Since the last update we have been continuously busy getting our boat ready for the spring trip to Alaska, Russia and Japan. Seattle is a great town but ….it is cold!! We drove to California to spend Christmas with Carol’s Dad and we barely made it out of town and through the mountains of Oregon before the snow came. I should also mention that they do not get much snow in Seattle and when they do, the town just shuts down. I am not talking about snow in feet, either! Two inches is enough to create hysteria there! Back in New England, maybe 3 feet would cause problems.
We are planning to depart Seattle around May 1 and do an abbreviated trip through Canada, meeting as a group in Alaska around the second week in June. Fuel and dockage looks pretty good so far until we get to Adak Island, in the Aleutians, where after that, civilisation ends. It is about 500 miles from there to a harbor in Attu, the last of the Aleutians and then another 500 miles or so to Kamchatka, Siberia where we can get fuel and dockage. We are dealing with an agent (a Russian national) who is making all of the arrangements for us for fuel and dockage…..and it aint cheap!! We still do not have any arrangements for slips in Japan but Ken is working on that and we may end up getting an agent for that too.
We have finished a great deal of the work on the boat electronically and mechanically, but still have the new generator to be installed, rebedding of windows, gaskets etc, new fuel hoses, hydraulic hoses and a host of other things that, as we have learned from our cruising outside the US, are difficult to have done when traveling abroad.
We also have a new device called SPOT. It is a transmitter that transmits your position every twenty minutes or so to a satellite. Before we leave, we will email and post here the website that you need to go to that will show our position on a map any time of day. It also has a kind of “911” service for the high seas and supposedly they will fund up to $150,000 for a search and rescue. I hope we don’t need to test it out!
Update
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T Swain
8 Jan 2009Happy New Year. I am looking forward to the start of the next stage of your grand adventure. From the sound of what you are doing to Seabird you will be steaming to Japan on a new vessel.
Jim Evans
11 Jan 2009I look forward to following your adventures with the trip to Japan! I boat out of Valdez AK in the summer and was wondering if your plans include any parts of Prince William Sound? I follow Ken’s site daily and get the impression that you will be cutting across to the Aleutians and missing Valdez, Seward Etc…
Again, look forward to following your updates!
Thanks, Jim E.
Chuck
14 Jan 2009Who did the repair work in Seattle?