Day 12: Wind (Whittier, Alaska)

Strictly speaking our Whittier adventures began when we arrived in Whittier 8pm the night before. The captain advised bad weather was on the way, and he was keen to arrive before it hit us in open water.

So we spent the night moored in Whittier, which is smaller than this sentence. It's essentially a port connected by rail and road to Anchorage 100 km/60 miles to the north-west, with 4 km/2.5 miles of this trip via a seriously long tunnel. The town only has two large buildings, one contains 80% of the population, and the other one is abandoned.

So Whittier proper isn't exactly a tourist mecca, although it is a staging point for fishing and sailing tours through the area. 

The storm hit that night, with winds over 48 knots. The gusts hit the ship with enough force to make it shudder and sway. Enough that when I woke up around 2.30am I thought we were back at sea. 

Morning came, and the winds still hadn't dropped. Visibility was only a few hundred meters, only this time due to sleeting rain, not fog.

And we were booked for a four-hour cruise. Oboy.

We went to the tour desk, hoping against hope that the cruise had been cancelled. Nobody there, no signs. So far so bad.

Around 10.15am we went down the laughably inadequately covered walkway, entered the port's main building, and queued up with the others, all of us hoping the tour was cancelled.

It wasn't. 

They gave us our tour stickers and sent us out again into the freezing largely-horizontal rain to board the ship.

The ship had fixed seating, and we were part of a group of six seated by the window.  The rain obscured 90% of the view, and the other 10% was lost due to the windows heating up. 

"Maybe they'll clear when we're underway," I thought, "once most of the other passengers leave the room to hurl over the side".

Then the winds picked up. This is just getting better and better...

After 15 minutes or so the captain came on over the loudspeaker to say that a squall had come in, and he expected it to clear in about 15 minutes. He assured us that, because our ship was a catamaran, once we were out of the narrow passage at the harbour's entrance we wouldn't notice the weather at all.

Yeah. Sure. Why not?

Another 15 minutes passed, accompanied by another "the squall should pass soon" announcement. Emma and I did a rough count of the passengers, and the costs of tickets, and figured there was around $60,000 worth of revenue sitting there. If there was any chance of getting us out the captain was going to take it.

Glumly we rejoined the conversation with the other four (all Aussies, as it turns out).

About 15 minutes after this the captain came back on the intercom again, saying he was weighing up whether to cancel. What a wimp.

Finally, an hour after boarding, he announced he was cancelling the tour.

"Awwww," said one passenger, in a tone of voice without a hint of disappointment. 

They had prepared lunch already, so they allowed us to have that free-of-charge, which was a nice gesture. But a note to Americans: when the English invented fish 'n chips the chips they were referring to was what you call "french fries". I appreciate that the US and England are different cultures and all that, but using potato crisps is tragically, horribly, insanely wrong.

I thought we might do a quick tour of what little there is to see of Whittier, but one 40 knot blast of frozen rain convinced that was a stupid idea, so we re-boarded the Diamond Princess (but not before one member of our group slipped and tripped in the wet, fortunately avoiding serious injury).

So we parked on deck, hot drinks to hand, and read. Unadventurous, perhaps, but it beats the hell out of a four hour spewfest.

We were due to sail at 4.30pm, but the alleged 15 minute squall still hadn't lifted. The Captain announced he was delaying our departure until the winds lessened, probably around 7.30pm.

Emma looked out the window. She watched as sheets of rain fell, were swept sideways, and from time to time whipped back up into the air by the most severe gusts. 

Not-so-incredibly, when we went to the Pacific Moon dining room for dinner at 7.30pm we were still moored. We had a fabulous meal and evening with three Canadian couples at our table, one from Vancouver, one from Montreal, and one from near Winnipeg, and had a marvellous time chatting while waiting for the ship not-to-move.

By 10pm we returned to our cabin , by this stage throughly obsessed with wind speeds. We tuned into the channel showing the ship's position and distance travelled from Whittier (0.0 km/ 0.0 miles), ship's speed (0.0 knots), temperature (around 10 degrees centigrade/50 degrees Fahrenheit), and wind speed (now down to 30 knots).

Yay. Soon we'll leave this bitter desolate ice-hole of a place. We kept watching... no change... watching... no change... watching... no change... until around 11pm wind speeds kicked back up to 45km.

Screw it. We're going to sleep.