Help with a fiction novel

[Redreuben]

I like your attitude, nothing pisses me off more than an author/screenwriter who hasn’t done due diligence on the topic. Especially when it involves terminology or basic physics/common science. Good job.

[CBarry]

1. Tell me I've either made a good choice in the Skookum 53 (and why), or a terrible one (and, yes, why and what do you recommend).

I have circumnavigated but never did the inside passage. But I think I can help here.

All boats are a compromise. Some are designed to sail well. Which comes at the expense of space and comfort. Your skookum is spacious and built to be something you can live in. Travelling that boat means lots of fuel. The wind would need to be just right before you could sail. Trade winds or you going to motor. I know folks that have done that inside passage. It's a motor. As mentioned by others narrow, currents, little or wrong wind. If it has to be the inside passage consider "finding" some fuel. Or invent a micro nuclear generator (it's the future after all) or maybe a fuel cell

1. What are some things that can go really wrong with a boat like this, and also with the route? I'm pretty familiar with the tides around the San Juans (I live in WA), but everything north of there is unknown to me.

Not sure what the future looks like but bears can be trouble. Curent can really fly in some of the narrow spots. If you let that current catch you it could be the end. Tides drive these currents of course. Sailboat problems are usually electric or engine related. But if these systems are offline in your story, that leaves the hull and the sails. You could lose a rudder as someone pointed out. Easy. Clip a rock in a narrow bit. There is a wind driven steering system called a hydrovane. Hydrovane.com. if your crew had one it would make rudder loss survivable. They might go aground and get stranded as the tide went down. And free when it comes up.

1. Do you have any interest in looking at the rough draft portions related to the trip? These are big books so this is only a relatively small part of the overall story, but I don't want to gloss it over.

Sure I'd be interested. I should mention I know a sailor, Jim Rard. He has led many groups of sailboats up that passage. He could share a long problem list that actually happened!And he sold boats for a career. He might "sell" you on something different. I'll put you in touch if you are interested.

[intervivos]

If things go bad, you will have what you have. You will not be able to pick the perfect boat for a given goal, so why make this concession for your book? If wind is truly the only way, perhaps making the boat a bit more sailboat vs. motorboat makes sense. If I had access to Skookum 53 and that was the only boat, I would find a way to make it work. Is all fuel out, or just traditional fuels? What about Biodiesel, Propane, natural gas...Is it really all gone? Lets face it, even in Waterworld there were "smokers."

[ShakingTheTree]

Post-apocolyptic fiction that involves survival on a boat? COOL!

You got a lot of great suggestions in this thread (along with some... other stuff... yikes). As a writer, myself, I also know the struggle of writing about something with which I don't have a whole lot of experience; I also know the value of getting some of that experience, even if it's just a taste.

Someone upthread suggested taking a basic sailing course, and I think that's a great idea. Many sailing schools offer it in one weekend. Also, to get familiar with your terms as well as having a technical reference that isn't overwhelming, pick up Sailing for Dummies. I still refer to this book because (1) it's thorough, and (2) it was written for... well, it's right there in the title, and that there is my tribe.

See if you can get some time on boats with people who sail, and you will not only gain the firsthand experience of what it's like, but you will undoubtedly also be regaled with stories of things that can--and have--gone wrong.

I'm excited for you! I love the premise, and it sounds like it will be a great read. Good luck to you!

[gulfislandfred]

I have lived in the Salish Sea (Puget Sound to Sesolation Sound) and sailed all my life.


I lived in Port Townsend when the Skookum 53s were built. They don't sail as well as some boats, but they definitely sail well enough for your story.


With the number of people you have, and that boat, you can have a pretty big rowboat and tow in and out of anchorages, like the explorers on this coast did.



People sail the inside passage with little or no motoring all the time. We pay attention to wind and tide. If we're in a hurry, we motor, but there are a couple of races to Alaska with no motors. Smaller boats, mostly, but a bigger boat can do it. The area was well populated long before the internal combustion engine.



I would like to read what you've written, happy to comment.


Fred waterrat@island.net

[MJH]

Originally Posted by michaelzargona

Hello all! First post. I'm not a sailor, I'm a writer and am looking for some help.

I've published two books and am working on the third. As part of the story, the main group of 8 adults and 3 children must journey from the Puget Sound, WA area up through the Inside Passage, across the Bering Sea (avoiding Anchorage area), along the Aleutians, and then finally stop near Vladivostok, Russia.

