Snettisham 2011 - 7: The Riverboat
  August 13-14

Debbie and the riverboat in Stephen's Passage

It all started in June up the Taku River.  I'd finally managed to finagle my way into a field site visit for work during which I got to play fish technician by helping seine and minnow trap juvenile salmonids at various locations on the upper Taku River (U.S. side).  Locations ranged from just downriver of the border south to Johnson Creek and Warm Lake not far above the lodge.  It was a wonderful two days spent zipping up and down the glorious Taku Valley on riverboats with jet engines.  I'd been thinking about buying a riverboat for a while--had even decided I'd seriously work on it last winter--but hadn't made any progress before summer hit.  Now it seemed utterly ludicrous that I had a homestead at the mouth of a big, glacial river that runs all the way up into Canada and I couldn't access it.  Intolerable!

And so I checked the online boat sale sites when I got back to town, with no luck, and Craig's list, with similar success.  But, you never know what people have, so I placed a wanted ad on Craig's list and got two hits in a week--one was an ugly camouflaged boat with a center console, and the other was the boat of my dreams: a 16' SeaArk (welded) with a 40 hp Yamaha jet.  I knew I wanted that boat as soon as I laid eyes on it.   I'd been to Willie's Marine, which had some nice 3Gs with electric start 4-stroke motors, but this was a little more up my alley, and a little less expensive.  I certainly didn't need a new boat to bang around while I figured out how to run the river.  My schedule was pretty busy at the time, though, so it was over a week before I was able to take the boat for a test drive on Auke Lake.  My main concern was my ability to pull start it--I'm not always very good at that and the owner admitted that it was a little tough.  When I first checked it out, I struggled valiantly just to tilt it up by myself.  On the lake, starting it was easy, but it was a warm day and the engine had already been running.  The owner offered to bring it out again cold, but I couldn't wait for that.  On the way back to work I stopped to talk to my mechanic about it and he told me nothing that dissuaded me; as soon as I got back to work I made an offer.

It took two weeks to hear back.  I left several upbeat messages about how much I was looking forward to hearing back from him, but it wasn't until I left a glum message along the lines of "If you've decided not to sell it, please just let me know" before he called me back.  I made him a better offer then and he sold it to me the next day.  Giddy and terrified, I took my new boat straight out to Lawless Marine and left it there the day before I left town for most of two weeks.  I told Scott my schedule and we agreed that I'd pick in up the day after I got back, at which point he'd show me how to shim the impellor and other troubleshooting tips.  All he planned to do in the meantime was some basic maintenance due an 11-year old engine (changing the fuel pump, thermostat, etc.).  Then I went off on a Yukon adventure followed by a Colorado adventure.  As agreed, I called Scott a couple of days before I got back to remind him of my return and showed up Friday morning to pick up my boat.  It was inside the shop, but not yet complete, and he asked me to come back at 2:00.  When I arrived at 2:00, he'd left me a note asking for my phone number and saying that he'd had to go to the harbor.  The phone call later that afternoon did not bring good news.  The motor had been used in salt water for some time and had never been maintained; consequently, the impellor, which had never come off, was completely fused to the shaft.  Scott sounded frustrated, said it could be done, but not that day.

That was Friday.  Not having been to Snettisham for several weeks because of the other trips, I was naturally anxious to go south, ideally with a riverboat in tow.  The weather was tantalizingly good: northwest winds, seas two feet or less.  In fact, Saturday was gorgeous, a fine, Juneau summer day.  Scott called in the morning to say that he was making progress, hadn't yet finished up, but hoped to soon.  I have a feeling he would have been out on the water himself that day enjoying the weather if it hadn't been for my boat.  Chris and I went on a quick trip to the back side of Douglas on the Ronquil and, when we got back, it was really too late to do anything else that weekend and the boat still wasn't ready.

