Having woken up to yet another rainy day we are resolved to move ourselves south to the sun and warmth as rapidly as prudent. This means one stop on the outside of Dall, and then a straight shot to Port Hardy on the top of Vancouver Island – weather permitting, of course.

Then we heard a couple of fishing boats talking about Craig. "Where’s that?" we wondered. After checking a little further we found Craig to be a working Alaskan town, the largest on Prince of Wales Island, home to 2000 locals with no tourist facilities. Perfect.

All of the local fishing boats are out today, both trollers and seiners. There is also a large swell running in from the Gulf of Alaska, 6 to 10 feet (1.8 to 3m). This guy was practically hidden every few seconds as he dropped into the troughs.

The combination of this group of trollers and big swells present an excellent opportunity to practice with our radar. In the image above, sea and rain clutter are turned off. Gain is turned up to 50 – where we leave it offshore (this is too high for inshore work where there are surrounding targets). Notice the almost solid return from the sea clutter within a quarter of a mile of the boat. ARPA vectors are set to true here, to show us the actual courses of these targets.

All of the settings remain the same here, except that auto sea clutter is increased to a setting of 70. This eliminates all sea clutter close in, but maintains these small fishing boats in the ground swell. Notice that echo averaging (EAV) is also turned on to its first setting. This really helps pull out targets from sea clutter.

The toughest target to define here is the small breaking rock, above the pen being used as a pointer. With these settings we can still see this rock, so we make a note of what these are in the radar section of our log book for future reference.

Here’s another experiment. We normally have our pulse length set to the minimum available. However, lengthening pulse length will make small targets appear larger. The problem is that this also increase the size of the return from wave clutter. The photo above has all the same settings as before, except we’ve gone from S2 (short 2) on pulse length to M1 (medium 1). The targets are indeed larger and easier to see. But then there is a lot more sea clutter. With calmer seas we would probably use a longer pulse length offshore. But close in, with more targets, we stay with the shortest pulse lengths available.

Immediately after deciding to head towards Craig, the gods gave us a message of approval – in the form of dry air with a hint of sunshine.

Approaching Ariaga Channel, to the north of Noyes Island, we encountered a group of seiners and trollers working a salmon opening. The sea has softened, so we’ve dropped sea clutter control from 70 to 50. Note the numerous targets. The question now is what are these guys doing, and how are we going to thread our way through them?

Here is what the fleet looks like with ARPA turned on and set to relative, where the projected courses are relative to our own. The boats are moving slowly, so they are all showing an opposite relative course to our 11.5 knots.

The next step is to check what direction they are really heading, which we do by switching ARPA vectors from relative to true. We often switch back to keep situational awareness (this is done with a simple mouse click on the ARPA vector box on the computer screen – or by pressing the Vector key on the keyboard).

Speaking of awareness, we’ve been mentioning the large anchors most local boats carry.

There are four boat hulls and one barge ashore in this photo, across the channel from where we are anchored. We’re not sure of the story behind this, but it must have been a good blow. We normally set our anchor hard under power – after seeing these remnants on the beach, we gave the hook a couple hundred extra RPM.