Some background: it's a dystopian / apocalyptic story, more 1984 than Road Warrior but some of both. No fuel...which means wind power. No one is chasing them, so the dangers will be natural. And, given that route, there should be plenty. I haven't had much luck finding people who deep sea sail up there.

I've done a little bit of research. At this point I've settled on a Skookum 53 as it's a) a pretty believable boat to have in Washington State and b) it seems too small for such a big group but not impossibly so. Obviously a huge ship that does everything comfortably is not great for dramatic fiction, and a bathtub with a handkerchief on a stick for a sail isn't realistic. I do know the Skookum 53 is a motor sail and has a number of systems dependent on generator-run electrical power, so finding workarounds is both mine and the characters' job. I like how all of these boats have been customized over the years and all seem to have a unique flair.

You've made it this far. What I'm looking for from the sailing experts:

1. Tell me I've either made a good choice in the Skookum 53 (and why), or a terrible one (and, yes, why and what do you recommend).
2. What are some things that can go really wrong with a boat like this, and also with the route? I'm pretty familiar with the tides around the San Juans (I live in WA), but everything north of there is unknown to me.
3. Do you have any interest in looking at the rough draft portions related to the trip? These are big books so this is only a relatively small part of the overall story, but I don't want to gloss it over.

- M.Z.

I look forward to reading your book. There are too few good novels about ocean passages as many don't do enough research.

I have sail extensively through British Columbia and to Alaska twice. On both trips to Alaska I purposely avoided the Inside Passage since it basically a motoring trip and too many other boaters; I go up east of Aristazabal and Banks Islands via Laredo and Principe Channels...more remote with better possibility of sailing.

I suggest you look at World Cruising Routes by Jimmy Cornell for suggested routes, seasons, and prevailing winds. As a matter of fact you could have your characters go to the library to read up on their proposed journey since they are not particularly sea going to begin with but smart enough to do the research.

As to the boat they use, a true sailboat as opposed to a motor sailor would be more appropriate given the presumed fuel limitations that would be present post apocalyptic. If you selected something currently in production i.e. Hylas 57 or 70 you may get some support from the manufacturer.

Good Luck.

[Ike]

Wow. That's a fascinating concept. I have not sailed the route you suggest on a sailboat, but I have sailed the exact same route on a 327 foot Coast Guard Cutter. It was in February, 1975, so I can give some insights into what the conditions are like in winter. We sailed from Port Angeles WA up through the Salish Sea, Strait of Georgia, up the Inside passage to Queen Charlotte Sound. We stopped at Juneau, Kodiak, Dutch Harbor (you'll have to include Dutch Harbor, what a place. Talk about remote) Adak, And up to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea. We were there to do fisheries patrols, and we encountered a lot of Russian fishing vessels as well as Japanese and of course US vessels.

But first the weather. The initial part was rather uneventful, cold, rainy. Typical PNW weather. Of course the farther north the colder it got. We did not encounter any really rough seas until we went "outside". There is a part of this trip that is out on the open ocean, and it can get pretty rough. Of course that is relative. Rough to a 327 foot Coast Guard cutter may be catastrophic to a small boat. The passage from Ketchikan to Juneau can be done "inside" but as the song says it is "a long and winding road" but must be spectacular. We did it out side, and from then on we were outside. The trip to Kodiak was fairly smooth but that was just luck of the weather Gods. The weather in this part of the world can change dramatically, sometimes in the matter of a few hours. So in your post apocalyptic world they may not have advanced weather forecasts, so they would have to do it the old fashioned way with barometers, thermometers, wind speeds and directions, and a good knowledge of weather patterns.

From Kodiak we sailed to Dutch Harbor. It is a fishing village about half way out the Aleutian chain, on Unalaska Island. Dutch Harbor was the site of an attack by the Japanese during WWII and has a very interesting history. A lot of the old bunkers are still there. Perhaps you could use that. Look it up.

Then we headed north. Boarded a lot of fishing vessels. I was not in the boarding parties but they said the Russians were very gracious, offered gifts in exchange for American items. We found no violations. (BTW the most asked for items were cigarettes and Playboy) They gave us fish (of course) and Vodka. (don't ask) Then we got a SAR call (Search and Rescue) for a Navy tug with 21 people on board, mostly dependents (wives and children) who we rescued and towed to Adak. Adak is known as the home of the winds, and it certainly proved it. we faced gusts up to 75 knots. We actually had to request a harbor tug to get the ship into the pier.

