary rewards. That mark, the one we were watching so closely, was the one showing Lama Passage.

The moral of the story is that the chart symbols and the actual channel markers, depth measurements, landmarks and compass headings all agree completely. Wishful thinking will not put you in the right channel.

Photos by Jean E. Straatmeyer

SARAH AND THE INCLINOMETER

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

Circa 2000

Those people who are not accustomed to sailboats are often amazed and alarmed when the boat leans over to one side.   This is heeling, and it is a part of being propelled by wind.  One explanation that I have heard is that every other kind of boat will tilt to one side when hit by a wave, and then will tend to tilt to the other side before coming to an equilibrium.  A sailboat heeled over will not do that; it will lean over away from the wind; its motion is dependent on the wind, and to a much lesser extent, on the wave action.  Sailboats larger than tiny day-sailers will have weight below the hull to counterbalance the sideways thrust of the mast and its sails.  This weight, whether a fixed keel or moveable centerboard, can be nearly half the entire weight of the boat, causing it to pop up after you have knocked it down like a child's toy.  Many sailboats are capable of righting themselves automatically even if they were entirely capsized.  The force of heeling has to become less as the boat leans further and further over, spilling the wind out of the top of the sail.

 

Another aspect of boat stability is the shape of the hull.  In general, a flatter bottomed hull will want to stay upright and will tend to sail poorly under extreme heeling.  A more round bottomed boat will heel more under the same strength of wind, but will sail effectively in that condition.  The Newport 30 that we enjoyed so much for sixteen years was rather flat; Greta, the Ericson 34 that we have loved so well for fourteen years is rather rounded.  I bought a cheap little inclinometer, similar to a carpenter's level to check on just how far the boat actually heeled over.  Incidentally, any boat will "list" if it is out of balance; a poorly distributed load is usually the cause.  Sailboats "heel", and their skippers tend to get upset if landlubbers keep insisting that the boat is listing. 

I enjoy taking young people out sailing, and years ago I would take my college students out on Saturday day trips.  With son John in high school, I took many of his friends out.  So on one of these expeditions with John and his high school friends I had two new-comers to sailing aboard, Sarah and Soren.  (No, they are not related to each other at all.)  Soren took to the sailboat motion with little trouble, but Sarah seemed a bit apprehensive.  She caught sight of the inclinometer, mounted right where everyone could see it.  What was that for, she wanted to know.  I told her it was to let me know how many degrees the boat was leaning over from the vertical.

We got out from the shelter of the inner harbor a bit further, and the heeling increased to about fifteen degrees.  As you get further out, in the Haines harbor, you can expect stronger winds.  We got them, and the heeling increased to perhaps twenty degrees, but varying with the small gusts of wind that one usually encounters in this mountainous country.  By the time we got to thirty degrees of heel, Sarah got nervous.  She wanted to know how far the boat would tip to one side before it would refuse to come back upright.  I explained to her approximately what you have read in the first paragraph of this essay.  Since we were now in the middle of Lynn Canal where the wind could be expected to be the strongest, I felt safe in telling her that if she wanted to get really concerned, she could start worrying at about forty degrees. 

Where there are gusts of wind, there are sometimes GUSTS.  Wouldn't you know, within seconds of having said that, one of these GUSTS came along and gave us a real “knockdown.”  I didn't take time to look at the inclinometer, but I know from experience that we heeled a good bit more than forty degrees.  We didn't have just the lee rail under water; we actually took in a few gallons over the coaming of the cockpit.  This is one of the times you listen to the screaming and rather wish you had reefed the sails a while back when you had the chance.  But even these strong gusts are only gusts, and the weighted keel did its job very well indeed, and we popped right back up to our former position.   

But Sarah must have had her eye on the inclinometer, because all four or five of us aboard could see that she was terrified.  Perhaps if I had just stuck to the explanation in the aforementioned first paragraph she would have been less scared, but no, I had to mention forty degrees. 

After this GUST, we did not experience any more, but to reduce chances of more terror, I turned downwind a bit more, slackened the main and the jib a bit, and the wind cooperated by moderating.  This experience was scary for Sarah, but not long after that she begged and pleaded to come along with me and several others to go all the way to Juneau to a Cross Country run.  Lest we forget about Soren, he was cool; I don't think I have ever seen him flustered.

Thanks to Wikipedia for this photo.

A NEAR FATAL JIBE

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

               Joey was in our son John's high school class, and had the reputation which he still has, of being an adventurer.  He also was, and is quite skillful working with wood.  Joey had been sailing with us quite often, and since his father owned a workboat, it seemed fore-ordained that Joey would try his hand at building a boat, a sailboat.  I don't know how much help, if any, Joey had in building the boat, but it turned out to be a beautiful work of art.  It was a small enough boat to not require a weighted keel, but the ballast of the passengers shifting their weight from side to side would keep the boat upright in conditions where sailing a boat this small is at all practicable.