The following weekend was scheduled for our fishing trip to Pavlov Harbor and, as that was our only chance to catch that run, we put off Snettisham for another weekend.  I didn't pick up the riverboat until after we returned from fishing.  It had taken Scott eight hours to get the impellor off (which was destroyed in the process along with one of the bolts) and replace it, which increased the cost of the boat by a third.  It was a good lesson for both of us: low hours on an engine doesn't mean it isn't in any trouble.  Regular maintenance is key.  Having done so much work on it, Scott admonished me to run it for a couple of hours in town before taking it all the way to Snettisham.  He's a good mechanic.  That week, Chris's mother came to town and we planned to spend a long weekend at Snettisham.  On Friday morning, my mother accompanied me to the harbor for the shake-down cruise.  Once again, against all expectation, the weather was calling for perfect conditions to take the riverboat down.  In addition, everything was prepared for towing the riverboat, if that seemed appropriate, and I'd even taken time the evening before to install the bilge pump system I'd put together earlier in the week (I screwed the bilge pump and float switch to a plastic cutting board which I then glued to the bottom of the bilge with 5200 marine sealant and hooked it up to the Ronquil's former battery).  To my delight, the engine started after about five or six pulls with no issues.  We puttered around the harbor, picked up life jackets from the Ronquil, then headed out into the channel to get it up to speed.  And that's when the clicking noise happened.  About half way to reaching step, the engine started clicking and it never stopped, changing speed in direct relation to the rpms.  It seemed to be coming from under the flywheel.  Thoroughly disheartened, I took it back to the harbor and called Scott; he said, "Bring it in."  And so I ran it straight out to the shop and left it there (Scott wasn't around); he called me just as Chris, his mother, and I got to the harbor to head south to ask more detail about the problem.  I felt a little better when I was able to tell him all I'd observed and when he guessed that we were planning to take it to Snettisham that day (I told him I'd be out of town until Sunday).  He sounded sympathetic and said he'd get it fixed up for me. 

As I write this, I haven't actually heard from Scott since.  I called him and left a message on my way to Fairbanks the next Tuesday and told him I'd be back Thursday.  I waited anxiously for a phone call that never came and called him a few more times, but didn't leave messages.  Back at work in Juneau on Friday I called a couple more times, but his phone was either off or out of batteries.  Once again, for the third time, the weather was promising for running a flat-bottomed boat in Stephen's Passage (calm seas are relatively rare) and I was extremely anxious and furious that once again I might lost my chance to get my riverboat down there this summer (I'd started the process six weeks before); if I didn't get it down there that weekend, I may as well leave it in town all winter.  By the time I left work, I'd decided I'd just stop by the shop in person.  What if Scott had left his phone at home that day, I wondered?  Wouldn't I forever kick myself if, in fact, the boat was fixed and I just didn't know about it?  I asked myself the same questions again when I showed up at Scott's shop to find that he was fishing the derby and wouldn't be back until the following week.  There was my boat, staged in the area he'd once described as "ready for pickup."  I poked around to see if I could tell he'd worked on it.  I couldn't.  So I took it.  I hauled it home, set up a tub of water under the motor, and started it in my driveway.  Unfortunately, I couldn't feed the engine enough water for more than a couple of seconds of run time, so I couldn't be sure if there was still that clicking sound or not.  I turned it around in the driveway, hooked it up again, and set off for the harbor, coming across my mother along the way and picking her up to help out.  Without much confidence, I launched the boat, started the engine, and.....didn't hear anything weird.  Neither did my mother.  We stopped by the Ronquil again for life jackets, then left the harbor, getting up to speed with no problems.  So we sped down the channel, swerving this way and that to test out its maneuverability, and varying speeds to make sure nothing funny happened.  We went all the way to the end of the channel and back with no incident.  It appeared to have been fixed (if, in fact, anything had been wrong at all).  I left it in an empty transient slip that night and, the next morning, loaded everything up with Chris's help.  We traveled light, putting only the six ABS pipes onto the riverboat (intended as rollers to help bring it up on the beach). I lashed these down, pleased with how shipshape the boat was with its action packer full of gear, oar, lines, anchors, throw, and the bucket of cottonwoods tucked into the back with me.  I was very careful about everything.  I started the jet engine first and let it idle while Chris got underway.  We both drank beers on the way out of the harbor, myself giddy and terrified again.