Adak is pretty barren. Nothing grows except lichens and moss. There was a Naval Station there. I think they have since closed it, but the buildings would probably still be there, although in ruins.

As for the weather. Cold (I'm talking way below zero), windy, and ice constantly accumulating on the superstructure, which we had to go out every morning and break it off with baseball bats. Rough, In the Bering Sea 15 to 20 foot waves were normal.

This is not sailing weather. It is strictly powerboat weather. I haven't been there in the summer but I have been told by the locals and fishermen that it can change rapidly from sunny and calm to really nasty in a heartbeat. There are reasons why fishing in Alaskan waters is one of the most deadly occupations in the world. I hardly ever watched Deadliest Catch but you could get a pretty good idea of the weather there by watching it. A niece of mine spent a few months working on a fishing boat in Alaska (I told her not to do it) and she swore she would never ever do that again.

As has been said, the scenery is spectacular. Very rugged, mountainous, lots of Fjords.

[Ike]

As for the boat, I would suggest something very rugged. More like a fishing troller or a trawler, (look up the difference between a troller and a trawler) I can't imagine a 53 foot motorsailer surviving a storm in the North Pacific or Bering Sea. In a post apocalyptic world, getting fuel would be the biggest problem, but diesels can burn a lot of strange concoctions. It doesn't have to be nice clean low sulfur diesel. Peanut oil works along with a lot of other "oils".

[Ike]

a good source about heavy weather sailing https://www.offcenterharbor.com/flot...ng-skip-novak/

[Oeanda]

Yeah I’d consider a post apocalyptic fuel source. Boats don’t get much sailing time in local BC inlets and passages, for the obvious reasons that they’re inland passages, Protected from the main winds though subject to various land breezes at times. Funnels for the current which is going to be against you every six hours. Apart from that, the BC coast in general isn’t natural sailing country as in some other parts of the world.
Usually the wind is either against you, or it’s too strong. The only times we get anything you could call a consistent prevailing wind is when a rare high-pressure system builds, and then in that case the winds are going to be on your nose if you’re trying to go north

Whereas you could bust into one abandoned fishing lodge/logging camp/whatever, find some old diesel to run through a filter, and get all you can carry.

[howlingengines]

In this post-apocalyptic world , is GPS still working? If not , you are very much back to old-school 'by the twain mark' depth and sextant handling.This is serious passage-making.

[Apollo366]

Great Idea!! Stick with it.. And please keep us informed of your progress, please, please.

I did the Inside Passage in the early summer 1980 in a 55 ft Taiwan Ketch as a delivery from San Diego to Anchorage.

That year the summer wx was mostly calm to gentle on the outside passages so we motor sailed most all the time (Capt was a power boat guy, didn't like being out of sight of land), the IP we motored but only used less than the full tank as I remember, and found local cruising guide invaluable to time the tides & currents & when & where to anchor for the night, too dangerous to sail in the dark!

Of course you can blame Global Warming for all kinds of changed wx patterns. Having them research the Library for info on sailing & coastal navigating is a great idea, the nerd crowd will love it, esp when the reality meets the theoretical part.

Your choice of boat is right on, all the good ones will be gone by the time they get around to finding a boat, so a not really right for the task is spot on, & they can use the motor to get out of jams as they go, but sail most of the time, after about 2-4 weeks they should be able to sail OK and not use the motor at all cause they need the fuel to run the Elect. Genset. Hauling 200-300 gals of fuel out to the boat in 5 gal jugs from where they find it can be real interesting too.

The best idea I ran across is to find a real big motorsailer and get to know the crew and go on a trip with them for a week or so. You can't believe how much you'll learn!!

Feel free to contact me if you want to talk thru ideas, etc. I have many years on many kinds of boats from Acapulco to Anchorage & the East Coast to Caribbean and a good part of the South Pacific.

Fair winds & smooth seas,

Apollo Wayne

Ps I love Post Apocalyptical stories.

[michaelzargona]

I took my eye off of this thread for a few days --- thanks everyone!

Ironically I might be off to Hawaii for a writing project...truth is indeed stranger than fiction, but sometimes follows it.

