Voyage Details
3 friends and I are attempting to sail from near Seattle to Boston May-Oct 2023. Almost 10,000 nm, the route passes from Anacortes, WA northward along the western coasts of British Columbia and Alaska stopping at several locations, dodging thousands of floating logs, and timing the tides through the narrows. Probably the first open water segment, we'll cross the Gulf of Alaska, stopping at Kodiak, through the Aleutian Islands near Dutch Harbor/Unalaska into the Bering Sea, above the Arctic Circle towards Nome, into the Chukchi Sea and along the northern coast of Alaska. We will sail the Beaufort Sea to Point Barrow and await the sea ice to reveal a path. We'll stop at Tuktoyaktuk and then enter the Amundsen Gulf, cross Coronation Gulf, and await the sea ice to break up at Cambridge Bay in Nunavut. When "ice-free," we will sail Queen Maud Gulf (maybe via Gjoa Haven) into Larsen Sound. Ice-free is a relative term; there will be plenty of icebergs, bergy bits, and growlers. We hope to take the Bellot Strait and leave a bottle of Tito's Handmade Vodka from San Antonio, Texas, at the ruins of Fort Ross for the next party to arrive there. We will sail into Lancaster Sound and round the northern tip of Baffin Island into Baffin Bay, probably calling on Pond Inlet. Sailing southward below the Arctic Circle along Labrador through the Davis Strait, we hope to reach the North Atlantic Ocean by rounding Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The crew will celebrate in Boston, MA, in late September or early October, if all goes well. Our nominal ETA is 1 Oct. Everyone is invited to the party!
Departure is (was!) 10 May (see photos). The 1984 Nauticat 43 staysail-rigged ketch, s/y Tango, was built for high latitude sailing in Finland. The owner, Skip Peters, has tens of thousands of miles of sailing experience. Another crew, JT More, sails but has much more wilderness experience as a whitewater rafting guide. He's trained in wilderness first aid. Our youngest crew member, Jan Wysny, is the brother of our German foreign exchange student years ago, and a recent engineering grad from Cologne with some sailing experience.
We are taking all reasonable precautions. We are already in contact with the Canadian Search & Rescue folks. They will track our AIS signals. You can, too, at MarineTraffic.com but the free data will be a few days old. I think it costs $1 to get the current data, so most folks are going to rely on the Garmin URL above for free tracking location info. We have med-evac insurance, too, but hope never to use it.
We hope to see narwhales and orcas, seals and walruses, eagles and gulls, polar bears and reindeer as well as meet many locals to learn their stories. We will carry bear spray, a shotgun, and a rifle to guard against bears.
We have Star Link aboard and hope to blog but that will be at anchor only. Other crew will have their preferences. I have a Garmin Mini 2 and will update GPS locations every hour or so at https://share.garmin.com/
P.S. Tango will be for sale in Boston. If any of you want to do the Northwest Passage east-west, then start planning.
