Cruising Chatham Straight / Pavlov Harbor
Behold the mystery and sink in with us like the clouds and the barometer do. Moisten your eyes and your sighs and the handrails and search for the whale tails as they curve gently into the morning deep. A gentle rain for a gentle beast, falling near-noiselessly and chasing the quiet undulation of dorsal to fluke, dorsal to fluke. The near shore beyond reach as imagination and mist keep it out of sight, placing us in the open, wide waters of Chatham Straight. A peaceful morning, Sunday-seeming although Wednesday the day, but who cares of the day? Or time? Immerse your thoughts not in the enumerations of the upright world, but be lost in the sea, at sea, and let the times of the tides dictate your risings and fallings.
What speck, what break, what blue bursts through the stratus! Sunlight boiling away and condensing our canopy of cloud into cumulus, allowing the full bath of the glorious sun, our star, to paint our afternoon in vivid greens and sparkling whites. A kayak fleet of Indian Paintbrush and Sunflower falls from the boat deck to add to the newborn colors of Pavlov Harbor. Hikes embark, paddlers stroke, rivers flow out and tides flow in to create an afternoon of exploration, life and contemplation.
The most glorious of all, the Adonis of Admiralty Island, the great grizzly bear wanders out from the forest for walk in the sunshine along the shore. The deployed kayak fleet quickly takes note, and tracks the animal on its constitutional. Trundling along, he stops for a quick sniff at a lifejacket and an inspection of remaining kayak gear slowly drowning under the rapidly rising tide. Onward the bear travels, finding nothing of taste in our plastics and backpacks, and we are honored to have shared this moment with him and each other.
With the sun erasing our minds of care and nature filling the blankness with bliss, the fleet is recalled and together aboard we depart Pavlov in search again of the wild creatures of the deep. Chatham can hold many more wonders beneath her opaque surface than could ever be hoped to witness in a week. We ask only a glimpse, a tease, to tweak the imagination more.
