As my north coast journey approached I looked to the weather forecast of the Sonoma Coast, one weather phenomenon dominated: rain.

I wasn’t going to let this dampen my field sketching mojo. I planned to sketch at Fort Ross, no matter the weather. Call me the postal worker of sketching! Corvids don’t mind the rain.

I had everything I needed for wet weather: rain jacket and pants, umbrella, and a dry bag for my journals.

Fort Ross is one of those coastal sketching touchstones that I have returned to again and again. This was the first time I had visited with 100% humidity.

Now you can’t have watercolor, as the name implies, without water. But a deluge of rain is a bit too much water. And applying ink to damp paper will cause the ink to run or smudge which can become part of the story of the final sketch.

Visiting Fort Ross on a cold, rainy, and windy day gave a me a first hand experience of what it must have been like to spend the winter at the fort. It was dark in the houses even in the middle of the day. No electricity, no television, no smartphones, and no emojis. Cabin fever anyone?

The plus side is that I had the fort all to myself!

I knew the perspective I wanted to sketch from: along the barricade looking west toward the guard tower. Seems perfectly fine while you’re planning in your cozy abode; far harder to do in the realities of rain and wind.

I had my umbrella to keep the rain off my journal. Well my umbrella was absolutely useless in these fierce coastal gusts. Trying to concentrate on my sketching while attempting to prevent my umbrella from launching into the local watershed was a struggle.

I had to abort the sketch without actually committing pen to paper. It was time to find shelter from the wind and the rain and commit a sketch to my journal.

I chose as my sketching blind, the second story of the Kuskov House. Great view, dry, and less chilly.