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.