Hey everyone, the final update is that the boat is staying the winter in Homer, AK. I was able to catch a flight out on the morning of the 25th and I got home yesterday, the 26th. It was a long trip, with lots of good memories. Unfortunately due to the weather we couldn't make it all the way to Vancouver through the inland passage but Homer seems like a really nice small Alaskan town with good facilities so it should work well for Nordwind. Other than that, thanks for following me on my trip!

On to Homer

The Seward harbor master determined that Nordwind was too nice and too expensive to take responsibility for protecting it all winter. Then, every other port we talked to said the same thing. As of yesterday afternoon we were going to make for Sitka (across the Gulf of Alaska), either leaving this morning, or waiting another week in Kodiak for more bad weather to pass. Then late yesterday we got word from Homer, that there might be a possibility for wintering over there (much closer). We are about to leave for Homer and evaluate the facilities for wintering.

New Updates: I posted more photos which can be seen here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4329229989465.2183790.1248679119&type=3&l=a96d23d88e The other latest update is that we are not leaving Kodiak in a hurry anymore I guess because of the flooding thats happening in Seward and the terrible weather in general so we're here until around Wednesday. But Alex did talk to the Seward harbormaster and apparently they can haul us out and they are sending Alex the forms to fill out now so if all goes well the end of our trip is 170 miles away. ALSO Rob caught a ride back on a boat with the crew of Time Bandit from the Deadliest Catch and they said we were absolutely crazy doing what we are doing!

Through Hell and High Water

So after 4 days here in Kodiak (the longest I’ve been in one place since being home) we found out yesterday that after all the harbor master’s bs-ing they actually don’t have a spot for us to keep the boat for the winter. That means like it or not we have to push on. The plan is to leave early tomorrow morning (Saturday) and probably make for Seward, or may go for Yakutat Bay. Seward is the next potential port where we could haul out and keep the boat for the winter. They have a large storage yard good marina facilities and there is bus service to Anchorage. Unfortunately they are undergoing some flood problems right now so we haven’t been able to get in touch with the harbor master. If we don’t stop there and go for Yakutat, we’ll be playing with fire so to speak but in reality wind and water because we have a little less than a 48 hr window of clear weather in between ugly looking low pressure systems and Yakutat is about 2 and a half days away… If you go to passageweather.com and click through the map to get to the Gulf of Alaska you can see what we’re dealing with up here. The litte arrows on the map are the wind speed, each little barb is 10 kts, and the color is also related to wind speed. At this point, especially after spending 4 and now 5 days here in Kodiak, we’re all pretty tired and are struggling to get back in to sailing mode. Once you stop somewhere, let yourself relax, and start thinking about ending the trip and going home it’s really tough to shake it off and go again. Kodiak has been cool and really fun but unfortunately we have no choice and tomorrow we dive in to the 20 ft seas and hopefully mild 20-25 kt instead of 40-45 kt winds of the Gulf of Alaska as we try to push on and find a place for Nordwind to call home for the winter.

