Wow, today is day 50 of our Aleutians journey. To celebrate our half century, we endured a short battle into a nasty, gusty headwind, progressing just 6 miles before deciding our time would be better spent resting up on a beach waiting for less tiring weather. As we pulled up onto a rare brown sand beach, our total mileage notched up above 600 nautical miles which means we are approaching half way to Homer. That puts Sarah on target to win the sweepstakes on how long it will take us- she said 100 days, I reckoned 83. But with luck we’ll have less days off due to weather now we’ve nearly completed the Aleutian Islands part. We’ve had 21 days off so far, often while waiting for good weather for a crossing. But just 3 more crossings now lie between us and the Alaskan peninsula so maybe we’ll speed up a bit?

We chose the east end of our beach to set up camp as the other side was occupied with the great brown hulks of 11 sea lions, sprawled out on the sand. They were oblivious to us as we made a fire and cooked our sweet potatoes and onions in the coals. Occasionally one would sit up and growl at the others or have a scratch of his nose with a long flipper but mostly they would just lie and snooze. Later we crept up above them in the grass and watched them and took photos. I looked through binoculars and could see every whisker and every raw red scar on their blubbery bodies. I think they were all big males so perhaps they are too young, too old or too ugly to have a harem of women on a rock somewhere?

We’d hoped to reach Aiktak island less than 15 miles from here as 2 biologists are working there and have invited us to call in and stay at their “puffin palace”. Today’s wind was creating 2 foot white caps in a bay just a mile wide so we soon decided that crossing a 3 mile wide pass in strong currents with a fetch of several hundred miles probably wasn’t a great idea. Once we abandoned that objective it was an easy choice to stop at the next possible campsite. It’s likely we’ll have a day off tomorrow in more strong winds and hopefully get to Aiktak on Thursday. Hopefully we’ll manage to nail our biggest remaining crossing to Unimak island on Friday – if the forecast stays similar.

For now I’m looking forward to reading, eating and exploring tomorrow.