Articles - Page 51 of 51 - Small Boats Magazine

The Mining Ruins of Juneau, Alaska

There are so many things to see and explore in Southeast Alaska that can only be accessed by a small boat. In 2008, my wife, Leni, and I wanted to make sure that our girls—Gracie, then three, and Isabel, then one—didn’t miss out on those things for lack of a way to get to them. That’s when we decided to build SPARROW, a Caledonia Yawl, which we launched in 2009. None of us really were sailors back then, but, lucky for us, the Caledonia yawl is a very forgiving boat.

The Caledonia yawl’s well mannered hull and simple lug rig made it easy for us to learn how to sail.

Over the past four seasons we’ve grown into SPARROW. Our list of camping gear has been slowly whittled down each season to a more streamlined kit: shovel, axe, cook stove, small galley kit stowed in a wooden box, fishing rods, sleeping bags, and a boat tent. That made room for extra gear for the crew, enough food to last a trip six times as long as whatever we might plan, and, of course, buckets for building sand castles.

For a while, I’d been thinking about exploring some of the old mining sites south of Juneau on Gastineau channel. With the girls now eight and six, and more eager to help sail the boat, Leni and I decided to make an overnight trip with them. We planned an itinerary that would take us fewer than 10 miles down the chanel, but a world away from Juneau. Gracie and Isabel, however, were only a little curious about where we were going, and mostly eager to simply have fun, sing, and have snacks that are forbidden at home.

I watched and waited for a good weather window. When Saturday, June 29, dawned warm and fair with a good forecast for light north winds, conditions were perfect for heading south from Juneau to the mining ruins down Gastineau Channel. We’d sail against the tide, something I usually avoid, but we needed to make an exception if we were going to slip into the Treadwell mine cave-in lagoon on the incoming tide. Excavated to more than 500’ below sea level, this mine had collapsed suddenly in 1917, leaving behind the lagoon. The basin where the mine collapsed is egg-shaped and about a hundred feet across at its widest point. Sheer rocky faces on three sides drop straight into the profoundly deep green water. The Treadwell operation had once been the largest gold mine in the world, employing more than 2,000 miners. Hours before the collapse, water began to flood in through fissures in the rock, filling the mine deep below the channel. The miners escaped but some of the horses working there weren’t so lucky.

After a quick breakfast we made the short hop down to the waterfront, where SPARROW was waiting for us. Because we keep SPARROW at the dock, it took no more than fifteen minutes to stow all the gear and get the sails ready.

SPARROW lies ready and waiting for crew and gear.

Away from the dock, I pulled at the oars while Leni steered us clear of the moored boats and breakwater. Safely in the middle of the channel I stowed the oars, and Leni set the mizzen and sheeted it in. SPARROW quickly luffed and sat bobbing quietly, head to wind. Gracie was keen to help and asked if she could help raise the mainsail. Isabel immediately piped up saying that she wanted to raise the sail, too. The main halyard and downhaul turn at the mast partners and lead aft to jam cleats on the centerboard trunk, allowing easy access for our young crew who, with a little help from me, soon had the sail swayed up.

With the mainsail set and the crew safely seated and enjoying granola bars, Leni eased the mizzen while I sheeted in the main. The main filled, the bow fell off, and we were on our way. We eased the sheets and came around until we were pointed down Gastineau Channel, which is approximately fifteen miles long and a mile wide at its southern end. Dense forests of Sitka spruce and western hemlock cover Douglas Island to the west and the Juneau mainland to the east, with only the tallest peaks rising above this blanket of trees. Turning to run downwind, the noise and motion of the wind were suddenly gone and we were enveloped in a bubble of still air. The shore sliding quietly by was the only sign we were moving.

Even against the tide we were making good progress and soon passed under the broad concrete arch of the Juneau-Douglas Bridge and into the outer harbor. There were four cruise ships docked there, their thousands of passengers almost doubling Juneau’s population. Float planes were making their morning rounds, five of them taking off one after another. One returning plane roared overhead, its pontoons seeming to miss the masts by mere feet.

