Tin-Can Weatherfax

You won't find Graybeard Cove marked as such on many charts – maybe three, tops. It's one of those secret anchorages of the Inside Passage that you either have to find on your own, or pry from what Sailing Directions always refer to as “local knowledge.” My Local was a Canadian cruising friend who is always looking for a quiet spot away from the “damned Americans.” He, by the way, was born in Walnut Creek, CA...

The anchorage is deep in grizzly country, and under penalty of keel-hauling, that's as much as I'll tell of its location. Like many of the areas up north, it is a mountainous, glacier-carved and heavily wooded bit of rugged fjord. Seasonally, it is a paradise of almost unimaginable beauty (for those who have never been, imagine cruising inside the Yosemite Valley for hundreds of miles). Off-season, it gets cold enough for sea-water to freeze hard, and winds called williwaws have been known to blow straight down from the sheer cliffs to smash a boat's deck into kindling.

On the day we arrived at Graybeard, we had been sailing in 15 kts. under blue skies, enjoying the company of porpoises, orcas and minke whales. It was the type of cruising always portrayed in boat ads – sunny and warm with a steady breeze – basically as close to perfection as possible. A funny thing about cruising is that when the weather is nice, you can't imagine it being bad, and when it's bad, you can't imagine it being nice again. Thus, we couldn't really conceive of what was about to happen in this warm, azure playground as a “cold front and associated deep trough” approached from the North Pacific.

It's important to point out that we aren't complete idiots. Foolish, sure, but not total fools. We had enough provisions (food, heating fuel, trash novels) to stay in place for weeks. Cordelie, our Rawson 30 cutter, has full instruments, radar, gps chartplotting, a compliment of “real” charts, and no less than two skippers (who often agree). We have ground tackle suitable for a boat twice our size, a medical kit that several third-world hospitals would envy, and the combined experience of over 50 years of sailing and what my wife refers to haughtily as “stinkpotting.” Having said all that, you know I'm going to admit to something stupid, right?

It's our habit to check the VHF for weather reports (especially at northern latitudes) regularly. Usually, we check it when we first wake up, and again when we go to bed. If we're in unfamiliar waters, or there's any indication of a change (mare's tails, buttermilk or mackerel skies, dropping barometer, wind shifts, feeling of impending doom, etc.), we'll check it several times a day. Unfortunately, it wasn't until after we'd set the hook that we realized there was absolutely no VHF, AM, FM or cellular reception inside Graybeard Cove. We might as well have been inside a cave.

Even if we did have radio coverage, it wouldn't necessarily have helped at that point, since nobody expected what happened next. Freakishly fast, the high pressure we'd been enjoying dropped 20 millibars, and the previously unlimited visibility was about to become less than 30 feet. The daytime high temperature was going to drop by nearly 30 degrees, and the warm breeze was going to turn to 40 kts. of gusting, horizontal rain. On the other hand, our anchor was set hard, we had plenty of room to swing, and the maximum fetch was only a few hundred yards – so we were safe, just uncomfortable. And here's where the stupid part begins.

Discomfort can kill you. It can, for instance, make you abandon a perfectly good boat for a rubber pup-tent of a life raft. It can send you, lost and cold, away from a proper camp instead of waiting safely for rescue. And, in our case, it can convince you to leave a fully-protected “hurricane hole” in an unseasonably bastardly storm because you “can't stand another day of this!” Not at all bright! Nope, not at all.

It went like this: in the middle of the first night, the wind kicked up. By morning, there was a drizzling, stinging rain and it was cold. How cold? Cold enough that despite our heater and fans, condensation was raining down from the cabin top. Everything dripped, and since we were never able to deck-train our 80 pound retriever, our thrice-daily foray into the dinghy and onto the very bear-y shores guaranteed gallons more dog-scented water vapor to recharge the humidity. This went on for six days and six nights, each day worse than the last.

In all that time, we saw only one boat. It flew by the entrance to the cove in a wind-lashed blur, and never responded to our hails. This made us wonder if: A) our radio was simply out, and B) if we weren't maybe in a particularly bad microclimate. We figured out the answer to A: Nothing on the hand-held VHF, no AM or FM stations, and only a few shortwave stations on our receiver (and then only after dark). But, we kept thinking that maybe we were only a few hours away from sunshine and those warm breezes. Every day we thought this, and finally we talked ourselves into believing we were just being chickens – miserably cowering within hours of sunshine and serenity. Luckily, that's when we came up with the tin-can weatherfax.

I had an old CD-ROM that cruisers used to trade. You may have it too: the one with the back issues of the Seven Seas letters, the weird recipes, and all that “useless, outdated” software? A buddy had given it to me for reading material, and after one look I'd put it on a spindle and forgotten about it. After a few days of reading pulp fiction and listening to the same CD's, any distraction was welcome. So I read some of the reports from the seven seas commodores. Then I played with the recipe database (Mmmmm – Sardine-butter!), and then I looked at the software for getting weatherfax from an SSB and radio-modem.

Though we have the antenna and counterpoise from a previous owner, we didn't have an SSB or HAM rig. Like I said, we did have a little shortwave receiver, but I was thinking it was pretty useless for anything but hearing the cricket scores from India when I noticed that the software instructions I was reading briefly mentioned using a sound card instead of a radio-modem. That means, it could get a signal from a microphone. So, what if...?

My wife, to her great credit, hardly screamed when I destroyed (I prefer “modified”) not one but both pairs of our precious headphones. As I strung antenna wires along the length of the cabin, she quietly stayed forward and nonchalantly kept one hand curled around the bear spray (a can of pepper spray the size of a small fire extinguisher). The dog began whining ceaselessly in fear that 'Food-Guy' had finally lost his marbles (we had been eying each other as emergency rations for the last few days). I muttered to myself, I screamed curses, I dug through drawers and the awful “extra parts” compartment, and as night fell I found myself stripped down to boxers for the humidity, bathed in the blueish glow of the computer (since any lights might ruin the already weak reception), holding the radio above my head with one hand and tapping the keyboard with the other. Not a pretty sight.

An hour passed, and then another. My wife was asleep, the dog was asleep (with one eye open), it was pitch-black, and while I gave it my fifteenth “one last try,” an image slowly appeared on the screen. There was the eastern North Pacific ocean, with a big letter H heading right for us! It's hard to explain what it's like to see a picture like that appear out of nothing, especially when you've felt so absolutely alone and out of touch. I've since heard lone explorers talk about hearing “the voice in the darkness” on the radio, and know a little of what they mean by that.

That night, I went to my berth knowing I could sleep in, because we weren't heading out the next day after all. The barometer rose as predicted, and 36 hours later, we sailed south in warm breezes under blue skies. Outside of our little cove, the winds had been gusting to 60 kts, and several boats had gone aground or been damaged within 20 miles of us. But of course, it was so beautiful just then, we couldn't imagine what it would be like in bad weather.

If you'd like to learn how to make a Tin-Can Weatherfax, we've added instructions. Please follow this link to the how-to guide.

Author: Brad H. (Salty Dog)