The day was glorious, sunny and calm, and the ride down was splendid.  The Ronquil was much faster at speed than the riverboat, so Chris either matched my speed or waited for me periodically, taking lots of photos of me on my new boat.  I think the whole trip took about two and a half hours; we anchored the Ronquil in the river and brought the riverboat ashore on the rising tide, then had a quick lunch.  I was extremely anxious to head up the river, now that I'd finally brought the boat safely down!  Having not made much progress at Snettisham this summer (occupied  as I was with other adventures (including riverboat trials) and entertaining guests), I'd decided back in July that if I just got the riverboat to Snettisham and figured out a system to keep it on the beach while I was away, I'd call it a successful summer.  Of course, implicit in this goal was the underlying purpose of the boat: getting up the river and exploring.  I took this to be no issue at all compared to the rest of it.  Technically I achieved my goal that weekend, but I failed in the underlying objective, and fear I'll never get up the river.  My dreams of fishing for cohos at the mouth of that brown water slough emptying the small lake across the river from Crescent Lake fizzled away as Chris and I drifted downriver.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  With action packer loaded with all the essentials, a full gas tank, and my adventure backpack, Chris and I headed upriver on the high tide.  I was ELATED.  We quickly zoomed up to Whiting Point, which is where I knew things would get dicey, as I told Chris, because I didn't know the channels and the sandbars there are rampant (from my brief experience).  I moved at little more than an idle, trying to read the water and piece together a route.  As Chris pointed out, I really wanted to be up on step to draw as little water as possible, but I didn't feel comfortable doing so without knowing where the basic channels were--without knowing that I wasn't going to hit a sandbar at speed just ahead.  I had seen from satellite images that the main channel, surprisingly, crossed the river not far above Whiting Point rather than following the shore around the curve.  Indeed, we could see many sandbars lining the shoreline ahead of us.  I poked my nose up one promising lead, but was quickly surrounded by barely submerged sandbars.  A more likely channel led upriver to a triangular sandbar absolutely packed with harbor seals.  Alas, the main channel was directly adjacent their haulout and so I had no choice but to approach right alongside it; of course, by then they'd all scurried into the river and were coming up all around us to watch.  Thankfully, they didn't seem very much annoyed, or very skittish, and we had some of the best looks we've ever had.  We first tried to go along the right of their sandbar, but quickly lost deep water, so we tried a channel below and to the left, and again came upon a sandbar.  I sucked in a little sand and noticed that the starter cord was stiff the next time I started it.  Chris and I looked at one shallow area and thought we might see deeper water on the other side, so I decided to give it a go, already quite exasperated that I was having so much difficulty running the river.  In my haste I made a rather crucial mistake: I tried to get up to speed to run the shallow area on step, but failed to get up on step in time, running into the shallows at the worst possible position (with the stern digging deep into the water and the bow raised).  Naturally, I sucked up a lot of sand.

Now, I knew that sucking up sand was not good.  I knew that it wore down the impellor and caused wear on other parts of the engine.  However, somehow I'd missed the part where it would stop the engine from turning over at all.  That seemed like an important thing to know!  I went over what my dad had told me about troubleshooting....I seemed to remember something about tilting the engine up and down a bunch of times to flush it out....also, something about working the impellor with a screwdriver.  I couldn't access the bottom of the grate from inside the boat, but I did try to raise and lower the engine a lot.  However, it's heavy enough that I can barely lift it at all, so it was a slow process and, I'm afraid, not very effective.  Beyond that, I needed land to work on it.  Lacking confidence in my ability to fix the situation, it seemed that the best solution was to get the boat back to the homestead rather than risk getting stuck upriver on a falling tide.  So, Chris and I steered the boat into the current and drifted down to Whiting Point and thence across the river.  It was such a long ways to go and the tide was falling fast (evidenced by the rapidly growing sandbars along the right side of us as we crossed the river), so I wanted to go the shortest distance possible.  We aimed for Ox Point to avoid the big bend in the river above it, but the wind was blowing upriver and, in combination with the current, was too strong to fight.  We wound up going around the bend above Ox Point where Chris suggested we increase our speed by having someone step onto the bank and pull the boat (there's a big grassy meadow there with sandy banks).  This worked extremely well, and we took turns hauling the boat while the other one held it off the sand. 

