Today looked like an ideal day for sailing. The sky was blue. The waves were small. A steady wind speed of 15 to 20 knots . . . that is until we would get williwaws from the steep mountain valleys funneling wind from the northwest. Reading the water is one of the first sailor lessons to navigate the vessel; watching for ripples increasing and becoming dark lines across the water. Anticipating this puff or gust of wind before it fills the sails and possibly overpowers the vessel. Today was a reminder that this lesson is still true for big boats as well as little sailing boats. As we sailed past most valleys, sighting upcoming williwaws were mostly obvious and we could anticipate the williwaw, but there were a couple today that caught us by surprise and one oddly from the direction opposite the wind was generally blowing. That may sound odd but like wind funneling through tall buildings in a city, sometimes strange wind directions happen.
During this voyage around Kodiak we have experimented with the Iridium Go to handle our communication. Previously we always used an SSB radio and Sailmail. Sailmail has several SSB stations to connect and retrieve weather and emails. As we made our way from Dutch Harbor to Kodiak and around Kodiak in 2017 we became increasingly disappointed that our SSB could not reach a Sailmail station of either Honolulu or Seattle because the mountain ranges were too high. As most of the bays in which we anchor are in deep fjords surrounded by mountains, the majority of our anchorages we could not receive VHF weather.
What does this mean? Most importantly we cannot receive weather Grib files, which in turn means we cannot accurately and safely be in the best anchorage for the forecasted weather. After careful research we chose the Iridium Go because it still supports Sailmail and other fabulous features like text and voice calls using our smart phones. We’ve heard of other cruisers that use Predict Wind instead of Sailmail to retrieve weather, but we have discovered the Predict Wind Offshore app is unable to download as large of a weather picture and with as much detail as Sailmail. Predict Wind takes five times longer to download the same size of weather file, if it downloads at all. Lastly, Sailmail has a big feature called Shadowmail, basically we can select emails from our normal Gmail account without having to forward them all to our Iridium email or Sailmail email. Could you imagine if we forwarded all of our emails to this extremely slow connection, haha, Wade would have to be more vigilant in preventing spam emails or we’d never finish downloads.
To sum everything up, on our way to Old Harbor, we stopped by our first anchorage on Kodiak Island, Three Saints Bay. This bay is surrounded by tall mountains and we tested the SSB connection in 2017 and we could not get a signal. Today we tested the Iridium Go and it had 5 out 5 satellite signal. We actually downloaded the Predict Wind weather because we knew if the satellite connection could handle that, then Sailmail would be a walk in the park.
Plus we saw mountain goats!
Cheers,
Wade and Sara
Old Harbor Anchorage Mud Bottom (VHF Weather, SSB Unsure) 57° 11.970’N, 153° 18.204W
Three Saints Bay Anchorage Sand No VHF Weather and No SSB but 5/5 Iridium Go connection
Copy and paste these coordinates 57.1995,-153.3034 into Google Maps to see where are Wade, Sara, and SV Just Drifting!
Iridium Go is working amazingly for text and getting weather via Sailmail