On the far side of the outer harbor is the Rock Dump, a commercial area built upon a peninsula made of rock excavated from the mountain mines. It sticks out like a huge thumb, making the channel wide enough for only one ship to pass through at a time. Beyond the harbor things got quiet once again. Gastineau Channel opened up and only a few faraway fishing boats dotted the water. On the south side of the Rock Dump there was a wide tide rip, a dark sapphire jumble of stiff crests half a foot higher than the surrounding water. There was no avoiding it. SPARROW’s forefoot crossed the line between smooth water and dark and the current slewed us to starboard. Leni quickly corrected.

Sailing toward the rising sun on this bright morning, we all huddled in the shade of the broad lug-rigged main while the ruffled water sparkled in the sunshine. The girls, bundled up under their life jackets, were toasty warm. They held silver pinwheels spangled with red and blue stars, looking for the direction that would make them spin the fastest and giving us up-to-the-minute reports on wind direction and speed.

Leni, Gracie, and Isabel, with pinwheel anemometer, take a break between weather reports.

We’d been sailing for about two hours when we reached Sandy Beach on Douglas Island and passed the Treadwell mine pump-house tower standing at the water’s edge. Its concrete base has been eroded by the tides and only the rusted iron reinforcements now hold it up. We sailed another half mile, then hove-to and dropped the main. Seated at the forward rowing station and facing forward, I pulled toward the beach as the honey-colored sandy bottom came slowly up to meet us. All the while I looked for the channel that would lead us to an emerald-green pool beyond—the sinkhole marking the half-mile deep collapsed Treadwell mine.

I followed a twisting path of darker water through the shallows; there was a rasping sound in the hull when I strayed off it and scraped bottom. The girls were talking excitedly about playing at the beach and constantly asking “Are we there yet?” We glided over the last of the bar and beached the boat.

SPARROW sits at the entrance to the lagoon.

Leni and the girls jumped from the bow to the hard packed sand with buckets, shovels, and a large canvas bag filled with sandwiches, chips, cherries, and other picnic goodies. The girls quickly fell to digging in the sand and amassed a pile of broken pottery from the old bunkhouse and tiles from the swimming pool that was once near the site of the cave-in. I tended to the boat.

Hauled up on a beach, SPARROW wants to fall over on its side. It’s not a light boat and I wanted to avoid wrestling it back to the water if the tide went out too far before we decided to move on. So I rowed across to the other side of the basin, set a grapnel on the opposite shore and then paid line out as I worked back across. Half way out I tied a loop in a bight in the line for my Anchor Buddy, a long sheathed bungee cord that stretches from 14′ out to 50′. I resumed rowing, stretching the Anchor Buddy out until I reached shore. I stepped out of SPARROW, paying out the bow line as the bungee drew her back out.

An elastic cord off the stern pulls SPARROW away from a rocky beach.

With the boat resting safely over deep water I joined my crew.

We settled down to a lunch of sandwiches and cherries. After eating we stowed our picnic gear and poked around the mine ruins. Just up the beach an enormous cast-iron gear about five or six feet in diameter lay half-buried in gravel looking like the face of an ancient sundial, heavily scaled with flaking rust.

Treadwell is easy to reach from Juneau and a popular place to visit. The complex is crisscrossed with hard-packed dirt trails.

SPARROW’s crew explores the overgrown ruins at the site of the Treadwell mines.

Down one path we found moss-covered concrete foundations, lime leaching from the concrete leaving white patches on gray slabs. The ruins of old mining structures thrust up through a dense green undergrowth of ferns and devils club like ancient temples, the wooden superstructures rotted away. Here and there old railroad tracks showed through the floor of the trail, the tops of the steel rails polished by hikers’ feet.

We came to what was once the office, a two story concrete structure with peeling yellow paint, windows and doors missing and a corrugated iron roof half rusted away. All around it are tall slender alder trees and low leafy plants. The girls were immediately drawn inside the cavernous interior where lime stalactites hang from the ceiling. They played hide and seek with Leni and me, tiptoeing behind pillars, corners, and walls. With the girls found, it was time to head back to the boat.