Catching up in Kodiak

Heyyy everyone! Sorry I haven't been posting anything recently, we've been busy moving around a lot and I got back into cell phone range and got caught up calling people instead of blogging. Anyways, we are now in Kodiak on Kodiak Island. We spent the 15th in Geographic Harbor which was spectacularly beautiful even if it did rain all day...We saw lots of bears walking the beaches and feeding on salmon in the rivers. There were also lots of seals and eagles and other exciting things all nestled into lots of little waterfall filled coves amongst 3-7,000 ft peaks. We met a fisherman named Justin who was stationed there working for a lodge. He was spending 9-12 days living alone on a little fishing boat and the company would radio him at 7am every day telling him whether they were going to be flying in clients that day to go halibut fishing. If the weather was bad they didn't come and he had the day to himself. Needless to say he was pretty excited when we showed up around 9am and anchored next to him. That night the wind picked up and in what is becoming Nordwind fashion, our anchor started to drag. Around 3am we all woke up and after dragging in a few more gusts down off the mountains we pulled anchor and motored in circles around the bay until daylight when we could make it out of the narrow canals, since ya know our radar doesn't work and what not. We then set out across the Shelikof Strait between the Peninsula and Kodiak. It was a beautiful sunny and 40. That being sunny and blowing 40kts. There were steep 15+ foot seas and 30-40kts as we set out on a beam reach motor sailing across. It was another wet and wild ride but at least it was sunny which made for some fun driving. We made it across and into the islands off of Kodiak where we encountered a 6kt current in one strait propelling us along at 12-13kts over ground and there were sea otters everywhere just floating along on their backs alongside us! It was very cool. We pulled in to Kodiak around 5 o'clock local time and got a spot alongside the dock amongst all the fishing boats. Yesterday I spent the whole day walking around, I went all through town and then a couple miles out of town to Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park and hiked around there for a few hours. My legs are killing me. Franco and I were joking today about how the most hiking we've done is from our cabin to the doghouse, and then maybe the long trek from the doghouse to the bow...Anyways Abercrombie was very cool and very beautiful. It was a navy base in WWII as a part of the Aelutian campaign, which honestly I didn't even know existed. Apparently Dutch Harbor got bombed by the Japanese? I should probably learn a little more history. Now the park is all forest and lots and lots of rasberry bushes. Actually most of the island is lots of rasberry bushes and it's peak season right now...it's been a delicious few days. On to the more important matters at hand, there is an increasingly good chance that this may be the end of our trip. We have been looking at the weather for crossing the Gulf of Alaska and to say that it's bad would be an understatement. It's terrifying. 30-40kts with 50-60 predicted in some places and 20ft seas for the next week with maybe 1 day inbetween low pressure systems that are stacked up across the Pacific. This weather, on top of the increasing list of repairs necessary for Nordwind, is giving Alex more and more reason to look at leaving the boat here for the winter. There are facilities here for most of the repairs we need; all of which could be started on now instead of in 3 weeks. We also don't have a good anchor and chain that would allow us to weather out these storms in a random bay if we do continue on. Plus, Hans' plan for next summer is to cruise Alaska, and what better place to start from than Kodiak? We are hoping to get some more weather information tonight or tomorrow, and tomorrow morning we also confirm if there will definitely be a slip for the boat for the winter. So for now we are on hold. While it would be a bummer to miss the inland passage and Alaska panhandle down to Vancouver, I think we are all pretty exhausted at this point and floating around the idea of just stopping here is pretty appealing to all of us.

Unimak, Nagai, Alaska Peninsula

So to catch everyone up to speed, we spent a couple of days in Dutch Harbor for some much needed R&R which basically just entailed some time on land being real people after 2 weeks straight cooped up in boat. The agent lady who I talked (complained) a little bit about in one of my last posts gave us her Chevy Silverado pickup while we were there, for which I immediately asserted myself as primary driver. It was so nice just being able to drive around, even if there were only about 3 roads, after spending 2 months sailing. All in all Dutch Harbor was great. From the stunning beauty of the island itself which I described in the last post, to the wildlife of bald and golden eagles and the massive salmon run going up the river right through the center of town. It was also great for me to be back in America. There is something very comforting about driving a big gas guzzling pickup truck and knowing what to expect when you walk into a big American grocery store after shopping in mom and pop type shops for the entire trip. Anyway we are now a few days back on our way and we expect to be in Geographic Harbor on the Alaskan Peninsula across from Kodiak on the morning of the 15th. We've had smooth fast sailing so far from Dutch with good wind from behind we've been doing around 8 kts with only a few light patches to motor through. Since this trip is anything but uneventful, the latest development for yacht Nordwind is that our radar isn't really working. And by not really working I mean it doesn't see the massive 5,000 ft. mountains rising out of the water 5 miles away from us let alone little things like 300m cargo boats. We're working on it and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but hopefully either we can fix it or someone in Kodiak can. Hopefully my next post will be of some beary merry tales of bears slapping salmon out of the air as we watch them fish straight out of National Geographic! From a very safe distance of course…Also the AIS tracker on marinetraffic.com should be working now that we´re back near civilization, there is a link to it on the left hand side of the blog!

New Photos up! http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4329231469502.2183791.1248679119&type=1&l=be1fa17918

Paying our dues

That is basically the best way we can reason what we did for the past 2 weeks, we paid our dues. We spent a month and half going up to and through the Northwest Passage, and we saw some amazing sights. We encountered a lot of icebergs, some pack ice, and we had our own problems along the way, but it was nothing we couldn’t overcome thanks to Alex’s careful planning. The price for all this relatively easy going was 2 weeks of cold, bleak, grey sailing around Northern Alaska with a 40-50kt low pressure system built in for good measure. We paid the price and were greeted with the reward on our last few miles in to Dutch Harbor today. I don’t think any of us really knew what to expect, but whatever it was, what we got blew us away. Dutch Harbor and all of the Aleutian Islands, from what I can tell, are beautiful. Lush green volcanic mountains rising straight out of the sea up to jagged and occasionally snow capped peaks. It’s spectacular. We were also greeted with the mesmerizing sight of what must have been well over one hundred humpback whales right outside of Dutch Harbor. As we approached, the sun broke through the clouds, the forecasted 25kts disappeared down to a glassy calm and all of a sudden whales began surfacing everywhere. I mean literally every direction you looked there were a dozen blow spouts and whale’s tails high in the air as they continuously dove back down. We were all spinning in circles on deck trying not to miss the next whale breaching in gigantic smack back into the water. This went on for at least the last hour of our trip if not the last two and, don’t forget, this was all happening with the spectacular sunlit mountainous backdrop…we were blown away. We paid our dues and were justly rewarded, after 2 weeks at sea, with our first real view of what Alaska is. And with fair assurances I’m going to say that Alaska is and is going to keep being, breathtaking. We’re hoping to leave Dutch Harbor Wednesday morning making our way up the southern side of the Aleutian Islands and the Alaskan Peninsula. The plan is to stop in Geographic Bay, where apparently bears play volleyball with salmon in the rivers, then continue on for a quick stop in Kodiak before making for the Alaskan panhandle and the Inland Passage to Vancouver.

