We have spent the last three months working on Skylark to get her ready for the next big adventure. It has been almost 2 years since we arrived home in Vancouver after our 7-year Caribbean cruise, and now it is time to explore another part of the world..
We took advantage of our area’s 14-ft tide range and put Skylark on the tide grid at our club in downtown Vancouver, changing the zincs, checking the seacocks and cutlass bearings, and determining that the bottom paint was good for another year. This saved us the cost of a haulout at the boatyard.
We did a one-week shakedown cruise to Victoria in order to ensure that all systems were go and to deliver Cliff to the 50th anniversary reunion of his Oak Bay High School class of '58. We had a great trip and felt good about the condition of the boat.
Thanks to the encouragement of our friends Juliet and David Fosh (Reflections of Hayling),who took this trip three or four years ago, kindly leaving us all their charts and guide books, we have decided to do one more relatively big cruise on Skylark. We are scheduling three months for a trip to Juneau, Alaska. We've packed lots of jeans, sweaters, sweatshirts, and foulies, but somewhere at the bottom of the pile are a couple of pairs of shorts and T shirts in case we get lucky. And we do have bathing suits on board so we can take advantage of the isolated hot springs along the way. We have also agreed that, if we don’t see the sun for weeks on end, we will happily turn, head for home, and go to Alaska some other time ..... on a cruise ship.
We will be out of cell phone range for much of the trip. We sold our Globalstar satellite phone last year and we don’t have SSB, so communication with our family and friends will be a challenge. Don’t expect that this blog will arrive on your computer on a daily basis. Since there are not many towns, the internet cafes will be few and far between.
To keep family abreast of our whereabouts, and to provide some security, we have invested in a device called “SPOT” www.findmespot.com . It is a palm-sized unit that communicates directly with a satellite and allows us to send our location (or distress signal) without depending on cell phone service. The recipient can click a link on his computer and see exactly where we are on Google Earth.
So sit back, relax, and travel along with us, NORTH TO ALASKA!
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