SPARROW lies to her clothesline mooring on a falling tide.

The afternoon sky was a brassy haze and I couldn’t tell if it was overcast or not. The breeze had faded away. Isabel and Gracie were reluctant to leave but we needed to catch the outgoing tide to help us to our campsite. I pulled SPARROW ashore and we piled in and cast off. The tide had turned and that elusive channel was readily apparent now, a dark ribbon of shallow water bordered by soft sand sprinkled with palm-sized stones and white shards of broken crockery. Fortunately it was still deep enough for us to make our escape.

I poled SPARROW with an oar out of the shallows, and back out in Gastineau channel we set our sails, turned our backs to Juneau, and ran with the dying wind and ebb tide. In the distance we could see the end of the channel, where the evergreen-covered slope of Point Bishop meets the water on the left and Douglas Island does the same on the right. Beyond lay Stephens Passage, backed by high snow-capped mountains.

The plan was to camp in a little cove next to the old Dupont Dock. With a favorable current and following breeze we were moving at about three miles an hour and we’d be at our destination in two or three hours. The chill of the morning was long gone; it was a shorts-and-sandals afternoon. Gracie and Isabel succumbed to the warmth and the gentle motion of SPARROW. They curled up, one to port and the other to starboard, and were soon fast asleep.

Two miles down the channel the breeze faded away completely. I lowered the mainsail and took to the oars. The thunk ca-chunk rhythm of oars against thole pins filled the air as Leni steered us over glassy smooth water. A boat length behind us a dark brown head bigger than a football popped out of the water. It was a harbor seal, and it stared at us intently for almost a minute with eyes the size of silver dollars, nostrils opening and closing with each breath. It tilted its nose up, slipped beneath the surface, and was gone.

Our handheld VHF squawked to life, “Sécurité, sécurité, sécurité, this is the CARNIVAL SPIRIT departing Franklin Dock southbound Gastineau Channel.” To the north of us the upper decks of a cruise ship towering above the storage tank farm on the Rock Dump was under way. I rowed and Leni steered us south along the channel’s mainland shore. We chatted quietly about places we’d like to take SPARROW and watched the shoreline slip by. After an hour we switched places and Leni took over the rowing. CARNIVAL SPIRIT by that time was rapidly closing the distance between us. This wasn’t cause for alarm, as the channel is about three-quarters of a mile wide here with plenty of room for both of us, and we were well outside the shipping lane, a couple of boat lengths off the rocky shore on the Juneau side.

SPIRIT passed, wake creaming from its bulbous bow, white sides gleaming in the afternoon light, and tall red funnel streaming blue exhaust. The kids woke from their afternoon siesta and sat in the bottom of the boat reading books. We watched the long wake carefully as it approached us. Leni switched places with me again and took the tiller. We turned to meet the wake head on, and SPARROW’s bow rose steeply as the wave passed underneath us. I told everyone to hang on as we dropped into a 6’-deep trough. When the SPARROW hit the bottom of the trough I fully expected the bow to bury and the boat to swamp, but the boat just brushed it aside with a little splash and rode up the next wave as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do. The crew was completely unfazed: Gracie asked how much farther we had to go and Isabel asked if she could have another fruit snack. The wake crashed into the rocky shore with a roar, sending spray high enough into the air to soak overhanging spruce boughs.

The Dupont dock, owned by the Dupont Powder Company, had been used to receive explosives used in the mines. The decking of the long-idle dock is missing in places and the structure is no longer connected to the shore. What remains has accumulated a blanket of bright green moss dotted here and there with young spruce trees. Behind the dock is a steep ridge of rock about twenty feet high topped with a concrete footing where the end of the dock once was.

The current was running strong through the pilings as we rowed past, trailing little eddies around the pilings. Beyond the ridge a small cove and steep gravel beach opened up to us. As we slid into the cove and beached the boat, the girls excitedly chattered about what we might find and the prospect of camping on the boat.