               Joey came over one day to pick up John and Lee; they were to go sailing in Joey's new boat.  "Good luck", I thought to myself, as there seemed to be zero wind on Lynn Canal.  I went down to the dock to see them off.  As predicted, there was virtually no wind, and they had to row out a fair distance before catching the slightest hint of a breeze.  I got bored watching them, and walked back home.

               I noticed later in the afternoon that there was a bit of a breeze.  I did not know that the boys had come back to pick up Lucinda, also in their high school class.  That made four adult-sized people aboard, and Lee is no lightweight. There would be plenty of ballast, but the boat would be fairly low in the water.  Later in the afternoon I was out for a walk and glanced out over the water as I so often do.  I thought I might be able to glimpse the small white sails of Joey's boat.  What I saw was the Chilkat Cruises fast ferry coming back from Skagway roaring back to their Haines dock as usual, but with a major difference.  It slowed dramatically, turned around, and seemed to drift in one spot for a while.  Eventually I got tired of trying to figure out why they didn't stick to their usual rush to the dock and went home.

               In perhaps forty-five minutes or so, Lucinda, Lee, Joey and John came to our door, looking harried, bedraggled and damp, trying to act super-cool.  After all, that's what teen-agers do, they act cool.  They wanted to know if it would be OK for Joey to take a shower now, in our bathroom.  "We will explain everything later", they said.  So Joey spent some time in the shower while the other three were lined up on the couch, trying to huddle together under a blanket.  They assured us they would tell everything only after Joey got out of the shower.

               Joey had been very cold, the coldest of the four. They tried to make light of their adventure, but the further they got into the story the more I was convinced that they were alive only by the grace of God.  The wind had increased significantly, and Lucinda suggested they turn back.  Lucinda knew the wind on Lynn Canal perhaps better than the boys, as she had had a good bit of sea-time on her father's fish-boat.  Eventually even fearless Joey agreed to head back to the Haines Boat Harbor.  They had been sailing with the wind on the starboard quarter, nearly directly ahead of the wind.  They were probably deceived as to the strength of the wind as the boat speed subtracted from the actual wind velocity gives an apparent wind that seems much less than it is. Of course the wind always feels better if it is blowing on your back instead of having to face into it.

               What they attempted to do was to turn to the starboard, as the mainsail was on the port side, and they could have easily come up into the wind, tightened up the main and jib sheets, built up a little speed, and then come about through the eye of the wind and be headed straight for home.  From what I gathered from their account of it, Joey had attempted to do the whole maneuver in one step. Turn to starboard, leave the sheets slack, go through the eye of the wind, wind up on the port tack and be headed for home.  For some reason it did not work; the boat did not have momentum enough to go all that distance through the eye of the wind, finally catching the wind on the port side.  Apparently a 270 degree turn was just too much; they fell back on the original course, wind on the starboard quarter, and were sailing full speed away from shelter.

               Next they tried jibing.  This is a tricky maneuver in a strong wind, and is usually a bad idea.  It involves turning the boat in the direction of the mainsail.  That is, if the sail is spread out on the left, turn to the left. Eventually the wind will catch the back side of the sail and will blow sail and boom across to the other side at great speed and with devastating effect if some person happens to be standing in the way.  There are ways to limit this danger, but Joey and company were not experienced enough to know much about them.  When Joey's boat was broadside to the wind, evidently two bad things happened: the main sheet did not freely run out as it should have, and the ballast/passengers were too slow about shifting their weight to the windward side.  With the mainsail catching the full side force of the wind and the ballast on the wrong side, the boat had to suffer a severe knock-down, ending up with the mast and sails floating in the water, the hull floating on its side.  Being wood, the boat would not sink, and they had a fighting chance to right the boat.  

               According to their accounts, they did succeed in getting the boat upright, temporarily, but it was full of water, and they couldn't bail the water out as fast as the waves filled it.  Miraculously, they were all wearing life jackets, which is not usually the cool teen-age thing to do.  Lee, Lucinda and John managed to get out of the coldest water, somehow climbing onto the side-ways floating hull.  Joey could perhaps have done the same, but he was too engaged in trying to save his oars, and was hanging onto the mast with one hand and holding onto the oars with the other.  This seems irrational, but people do unexpected things when under extreme pressure sometimes.  This was why he was so much colder than the others, probably he was close to serious hypothermia. It should be noted that in the cold waters of the Lynn Canal, the average survival time has been estimated at ten to twenty minutes.

