The one that got away, and a hazy day

Monday and Tuesday, August 24-25, 2026

On Monday the wind blew for most of the day at 0.0 mph with gusts up to 1.5 mph! In the early evening, however, as Walt was attaching our staysail to the inner forestay using the “soft shackles” he’d produced and hoisting the sail ever higher off the deck, some 7-mph teasing breezes arrived to flap the sail around and make his task more challenging. He WAS able to try out the sail on the forestay successfully, to remove it, and to fold it (with some help from me) and return it to its storage bag. He did discover that the sail-makers had told him that the sail had 11 “eyes” through which to insert the shackles, and there are actually 12 eyes along the edge of the sail, so he will need to make a 12^th shackle in addition to constructing four others that will fit better if they are made of smaller strands of Dyneema.

In mid-morning, Walt collected our crab trap and was surprised and pleased to find 11 crabs in it, but only one was large enough to retain. So, for the first time, we succeeded in our efforts to nab a crab—hooray! Walt killed, cleaned, and cooked it, and we anticipated a lovely crab salad for dinner. It wasn’t long before Walt was off again in Coracle with a freshly-baited trap, which he deposited in a different location. Following his afternoon experiments with hoisting the staysail, he set out to retrieve the trap, leaving me on the dock on the shore of Stuart Island to wander about and find some photo opportunities.

He pulled up the trap, but this time found only a single good-sized crab within; he brought the trap and its contents back to Braesail; and then he collected me from the dock, and told me that he hadn’t checked to see if the crab were a boy or a girl. Back on the boat, he lifted the motionless crab from the bucket into which he’d placed it and turned it over to check its gender, and just as he identified it as a male whose meat he could add to our dinner, the crafty crustacean flipped himself over in his captor’s gloved hand and made his escape into the water at the stern of the boat, leaving a little trail of bubbles behind as he descended into the depths! We were not feeling terribly crabby about this, however, because we HAD finally trapped a DOZEN crabs in all, and we still had one on which to dine (although it had taken a good deal of time and effort to produce about a half-cup of meat!).

The rest of Monday found us engaged in our usual activities and considering the tasks to be done during the next few days. Our crab salad WAS delectable, and I was able to enjoy the view of an almost-full moon drifting in an indigo-satin sky and pouring a stream of silver light into the harbor on another windless, motionless night.

During the night, however, wildfire smoke began to waft our way, and by mid-morning on Tuesday, with NO wind to scatter it, the smoke was dimming the sky and veiling, in an acrid bluish-gray haze, the hills surrounding the harbor, on the surface of which about 20 boats sat perfectly still as if on a huge mirror. Walt used our small pressure-washer to remove a substantial layer of grime from the two large solar panels that rest atop the arch in Braesail’s stern and form a “garage” for Coracle, thus considerably increasing their power output. I took a good hot shower, did some reading, writing, German, and general tidy-up, and helped a bit with Walt’s installation of a larger, quieter fan beside our bed in the aft cabin.

After good naps, Walt did some work in the two large lazarettes (storage compartments) in Braesail’s stern, installing hangers along their sides to facilitate organization and increasing capacity, and I read several thought-provoking articles about the nature, sources, and persistence of consciousness, and worked on this post. A small breeze began to breathe across the harbor as the sun slipped away, and some of the murky miasma began to thin, allowing the moon to glow through the remaining mist. Tomorrow we plan to motor, for a little more than two hours, to Blind Bay on Shaw Island, since there won’t, according to predictions, be enough wind to fill our sails. I hope some breezes might actually find us!