I hopped out and pulled the boat up a little higher so it wouldn’t get away, then helped the girls get out. Gracie and Isabel made a beeline for the ridge of rock the old footing was on and began climbing. They had found half of a small broken egg shell that had perhaps belonged to an Actic Tern or a gull of some kind and were pretending they were sea birds nesting in the cliffs.

With the camp stove and galley box ashore, Leni got to work cooking dinner on a log high above the tide line while I pushed off in SPARROW to anchor up. Sitting in the boat and looking out at the broad expanse of Stephens Passage to the south it was hard to believe we were only seven miles from town. Here the only sign of civilization was the ruined dock and the only sounds were the kids playing on the shore. It took a couple tries to set the anchor in the loose rocky bottom; when it finally held I paid out a clothesline loop—an “outhaul”—as I rowed back to the beach.

I set up SPARROW’s tent—a dome of red rip-stop nylon stretched over crisscrossed aluminum poles—and secured it to the masts and gunwales.

With her dome tent pitched, SPARROW is ready to house her crew for a night at anchor.

In ten minutes our open boat was transformed into the cozy little cabin for four, with a spot for adults on a folding platform at thwart height forward and aft, and two snug floorboard berths on either side of the centerboard case.

After a dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce and garlic bread, we cleaned up our dishes and stowed our galley kit back in the boat. Then all four of us walked together down the beach hunting for driftwood dry enough to burn. Back at camp we roasted marshmallows over a fire, then played a few rounds of the animal guessing game. Full bellies and a warm fire soon took their toll on our crew.

We put out the fire and snuggled the girls into their berths. Wrapped in sleeping bags they were dozing in minutes, and Leni soon followed.

Gracie and Isabel lie sound asleep on the floorboards.

I sat up a little while longer. It was calm and quiet in our little cove, not even the water against the hull making a sound. A high overcast had worked its way in adding just a touch more darkness to the long summer dusk. Leaning against the mast, I reflected on the day. It had been a good one, full of fun and adventure on our little ship, and tomorrow was looking good too.

Jim Danner is an IT manager for the state of Alaska. When he’s not working he’s spending time with his family—he and his wife recently added a baby boy to the crew—or messing around with small boats. The SPARROW is his first boat project and he has since built a few skin-on-frame kayaks. His review of the Anchor Buddy also appears in this issue.

The Caledonia Yawl

When looking for a boat to build, I wanted a design with a proven history of taking care of its crew in remote and wild locations, a boat that would allow our young family to break the orbit of town and explore some of the roadless wilderness of Southeast Alaska. At the same time it had to provide a reassuring platform that our young crew could grow into. I needed a boat that, while big enough for four, could be singlehanded. It had to be easily beachable; after all, what good is getting out into the wilderness if you’re stuck viewing it from the boat? Our kids needed to be able to explore those distant shores, scrambling along rocky ledges and over logs piled up from winter storms.

I found what I was looking for in Ian Oughtred’s Caledonia Yawl. It was love at first sight. While a well-proven design in its own right, the Caledonia Yawl is a descendant of the Shetland Yole, an open fishing boat used for nearshore work in the North Sea. At 19′6″ by 6′2″ the Caledonia Yawl fit the bill perfectly. It has lots of room for crew and gear, and it’s still easily managed by one person, and is beachable. A modern boat built with modern methods, the Caledonia is well suited to handling the rigors of summer travel in the Inside Passage. Its glued lapstrake construction makes for a light yet strong boat that is handsome and well within reach of expert and novice builders alike. A boat this size won’t break the bank or take years to complete, allowing you to be out sailing sooner rather then later. Oughtred offers two sail plans: a gunter main with jib and mizzen, or a lug main with mizzen. I chose the latter, a simpler rig without standing rigging and much easier to set up. –JD

Plans for the Caledonia Yawl are available from the WoodenBoat Store. Click here to read a full description of the design, and to order.