               So there they were, adrift in a very precarious position, but still not aware they could all be dead in a very short time.  It may have been Lee who pointed out with confidence that the Chilkat Cruise’s last ferry trip of the day would be due soon, and they would be rescued.  Sure enough, here came the fast ferry, hell-bent-for-election as usual.  Captain Molly and the crew saw neither the capsized sailboat nor the three miserable creatures perched on the side.  Joey and the sail in the water would have been virtually invisible.  By great good fortune, or by the guidance of a guardian angel, one of the ferry passengers happened to see them, rushed to Captain Molly and the rescue operation was started.  If I had had my binoculars with me on that walk, I could have watched the whole procedure.  Remember, I had wondered why the ferry had turned around and stopped.

               John was not impressed by the rescue operation.  He said the crew kept throwing things at them in the water.  Life jackets, which they already were wearing, and other flotation devices which they didn't need at that point.  Finally, after a lot of yelling John said he got them to throw just a plain old line, which he caught and hauled himself aboard.  He was a little ashamed to be the first to be rescued, but with the line in his hand it made more sense to use it, and then help to get the rest aboard, especially Joey who must have been in real trouble by this time.

               So they arrived at the Chilkat Cruises dock where some kind soul gave them a ride to the Senior Village apartment where we were living at that time.  Joey's boat was left drifting in the water, sails still set, but floating waterlogged in their horizontal state.  A fish-boat was dispatched to tow it in, but where the oars were at that point I do not know.  They were eventually saved by someone.

               Since the kids were so cool-acting when they first got to our home, I think I did not appreciate the gravity of what had happened until much later. Lucinda's mother was angry over the whole episode, I was sorry I had ever let them leave the dock (in a dead calm), and Margaret was upset later because of strong language John had used when being interviewed for a story in the Chilkat Valley News.  On the radio interview which was broadcast not only over KHNS, but the Alaska Public Radio, John did comment, "I am now a believer in wearing life jackets!"

Circa 2000/2001

MARINE-TYPE DEFINITIONS

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

(These are mostly original, but some are well-known.)

Bikini              A tiny Pacific Island, also a tiny article of clothing never seen on the foredeck of a sailboat north of Lat. 48 N.

Boat                A vessel small enough to be carried aboard a ship (see ship).

Chimney        Also has the archaic name of Charley Noble, a vertical pipe leading from a heating device located forward in the cabin of a live-aboard sailboat, which inevitably fouls the sheets when coming about.

Come about   A sudden scary turning maneuver that results in wildly flapping sails, yelling, yanking on ropes (oops, sheets) finishing with all the passengers sitting on the wrong, or low side.

Compass       A crude, low-tech instrument that will indicate the general direction of North, but never true north, and only if there is no metal near it, and it must have been properly swung, adjusted, compensated, and the incantation about True Virgins Make Dull Companions has been recited.

Depth Sounder          A gadget that explains to the skipper that the reason his boat is no longer moving is because the water is too shallow to float the boat.

ETA               A question asked late in the trip by uneasy passengers who belatedly mention to the skipper that they have an appointment ashore (or wish they had) in fifteen minutes.                                                    

Fisherman        Someone who can't understand why sailboats exist.

GPS             A nearly miraculous method of electronic navigation that will let your boat run over a gill-net while you are watching the tiny screen for the next way-point, speed, direction, compass heading, etc.
GPS 2             Same miraculous gadget that will set your course as the shortest possible distance to the next way-point, quite probably over very shallow water, rocks and other dangers the skipper would see if he stopped watching the GPS screen.

Heel                 A tilt to one side.  This is good because it means the sails are filling properly and you have enough wind to move the boat instead of just drifting.

Jibe                 A noisy, scary turning maneuver with the wind at your back, involving the main boom unexpectedly swooping across the cockpit, coming to a sudden stop on the opposite side with a loud BANG, leaving all those who failed to duck, unconscious.

Liar                Anyone who claims never to have gone aground.

Liar 2           Anyone who claims to have never experienced the slightest sign of sea-sickness.

List                  A bad tilt to one side resulting from bad load distribution.  It can also mean your vessel is sinking.

Marine head   A complicated floor fixture meant to carry off human bodily wastes.  Skipper's nightmare when stuff inserted in head fails to go through the too small hoses.

Miracle         Somehow freeing the propeller from a line or net fouled on it without having  to go overboard and cut it off.

Rules of the Road    A hopelessly complicated system of preventing collisions and other accidents at sea which will explain to you why you do NOT have the right of way all the time, even though your vessel is a sailboat.

Ship                 Any vessel large enough to carry a boat on board.  (See boat)

 

 

A NIGHT OF MISERY

by Dr. Robert E. Plucker

We had not lived aboard the boat at LaConner very long before I got the notion to try going up the Inside Passage.  I had thought about it before, but now with the new boat and quite a lot more experience sailing behind us, I thought that I could persuade Margaret that we should at least try to spend a summer, or part of a summer in Southeast Alaska.  That was all I wanted, I thought, just one trip up the Passage; and then we could come back and live happily ever afterward at the dock in LaConner.  I never expected that Alaska would get such a strong grip on us.