170 to Dutch

56 deg 43'.50N 167 deg 01'.30W COG 174 SOG 7.5kts temp 9.1C Nothing much to report out here, we're chugging along motor sailing our way to Dutch Harbor and right now it looks like we'll be getting in Sunday night which will put us exactly 2 weeks out of Cambridge Bay. We're racing to beat a low pressure system moving into the Bering Sea, but it looks like the last bit of the trip tomorrow is going to be against strong head winds. The breeze is light right now though so we're making the best of it. Hopefully there will be good internet connection in Dutch Harbor and I'll be able to get some more pictures up! I take back the nothing happening, we just had Orcas surface next to the boat! They were amazing!

We made it!...well kind of

Current position 63 deg 53'.71N 168 deg 25'.24W COG 176 SOG 7.0Kts. Yesterday we made it through the Bering Strait into the Bering Sea and out of the Northwest Passage! We celebrated with a bottle of champagne and made lots of toasts out under the cold overcast sky to all our successes. We were only delayed by ice once in the whole passage and had very few bad storms so we consider it a pretty big success! We also have gotten lucky and a good weather window looks to have opened up for us as we make our way down the Alaskan coast so we are still headed straight for Dutch Harbor and we are currently about 600 miles away. So while we celebrated the end to a major, and very important, section to this trip there is still a good chunk to go over the next few weeks, however we expect to be in Vancouver by the end of the month. The one main foreseeable problem for these next legs is dealing with the United States and all the lovely bureaucratic control. Alex has spent more time filling out forms and going back and forth with the "agent" we had to hire as a liaison for us than I thought possible. He has been dealing with pilot exemptions for sailing in Alaska(necessary for any boat over 70ft apparently), figuring out which port of entry we were going to stop in first, if we were allowed to stop in other places if we needed to avoid bad weather before we officially checked in to the country, then figuring out which bays we were allowed to anchor in afterwards and if we were allowed to go ashore without a permit because it might be national park land. It's been a massive headache all around and a big slap in the face from the laid back style of Greenland and Canada...not to mention this "agent" charges like a lawyer for every unhelpful answer they give us. As an example, one piece of paid advice we received was to make sure we anchored on the downwind or "leeward" side of an island...Needless to say I've been getting a lot of backlash from the rest of the crew in regards to my country's workings.

Surfin' in the USA

So we've had one hell of a wild ride for the past 24 hours. That great wind from behind that I mentioned turned out to be courtesy of a massive low pressure system moving up through the Bering Sea. The 25kts that we were loving yesterday quickly escalated to 35-40 kts with a max gusts to 50 coming from basically straight behind us along with 12-15ft seas. We reduced sail eventually all the way down to just the stay sail and the mizzen with a reef in and we were still doing 9-10 kts and more when surfing. Rob holds the speed record at 17 kts down a wave during the night. Oh I forgot to mention we also stopped using our autopilot yesterday evening because it was working so hard for so long that we didn't want to risk breaking it. The low pressure system is moving fast to the North so the breeze has clocked around to the east but is forecasted to move back around behind us all the way to the Northwest and build back to 25kts by tomorrow when we are going through the Bering Strait. Apparently there is another low pressure system coming down off of Russia into the Bering Sea right after this one so once we make it through the Strait we are going to weigh our options for stopping and waiting for better weather or pressing on. We are being very safe with the bad weather and everything is going well other than the fact that we and the whole boat in general are very wet. Franco had a wave crash through the vent in his cabin last night on to his bunk...Hopefully we can get our diesel heater fired back up, although she doesn't like the bad weather, and get the boat dried out a bit and hopefully this next low pressure system is manageable and we can press on to Dutch Harbor. One more thing I have to say is that sailing this boat under minimal minimal sail seems wild in 35-40 kts of wind and pretty big seas and we're only doing 8-12 kts on average. I have a whole new level of respect for the guys in the Volvo Ocean Race who do this going at 25 kts day in and day out on a stripped bare race boat. Now that has to be a wild ride.

