Keeping up with the Joneses just got a little easier. As we radio our stories, coordinates and photos, you can join us steaming through the icy Arctic Sea to Alaska. To receive automatic updates, click the Subscribe button to the right and paste the url into your favorite RSS reader.
We are going to make it! We have successfully worked our way through numerous bands of ice last night and today. We just talked to the Canadian Ice Service and learned the worst is behind us and we should expect minimal ice from here on. We will again run through the night traversing Larsen Sound into Victoria Straight. The day is grey, overcast, foggy with snow flurries. We are all up at the moment and feeling pretty jovial but not wanting to let down our guard until we are really through. We have started a tradition that Sunday means Chocolate Chip Cookies and they are about to appear!
We had a good laugh today. There is a guy, Juan, from Majorca, Spain who’s boat passed us yesterday. We were on the radio hooked in with Peter (our boat-traffic and ice updater) and having a conversation with Juan. He wanted Walt’s email. Walt goes: “alpha queen uncle alpha tango oscar alpha delta dot com.” Silence. Juan replies, “Walter, you sound like hiccups. Say again.” Walt says it again only with the q being Quebec. Juan tried to respond back, repeating the sequence, but accents and trucker lingo prevented it from ever working. By the end of it we were all hysterical. Maybe you had to be there!
Last night it was much darker than we have experienced from 11:30 to 2:30am so we are seeing the days shortening as we head south and August advances. Walt and I were on our shift at sunrise and it rose at our backs for the first time. We are headed home! We saw a huge male polar bear up on a cliff and Pat thinks he was eating bird eggs. He just stopped and watched us motor by, probably wishing we’d hang around a while so he could move beyond eggs. Fat Chance!
You may wonder what it is like to sleep while the boat is running. The waves crash against the side for huge slamming noise effects, throwing Geraldine up an down and side to side for weightlessness effects. So it is like trying to sleep riding a bronco bareback at a rodeo. But if you are tired enough you can do it! Pat has seen Shane levitated in bed with only the cacoon of his blankets restraining him!
Hi to all! We have been traveling south in Peel Sound since 6:30 this morning and have seen rough and flat seas; right now it is flat. Shane and Walt put the new parts on the water maker while the seas were flat and have back flushed the system. The water temperature is 36.7 and Walt wants to wait until it is 40 degrees to try it again. So that is good progress and we are hopeful for a fix.
The ice report was full of warning as the winds are blowing ice down McClintock Channel, and in two days they expect the area ahead to be packed again. We are now running straight through tonight and tomorrow all day on shifts to sneak through as quickly as we can. The skies are grey with patches of fog. We did have a moment of excitement when we were hailed by an Aussie boat coming the opposite direction! We took their picture and they hope to get it published in their home town paper! They man who hailed us was on watch and didn’t want to chat so we don’t know much more, but it was encouraging to see someone made it! That man, Gary, who is sailing solo and had the motor troubles is up and running and is in Gjoa Haven now. Each night we make contact over the ham radio with a man in Cambridge Bay named Peter Semotiuk, and all boaters in the area tune in to and exchange info with him. He has the current ice information too and we get the benefit of hearing from others who are on the water.
I have nut bars just out of the oven and we are having a ham dinner tonight at 9:00 after Shane and Pat wake up. We have seen many seals and birds again but haven’t been close enough to shore to see much else. The land appears pretty flat with mountains only about 650 feet. There are NO trees and haven’t been for three weeks, we think, since Manvers Run, Labrador. There is green coloration however from lichen and low growing plants.
At about midnight we will pass Bellot Strait which is the northern most point of the North American continent. Everything else north is an island. Much love to you!
(73 deg 50.9′ N, 095 deg 08.0’W — Heading South) The water maker parts arrived! [ed. Charlotte reported the details in her comment] After fueling again from the beach this morning, we headed south in snow flurries across Barrow Strait and into Peel Sound. The crossing was pretty good with swells between 6-10 feet with a 25 knot wind. We found an anchorage at 11:00 pm and are all ready for the sack. We saw no ice today and again got encouraging ice reports for an open path through. We saw several seals and birds as we went. Kathy Robertson made three City Team burgees for us so Geraldine again flies colors out front in the bow!
Hi Geraldine fans. I had a chance to record my conversation / interview with the crew today and ask them your questions. It ended up being about an hour long. They were using the phone and internet at the local hotel: South Camp Inn. The staff there were so accommodating and it was nice to have a more solid connection than the satellite phone. I’ve discovered I’m not much of an interviewer, but I hope you enjoy hearing the familiar voices (total download is nearly four megabytes):
