Frontier State

It took us 45 days to sail from Opua in New Zealand to Dutch Harbor in Alaska.

During that time, Alaska was a point on the map. It was a day in the calendar. It was an upcoming relief, like crossing the gate at the end of a marathon. This was where we could finally catch our breath. This was the place where the boat would stop moving, where we could afford a full night of sleep, do the laundry, handle the repairs, and celebrate the end of a long passage.

The rest of the season was supposed to be easy coastal sailing in mostly protected waters, never far from an anchorage or a harbor. I imagined a slightly colder and less crowded version of sailing in Brittany in summer.

That is not how it turned out.

I should have looked at the map more carefully, to better prepare myself for what I was going to face. The Aleutian chain includes about 300 islands spanning 1,100 miles. That is roughly the distance from Miami, Florida to Portland, Maine along the U.S. East Coast.

The distance had to be reckoned with a couple of days before arriving in Dutch Harbor. We sailed along several islands. We quickly realized we would not have the time to come back to them this year. The idea of sailing from Dutch Harbor to Adak, or even to Umnak, the next island down the chain, proved to be beyond the realm of possibility for this season.

Instead, we decided to focus on Unalaska, the island where Dutch Harbor is located. Unalaska is slightly smaller than Majorca, but its coastline is twice as long. Majorca has close to a million inhabitants. Unalaska has fewer than 5,000. Majorca is a major yachting destination. At most, there were six sailboats on Unalaska while we were there, two of them in long-term storage. We met the crew of every actively cruising boat but one.