Different than the rocky east side, the west side of Olga Bay has low lying hills and grass. We have enjoyed these last several days of walking the miles of beach and hiking deer trails. For days we hiked deer trails where ever they took us. Up 500 feet to the top of mountains, through tall dead grass, low trees, and along little rivers and lakes. We mainly saw yearlings and does, but on the day we were going to pick up anchor Sara didn’t feel well so we had decided to stay to let her rest. Wade glassed the hill top with his rifle scope and spotted an eight point buck on the hill behind the cabin closest to our anchorage. As January 31st is the end of deer hunting season Wade knew this was the last chance to hunt deer. He jumped in the dinghy and within 30 minutes he had his first Alaska deer. The next couple of hours he spent dragging the animal back to the boat to process the whole animal. The temperature is around 30 degrees outside so our cockpit has become the perfect meat locker. We have been processing the meat with our LEM Big Bite Meat Grinder and we are making our first jerky and sausage. We had deer steaks yesterday and Sara thought the animal was tender and kind of tasted like lamb? We thought this is a little weird, but thought maybe some of our spicier recipes like lamb korma might be fun to try. Tomorrow we plan to start processing the hid.
East and south winds returned to Olga Bay. This morning our anchorage started to get a little bouncy because the north east winds turned more easterly. This morning Grib and weather files showed the wind switching out of the south, so anticipating the five miles of fetch across Olga Bay we moved to Anchor Cove. If you look in the index of the US Coast Pilot 9 you will find an Anchor Cove, but that is not the Olga Bay Anchor Cove. There is very limited information about Olga Bay but in text Anchor Cove is supposed to be a great anchorage. On our charts the depth in the east arm of Anchor Cove looks well protected and 30 to 47 feet . . . wrong! Haha! As we pulled into the east arm where the chart said 35 feet, the depth was 70, and the deeper we went in the cove finally did get shallow, but it was between two rocks so if we let out a 3 to 1 ratio of chain scope we’d be on the rocks. We went in deeper and the bay became slushy and icy. Just as we started to approach the 47 feet area in the center of the chart our depth finder read 20 feet. Wade was on the bow and could see the bottom get much shallower fairly quickly. We aborted anchoring on the east side and anchored in the center of the cove in 100 feet. We normally avoid anchoring so deep, but we circled around checking depth 300 feet from where we wanted to anchor and the depth was all acceptable. One area got to 15 feet and Wade noticed the bottom was gravel, but the tides in Olga Bay are only a couple feet plus the wind would have to come out of the north which are not expected (for at least the next four days).
After we anchored Wade was filling up our water bottles and heard the sputtering of our water, signifying it is time to switch tanks. We have been gone 16 days and we are half way through, 110 of 220 gallons, of our water. We have 48 gallons of fuel in jerry cans and around a third tank of fuel left in our 56 gallon fuel tank.
Tonight for dinner Deer ribs!
Cheers,
Wade and Sara
Anchor Cove Olga Bay Anchorage Gravel Bottom (No VHF Weather) 57° 06.867, 154° 8.450W
SSB did not work due to COM port failure; Iridium Go is working amazingly for text and getting weather via Sailmail