It's all downhill from here!

We're finally turning south! We just rounded Point Barrow and gave a toast to the North. Our current position is 71 deg 38'.96N 157 deg 18'.42W COG 266 deg SOG 7.0kts Temp 3.3 deg C So I lied a little, we're actually working a little bit farther west before gybing south but mentally we've all already made the turn. We're one week out of Cambridge Bay and we're almost done with the Northwest Passage. Today we celebrate heading south but we have a few more big celebrations ahead of us too. One for getting to the Bering Strait, one for making into the Pacific, and one for leaving the Arctic Circle. According to Amundsen, and our group consensus, the Northwest Passage officially ends when we make it through the Bering Strait and into the Pacific, making it all the way from the Atlantic via a route around the top of North America. We've had great wind for the past couple days and a great forecast that has this NE wind we're in sticking around for another couple of days at around 20-25kts. This breeze has and will continue to allow us to make around 7-8kts of boat speed. Up until now we've been able to head straight along the rhumb line which has been awesome, but we'll have to wait and see what kind of angles we get after we gybe in a few hours. The only downside to this breeze is that it got really freaking cold again with the wind coming off the ice cap and it's back down to around 3 degrees C and it was snowing earlier. We're looking forward to the palm trees and pina coladas in the pacific...they have those in Alaska right? Anyway we're all just kind of buckled down in routine here now that we're well into the longest ocean passage of our trip. We have another 1200ish miles to go so we're figuring on another week to 10 days before we see Dutch Harbor. Hopefully we can keep coming up with good meal ideas because good food always makes for good spirits. Seeing as it's Sunday today Alex had me make the two of us a full English breakfast during our morning watch with eggs, fresh bread, bacon, baked beans and tomato slices (we don't have any breakfast sausage or hash unfortunately)and right now he's working on dinner which I believe is some kind of fridge vegetable soup... i.e. soup made with whatever vegetables are in the fridge...It'll be warm at least...and hopefully delicious. Other than that there's not much to report from the Nordwind, everything is running smoothly and hopefully it'll stay that way. Actually there is one more point I've been meaning to bring up and that is a very odd eating habit that leaves me vastly outnumbered as the only American on a European cultured boat. This is the matter of cookies, or biscuits as they call them. For me a cookie is a dessert, you have it after lunch or dinner or if you're sneaky maybe you grab one as a mid afternoon snack. Not Europeans or in this case Argentines though, nope for them cookies are for breakfast. Every day its biscuits with their tea/coffee and I'm talking anything from gingersnaps to digestives(some wierd euro cookie) to Oreos. In exchange for eating cookies for breakfast, fruit is a more typical desert option; a banana with caramel or honey or mixed fruit in a bowl with some heavy cream. It seems completely backwards to me, I'm much more inclined to grab a banana, apple or peach in the morning than a pack of Oreos but I guess who am I to judge...plus what kid doesn't secretly love the idea of cookies for breakfast.

Proving Geometry Wrong

Current position: 70 deg. 58'.31N 138 deg. 40'.81W. Now I was always taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It always made sense and I never had any reason to doubt it. I have now learned that like all rules, there is an exception to this one as well. As we left Amundsen Gulf and entered the Beaufort Sea we started heading in a straight line on our chart plotting software, almost due west, towards Point Barrow at the top of Alaska. After a little while we plugged in a way point off of Point Barrow to make it easier to see our course. It turns out that the shortest distance for us to get to Point Barrow is actually an arc to the North. We are still so high up on the globe that the shorter distance is more over the top, but of course you can't see that on a flat chart. I have another point to bring up about being so far on top of the globe as well. Yesterday we had a southerly breeze that seemed so warm (11-12 deg C) and I started to say "oh well that makes sense, southerly breeze off the land should be warmer..." What's south of us is Northern Canada and Alaska...somehow it's still hard to accept that fact. But now we are in a 20-25 kt Northerly that's coming off the Polar Icecap and it's back down to around 5 deg. C so I guess everything has to be taken in perspective. Right now we are 21 miles from the Alaska/Canadian line doing about 7 kts so by the end of my watch we will be back in the good ol' US of A! It'll be good to be back in America for a bit. In a copy of Time Magazine that one of Hans' friends left on the boat there was a little blip about the Walmart on Kodiak Island...I wonder if I can get a dunkin donuts iced coffee and a big mac when we get to Dutch Harbor? I probably shouldn't joke about that because I probably can.