Anchor Buddy

With an almost 25′ tidal range, rocky shorelines, and steep beaches, the waters around Juneau are nearly impossible to cruise in a small boat without the ability to anchor while spending time ashore. Leaving a boat at the water’s edge where it would grind against the rocks or get stuck on the wrong side of a tide is a very real problem. Larger boats can carry dinghies for shuttling from anchored boat to beach and back, but on a smaller boat like our Caledonia yawl that’s not a practical solution.

There are a few ways to solve this problem. Setting up an outhaul anchor, or “clothesline loop,” from the anchor to the beach works well but it has its drawbacks—the primary one being that it requires lots of line that is easily tangled. It allows easy access to the boat, but for a short trip ashore it can be more trouble than it’s worth. There is also the Siwash method of anchoring: placing the anchor, chain, and rode on the bow with a long retrieval line tied to the anchor flukes, and shoving the boat out, letting the retrieval line trail after it. When the boat’s in deep water, a tug of the line drops the anchor. It’s easy to do but hard on the paint, and not convenient if you forgot the hot dogs. You’ll need to start over.

The Anchor Buddy is a length of 3/8” natural latex tubing sheathed in a hollow braided polypropylene line, and unlike an equivalent length of bungie cord, it will easily stretch from 14’ to 50’ and it won’t get progressively harder to pull.

An option I like is an Anchor Buddy. I found it at my local marine hardware store when I was looking for a new anchoring solution. We’ve used the Anchor Buddy many times, generally securing its ends in loops tied in bights in the rode. The loops are 50′ apart so the rode picks up the strain at maximum extension of the Anchor Buddy. That’s helpful if the anchor gets snagged, and adds a strong backup to the Anchor Buddy if it were to fail for some reason—we wouldn’t lose the anchor or the boat. It takes a bit of practice to get it set up so you have full extension and can just reach the shore. When I drop the anchor and row my boat in, stretching the Anchor Buddy, it helps to have someone on shore hold the boat while I ship the oars and prepare to disembark. It’s best to start off with a long line between boat and beach, tied to driftwood or anchored with a grapnel. I can then set the anchor and pull myself in. We have also used the Anchor Buddy to span small pools or narrow inlets with the Anchor Buddy and bow line secured on one side and a stern retrieval line on the other.

The Anchor Buddy has done its job well, keeping our boat afloat and off the rocks while we have lunch on the beach or go exploring. I’ve been using it for a few years now and it has held up well, although its fittings, a zinc-plated snap hook and shackle, are starting to show the effects of corrosion—a minor problem I can easily fix with stainless steel replacements.

The Anchor Buddy is a handy addition to any small boat’s anchoring toolkit.

Jim Danner is an IT manager for the state of Alaska. When he’s not working he’s spending time with his family—he and his wife recently added a baby boy to the crew—or messing around with small boats. The Caledonia yawl SPARROW was his first boat project and he has since built a few skin-on-frame kayaks. His article on a family cruise in SPARROW, to the mining ruins of Juneau, also appears in this issue.

The Anchor Buddy is manufactured by Greenfield Products, and retails for $35.99 at West Marine.

A High-Intensity LED Flashlight

One evening many years ago, on the Mississippi River, I rowed past sunset along miles of riprap. If I ventured close enough to shore to see anything with the flashlight I had, I risked being swept into the rocks. So I drifted for hours in the freezing December night air with spray coating my deck and jacket with ice. I eventually spotted the dim glow of white sand and landed, but by then I was desperately cold. With a more powerful flashlight I’m sure I could have been off the water much sooner.

Since then I’ve tried a number of high-intensity flashlights. They initially showed promise, but their 123 lithium cells weren’t universally available and a few hard-to-replace bulbs burned out. LED flashlights, once only good for use in camp, have now become powerful enough for use in a compact searchlight.

