We had about an hour of glorious weather turning the corner through Unimak Pass. There’d been fog for most of the last day and night, with our sleep constantly punctuated by the obligatory every-two-minutes blast of the ship’s foghorn. The westerly swells trained us to make our way down the corridors small-stepping to balance against the ship’s almost trademark corkscrew roll. Just another day – or two or three – at sea in the Gulf of Alaska.

But approaching the turn, we began to be able to make out faint outlines of cliffs and sharp spires rising in the distance on either side of us. Shafts of sunlight broke through the overcast and, as we fell in the shadow of Tigalda, Ugamak, and the rest, the swells dropped away to no more than light chop. For the handful of us keeping the Chief Mate and watchstander company on the bridge, it was a glorious sight: the Aleutians.

It…was not to last. By evening, the winds had picked up, and the swell, now funneled up behind us by the northern shore of that same chain of islands, scored the night with crashes, creaks and the sound of whatever hadn’t been tied down securely enough breaking free from its bonds and taking flight. I’m pretty sure we lost a stack of dishes that had been bungeed down in the galley, and I was up three times myself, twice to retrieve and stow medicine bottles that had been set rolling, rattling around my cabin in the dark, and once to hand-over-hand it down to main deck to confirm that my laptop hadn’t gotten it in mind to take flight from its moorings.

Ship’s data indicate that we were at times rolling 20-25 degrees either way through the night, with a period of just under 12 seconds (a little math indicates that up on the bridge, they were getting swung with upwards of 0.2 G as the ship rolled).

Welcome to the Bering Sea.

Then, having deprived us of a night’s sleep, the weather relented, giving us again flat water and gloriously blue sky. Hopes, even, that it might be clear enough that evening for some aurora viewing. Foiled because, of course, there was a full moon, but I was still up at 5 – just in case.

Bering Sea by moonlight

Of course, as they say, nature bats last, and the sea isn’t done with us yet. Our target of reaching Nome tomorrow at six or so in the morning now looks like it’s not going to happen. Turns out that there’s enough weather coming in on our tail that captain thinks it best that we shelter offshore in deep water tomorrow, and make harbor the next day.

In the meantime, we’ll have to continue to make do with the comforts on board. Ridiculously well-prepared meals (baked apple oats and eggs in half a dozen ways for breakfast, braised short ribs with brown butter pumpkin dumplings and green apple arugula salad for lunch). Science and tech lectures during the day. Popcorn and movies (inevitably something that involves misadventure at sea, like The Meg) at night.

We’ll get by..

But you can bet we’re going to make sure everything’s bolted down tighter than…well, we’re just going to make sure everything’s secure for tomorrow.