I hope that it's clear by now that they (the characters) are making this trip due to a lack of better options. So they have to make it work. In the story, there have been some significant strides made in battery technology (think graphene arrays, carbon is way cheaper than lithium) so I'm shoehorning a battery run prop with solar panels in there. But part of the drama is that the batteries don't last long (though these latitudes in summer are pretty darn good for recharging via solar).

I do think a few days on a motor sail or true sailboat is in the cards. Of course, whatever I'm on will almost certainly become the boat in the book.

[EngNate]

The inside passage is pretty benign compared to the big ocean but it still gets nasty at times and places - the Georgia Strait, Queen Charlotte Sound, Dixon Entrance, they'll have to cross those. But on Hecate Strait a human judgement could come into play. It could look like a potential choice vs the agonizingly slow progress inside. No experienced boater would use Hecate as a transit route, except direct between the coast and Haida Gwaii. Shallow water, amplified tidal range with very strong currents, wind funnel. It is like the Bearing Sea in bad weather.

A couple other places that can surprise the inexperienced: Haro Strait off Victoria, entrance to Discovery Passage at Cape Mudge, northern part of Johnstone Strait, outflow of Slingsby Channel into Q.C. Sound near Cape Caution. These places turn particularly nasty in certain conditions. Read some overviews of these places in Waggoner's Cruising Guide.

Re: boat breakdown, some local detail that could be useful: In Port Hardy there is a junkyard, owner Boris. There are boats there, and boat junk, besides cars and trucks and heavy equipment. Up in Fitz Hugh Sound, Namu was a big cannery operation with all kinds of machines and equipment and resources to fix and maintain it. For nearly two decades locals salvaged stuff from there.

Up a ways from Namu is Ocean Falls. There they have a hydroelectric plant that is totally on its own isolated grid, serving about 1600 people in Bella Bella and Denny Island. It is run by an engineer on site, not over the internet. It's turbines and generators have been in service since 1913, and quite realistically will be humming away still after the SHTF. To boot, the plant has a large surplus of power vs the present day demand. So, Bella Bella, long a hub on the coast, is also humming away. ...I'm kind of thinking of that inter-galactic bar scene in the original Star Wars. Ocean Falls present day is a ghost town, a dozen or fewer people. Ocean Falls also has a practically unlimited supply of gravity fed good clean water.

Attachment 259462

And there's a shipyard on Denny Island. And there's a wheeler dealer kind of guy nearby with his whole outfit and family on two big barges. He buys and sells all kinds of stuff from China, does everything from sawing lumber to building boats and has a small ship that holds a few 10's of 1000's of litres of fuel. The shipyard sells fuel and stores 100K L or so, and in Bella there's around 400K L of storage. So Bella is an oasis, a place with resources far enough removed from what was once civilization to be a relative paradise. Potential crew issues and turnover here... Further up the coast there are other places with resources but also closer connections to the mass of population and so they are treacherous... Nobody wants to leave Bella Bella because its safe and has the necessities of life in relative abundance, mostly because it has electricity and fuel and isolation.

So.. Cook and his crews got their boats through the inside passage. The voyagers may look to Cook for insights. It would be realistic that if not stolen there would be some fuel on board the boat. A strategy in the narrow channels would be to drift on the tidal current and use the motor only as needed to stay in safe water and get into and out of anchorages and trouble. They'll need to figure out a stout, long dinghy that two can row at once, with two resting. A lot of distance will have to be covered this way. They'll need a wood burning stove, and hand pumps for fresh water, bilges and toilet water, though the boat may have solar panels and serviceable batteries, and an engine with alternator. But they can't afford to use fuel that way, and it's cloudy and rains a lot up here. And charts, by this time nobody uses paper charts so they have to scrounge those or be reliant on electronics that require power. It wouldn't be impractical in this situation to rig an exercise bike to charge the boat's batteries. I read that an average adult can produce about 60 watts on a continuous basis, about as much as a PC monitor needs, give or take. And, getting exercise on board is a sailing issue, though maybe not with rowing duty.

And, they could have a run-in with PSP, a planktonic toxin that collects in shellfish (bivalves) and gets more and more prevalent the further north you go. (see Cook's journals)

You might should read a BC cruising classic The Curve of Time for a flavor of being inexperienced and on one's own journeying on the coast on a boat.

[lestersails]

Originally Posted by boatpoker

I remember the thread ridiculing Robert Redford for that atrociously ridiculous sailing catastrophe movie "All is Lost". I guess he made a few bucks from it tho'

Indeed, the CF crew are not very accepting of the concept of an allegory!