Category Archives: Deer

My Guardian Angel, Al – Continued

Foreword: This installment updates an earlier post (A Real-Life Spiritual Experience), and adds examples of Al’s intervention when the boat’s bow deck was under water.

My first experience of being vividly aware of being protected by an “unseen force” happened while transporting four hunters back to Whittier from Naked Island, where I had dropped them off a week earlier. Naked lies 40 miles from Whittier, about in the geographic center of the Sound. The morning weather forecast on the day of the pickup called for a small craft advisory, with northeasterly winds. I left Whittier mid morning, traveling close to land along the north side of Wells Passage as much as possible, which afforded some protection from the wind.  Once past the protection of Axle Lind Island, the seas were running four to five feet in height, and were fairly far apart, so they were not especially steep. The seas came directly from the northeast as the forecast had predicted, putting them on the boat’s port beam, or left side. It was a fairly tolerable ride as the boat rose up over the crest of a swell, and then descended into the trough between the crests.

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A Dinty Moore Thanksgiving

Part of my adventurous second career operating a water taxi and tour business in Prince William Sound was running deer hunter transport charters out of Whittier in the fall.  With challenging, potentially-dangerous fall weather always a threat, no two trips were alike.  “Weather rules in Alaska,” as the saying goes, and hunters had to accept the possibility of being weathered in or weathered out.  The shorter daylight hours of fall often complicated things as well. More often than not, this forced unplanned changes to the schedule.  Most of my hunter clients were weather-savvy Alaskans, so that was rarely a problem.  Thanksgiving weekend in 1997 proved to be a “good” example of how that scenario can play out. Continue reading