Below Ox Point we lost the beach, the current got swifter, and we drifted down again.  This was the most pleasant part of the trip.  Here we noticed again how the south side of the channel from Whiting Point past the big avalanche (and to a lesser degree our side of the river) was ragged with big windblown patches that we think came down last winter.  We'd heard that the Taku had had less snowfall than usual, but more winds, so perhaps the same had happened on the Whiting.  After a couple of points the current started to cross the river and I told Chris to paddle hard to stay on our present side (fearing that if we followed the current we'd wind up on the opposite side of the river and not able to paddle across to the homestead before being swept out to sea by the current).  It was probably a bad decision.  We quickly came upon a maze of sandbars and fought hard to stay in or get back into the deep channels, some of which were only a few inches deep. Time and time again we grounded on a sandbar, got out, and with much effort pushed and pulled the boat into a deeper channel.  Sometimes that channel was deep enough to float the boat and we climbed back in for a few seconds, other times it only made the pulling slightly easier and was not the relief we sought.  This seemed an endless battle as we made slow progress and the tide continued to fall.  We spent much more time in the water than on the boat but, eventually, did reach the end of the sandbars where the boat floated in about a foot of water.  Paddling toward the homestead was easy then and we relaxed.  In that shallow area we kept seeing ripples moving from under the water that were either seals or large fish swimming, or both.  Whatever was making them must have been attracted by the myriad tiny fish that jumped out of the water everywhere around us.  Tiny little flashes of silver leapt alone or in groups in all directions.  Chris started casting with his spinning rod and every time his lure ht the water, the surface erupted in tiny jumping fishes all around.  It was fascinating!  They couldn't have been more than an inch or so long.

I left the riverboat anchored at the edge of the mudflats in front of the lodge, thankfully remembering to check the status of the plug (which had been partially loosened by scraping along the bottom of sandbars so much).  I left the lock in an upright position to avoid that problem in the future.  Exhausted, we had dinner and crashed.  The half hour trip upriver had been followed by a three and a half hour drift/drag down and I was numb with discouragement.  It felt like a big $X,000 mistake.  How foolish I had been to think that I could run a riverboat!

The Ronquil underway at Sandy Beach	The Ronquil in Stephen's Passage	The riverboat in Taku Inlet
Heading upriver	Driving my new boat	Seal Sandbar
Seals in the river	Pulling the boat along the beach	Windblown areas below Whiting Point

The next morning I buried Nigel on the plot I'd prepared next to the lodge and planted two Taku cottonwoods among his ashes--one from Johnson Creek and one cut from a dead log I found in the middle of a sandbar near the Canadian border.  I liked the idea of giving a dead tree a second chance at life on Nigel's grave (dead trees often sprout leaves the first summer after their uprooting).  I also wanted to plant a cottonwood that had been closer to the Bullard's Landing cabin, which was Nigel's favorite place in the world, but I wasn't able to stop there on my June site visit, so the closest I could come was Johnson Creek, where Nigel accompanied Chris and I two summers ago.  I also planted four other cottonwood cuttings around the beach, two from Johnson Creek and two from my favorite cottonwood tree at the lodge (one each upriver and downriver).  Two I placed under trees, because that's where there was the most amenable soil for a tree, and two I placed in logs which were supporting other trees.  For the latter, I hacked out pint-sized holes with a pulaski and refilled the  with wood chips and soil.  I haven't noticed cottonwoods growing from fallen trees, but just about every other tree in Southeast Alaska does it commonly, so it's worth a shot.  Otherwise, the soil is too wet or already too densely overgrown with trees and shrubs to plant anything substantial. 

With both of those deeds done I actually felt much better.  In the afternoon I hooked up a temporary winch system to bring the riverboat higher on the beach to prevent it from sinking if the bilge pump failed.  I shackled a chain around a tree straight inland from where I thought I'd bring the riverboat up, then shackled the back of the winch to that.  I'd been pulling the boat closer and closer in as the tide rose all day, so it was easy to retrieve.  Once the tide was at its highest point and the riverboat pulled up as far as it would go, I tied the Ronquil's old anchor line to the bow, drug it to the woods, tied a bowline where it met the end of the winch line, and clipped it in.  Chris monitored the boat while I started winching it up.  The system worked pretty well, although we both agreed that the lengths of ABS pipe I'd cut and placed beneath the boat may have been more of a hindrance than a help, as it forced the boat up at a greater angle.  In any event, the two of us pulled it a boat length or so on shore; I slackened the line a little and tied an anchor to either side of the boat so it didn't move too far one way or another if a huge tide came in and floated it.  I was pleased to see a bird immediately use the line as a perch. 

With the riverboat secure, we packed up and headed out, excited to find a dungeness crab in Chris's pot (though we let him go), but still rather discouraged.

Cottonwoods over Nigel's grave	Cottonwood in a tree	Pulling up the riverboat
Sparrow on the line	Picking up Chris on the way out	Chris and his dungeness

My riverboat