“It was almost standing waves, and we were hobby horsing. The bow was going whoosh, and we were going nowhere,” says Kevin Starnes, 62. He’s describing a scene from an early spring cruise in the San Juan Islands on his 38-foot double-ender Arningali, which is what the Inuit called a rare female narwhal with a tusk. Sitting with his wife Sally, 55, in the boat’s cherry-wood-trimmed salon that’s lavishly decorated with whimsical art from around the globe, he speaks in a quiet voice while outside the wind howls through the rig. “We couldn’t get back, because it would swirl us around and down into the rocks.”
Kevin recalls what it felt like to buck the roiling waters of Cattle Pass between the southern tips of San Juan and Lopez islands, where obstacles like Deadman Island and Mummy Rock could rip apart Arningali’s massive fiberglass hull. It felt like a descent into the Maelstrom as described by Edgar Allan Poe, a dicey moment that would either become a memory to be shared with grandkids, or a Mayday call.
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