I’ve been impressed by Bushnell’s Rubicon T300L HD flashlight. It’s just shy of a pound and is powered by four common and inexpensive AA batteries. About the size of an old C-cell flashlight, it has a fish-eye lens on its business end. Behind the lens there’s a kaleidoscope pattern of green cat eyes. Peer into it and you’ll see a black square hole on a field of a white. That square is the shape of the beam the flashlight casts and the thick lens keeps the light quite uniform from edge to edge, just as a slide projector does without a slide. There are high and low settings for the light; you’ll need the low setting for close work, as the high can be painfully bright. The lens is encircled by a ring that emits a low intensity red light well suited for reading charts without wiping out your night vision.

Here we see the distinctive blue-outlined rectangle defined by the beam of the Bushnell Rubicon T300L HD flashlight, as compared with the beam of a car headlight.

As I walked with the T300L held horizontally, the square of light it cast was 6′ wide where it fell on the ground 24′ ahead of me. Some stray light radiated in a halo around the square and illuminated the ground around my feet. On the high setting, I could pick up the shine of retroreflective signs a measured 325 yards away, so it should pick up channel markers equally well.

During a midnight outing I paddled along a wooded hillside where there were a number of unlit houses invisible among the trees. At about 100 yards from shore the bright beam easily picked out their white trim. There was neither enough contrast nor shadows—my line of sight was parallel with the beam—to help distinguish one tree from another. At 50 yards, individual trees, weathered wood stairways, and concrete bulkheads were clearly visible. At 15 yards the T300L HD brought everything in the square into what almost looked like daylight. At a distance where I’d be looking to come ashore I’d easily be able to spot smooth beaches and open ground for camping.

I have only two quibbles with this flashlight. First, the switches are hard to find by touch. And second, the housing is black, which is not easy to find in the dark. While a smaller LED flashlight would be better for general-purpose lighting in camp, if you’re searching for something on the water or trying to find your way at night, the T300L will brighten your prospects.

Chris Cunningham is the digital editor of Small Boats Monthly.

The Bushnell Rubicon T300L HD has been discontinued. (Updated 11/26/22)

GENERATIONS

GENERATIONS is a Bevins skiff built by Wayne Cummings, his wife, Veronica, and their four kids (all under eight years old). Launched April 3, 2014, in Shelbyville, Kentucky, the boat was built in honor of Charles Carlson, Wayne’s grandfather. Charles lived and worked in North Stonington, Connecticut, and built several wooden rowboats in the later years of his life. He built his last boat when he was 82 years old and named it MARY ANNA after his wife of 69 years. That boat is still in the family.

Growing up, Wayne spent many hours with his grandfather, who always took the time to share his stories and his wisdom. GENERATIONS was built as a symbol of the passing down of skills, precepts, and life lessons from generation to generation using the practical application of wooden boat building.

In July 2012, Wayne visited his grandfather, then 90. Grandpa Charles talked about his boats, and his passion for them was contagious. Wayne was struck with the idea of building a boat, something he had never considered. He did some research and got advice from Charles and from Bill Young, a friend and accomplished boatbuilder. They settled on a Bevins skiff.

The skiff takes its name from a German shepherd belonging to Joe Youcha, one of the designers who developed the skiff for the Alexandria Seaport Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. Kits, plans, and instructions are available for purchase from the Foundation. Builders who involve kids in the project can get plans and instructions for free through the Building to Teach program. You can also download the plans at WoodenBoat.

Wayne and Veronica involved their kids in the construction of GENERATIONS to pass along a love of wooden boats and valuable skills, principles, and life lessons just as they were passed down from Grandpa Charles. They built GENERATIONS of white oak, spruce, and mahogany marine plywood. Wayne frequently called Charles for advice and every few weeks mailed photographs and handwritten letters to keep him up with progress. Charles’s short-term memory was fading, so he kept the letters and photos in an album he could revisit and refresh his memory. Months before GENERATIONS was completed, Charles passed away.

GENERATIONS was launched in the spring of 2014. The project had taken just over a year with Wayne, Veronica, and the kids working as time allowed. The family now enjoys the boat on the water, and continues to take lessons from it. The next project for the Cummings family is to restore MARY ANNA, Charles’s last boat.