We got under way one May morning, Margaret, John and I, in near-perfect weather, motoring up narrow Swinomish Channel to Anacortes and beyond.  Far beyond.  John, at nine years of age, was totally "into" sailboat travel.  The trip was eventful, and fun, but we decided to stop at Petersburg.  This is well inside the Southeast panhandle, and gave us the experience of navigating Wrangell Narrows.  Somehow, before reaching Petersburg, we found that the Alaska Marine Highway system was offering a very generous special rate to seniors that year, only five dollars going northerly as far as Skagway and another five to return.  John was still young enough for half-fare, so Margaret was the only "adult" among us.  She would have to pay the full fare. But what a bargain, and how could we not take advantage of it!  To Skagway and back!



[www.ci.petersburg.ak.us/]

Margaret was full of enthusiasm for the project; she made a number of phone calls, finding out that the ferry had already left from Petersburg, but that we could catch it at the village of Kake. There was a special flight of a LAB plane leaving for there in about three hours, so we would have to hurry to catch it.  I did not think there would be much frenzy about catching the plane, but it turned out that we needed food (Margaret always has food on hand when she goes nearly anywhere), extra clothes, books, toys, toothbrushes, "stuff", all sorts of things.  But we got it all done and caught the plane, a single-engine DeHavilland Beaver.  Our boat, "Greta", was locked up, and safely tied up at the visitor's dock in Petersburg.

The Alaska Marine Highway ferry "LeConte" was to be at the ferry dock in Kake early in the morning, and so we would have to spend the night there.  Of course we thought there surely would be at least one motel or B&B that could put us up for the night on short notice.  The LAB people were incredibly kind to us, driving us to a few places they thought might have a room for us.  But no, Kake is a very small Native village, and they were not set up to take in very many people; it turned out there were a few lumber-people there already, and had already taken the few rooms available in private homes.  The only choice then, was to stay at the ferry terminal, sleeping on the floor, no real problem.

So, off to the dock, where reality set in.  The "ferry terminal building" was a kind of picnic shelter, completely open to the mosquitoes, "no-see-ums," and the cold.  We huddled there for a short while, perhaps thirty minutes, until a local man took pity on us.  He had a Pepsi van that was to be taken back to Sitka on the same ferry we were waiting for, and we could sleep in the van. Sleeping in that van was one of the horrifyingly bad experiences of my sixty-five years of life.  No seats, except for the driver's perch; the rest was corrugated steel floor.  There were some flattened paper cartons spread on the floor which was supposed to keep out some of the cold and straighten out the corrugations of the floor, but there seemed to be no effect.  No comfort to my frozen old bones, but at least we were out of the range of the mosquitoes and other bugs.  But yes, it can get COLD in early June in Southeast Alaska.

Kids somehow seem to have the ability to withstand cold.  Think of the number of mothers the world over, who have to compel their youngsters to put on a coat when going out into the cold.  John was not bothered by the cold, and for some reason; Margaret didn't seem to be badly chilled either.  That rascally John spent a good part of the early evening laughing and chortling over how funny his father was, grumbling, shivering, scratching, and complaining.  All this discomfort was magnified by us having overheard a conversation earlier that expressed some doubt as to whether the ferry would be very late, or if it would stop at all.

When morning came, at about 5:30, LeConte came into view, tied up at the dock, and allowed us to come aboard perhaps by 6 o’clock.  LeConte is one of the smallest and least luxurious of the ferry fleet, but to me it looked like the Queen Mary.  And after all, who needs luxury, when you can get warmth.  The two luxuries aboard were the hot showers and the 24-hour hot coffee, free during the night hours.  There were probably fewer than two dozen passengers on the northward leg of the trip, and not many more on the return. 

LeConte could just as well have been our private yacht.  There are no cabins on that ship, so one sleeps on the floor, or in a chair, or on a sort of plastic cot in the solarium on the upper after-deck.  To me it was all super deluxe accommodation.  If you have spent a cold, cold night on the corrugated steel floor of a Pepsi van, you appreciate sleeping on a warm carpeted floor, as we did.

The rest of the trip was good, Sitka was great, there's a fine bookstore/coffee shop near the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, the villages of Angoon, Hoonah and Tenakee were all quick stops, the ferry terminals at Juneau and Haines were so far from downtown that we never left the ship.  The big turnaround is at Skagway, the end of the Inside Passage.  All the huge Cruise Ships stop there, making Skagway a candidate for America's largest retail center for T-shirts and cheap jewelry.   John and I had an ice cream cone, but were glad to escape the crowds of tourists and re-board the ship.

So returning to our beloved "Greta" in Petersburg and finally back to LaConner, our "summer in Alaska" came to an end.  I still had no idea that we would make three more trips up the Passage in Greta, and finally on the fourth trip, back to stay.



The LeConte 
[www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs]