S/V TRAVERSAY III achieves a world circumnavigation - KUDOS!!!

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Getting There ... (http://traversayiii.blogspot.com/2013/10/getting-there.html)

We're on our last major passage for this season. Traversay seems to know this and is bounding along at a good pace under shortened sail. I'm quite excited about arriving at the coast and the 4-hr watches seem very long. Instead of doing anything worth-while I'm obsessively working on Sudoku puzzles. I often re-check the row of x's marching towards Langara Island. I then realize that I'm not imagining it - this endless NWP trip is nearly over (or at least, the scary bits!)

We left the Alaska Peninsula in a great hurry ... I put on a scopalomine patch but it really didn't work too well. So for the first 2 days I made myself chicken broth and rice ... these fill your stomach and yet are bland enough to keep seasickness at bay. Actually, we're on "Shower Tack" (you have to look back a few months to find OUR definition). Although we undoubtedly need it, we're loath to try having a shower as we'd be a mass of bruises in this rocky sea. Being on S.T. means that it's nearly impossible to work in the galley. Everything stored away plus the food itself while you're preparing it wants to jump a few feet to port every time a big wave hits. So we're keeping food prep as simple as possible. I couldn't face fish the last few days, so we've had chicken pesto pasta every night. Today Larry's going to attempt a fish dish (and I'll attempt to eat it).

As far as our food supplies go, my calculations were fairly good. We've really made huge inroads into the tinned food lockers. Only the things we don't want to eat are left (lots of tomatoes with olives in them - somehow the olives are getting on my nerves because they overpower the taste of every dish rendering all the same!) There's lots of tinned fruit - that's because we've been able to find tinned mandarins in every grocery we've visited. Our unwanted leftovers will go to the Food Bank in Victoria.

We have altogether too much frozen spinach and beans. We discovered that in all of the North fresh vegetables are available so we've eaten them in preference.

I'm still missing some items that didn't make it to King Cave ... fresh garlic, capers and green Thai curry paste. But these form part of OUR individual "likes" and are probably less likely to form a part of the diet of the King Cove population.

Our joy at making way towards the East was blemished when we noticed an odd, erratic bumping noise under the hull. We've decided that we probably ran into some more free-floating fishing gear away out on the Gulf. So IF the wind dies, Larry will have to go under in dive gear and try to remove it ... or if the fine winds continue, we'll anchor in a deserted spot at Langara I. and he'll operate there. We really can't start the engine and risk more damage to our newly installed engine parts. I suppose even isolated Alaska is now as prone to these menaces as the more crowded South coast of England. We've come to dislike crab-pots and Larry has sworn off shellfish as a result.

In good news, we seem to have crossed our track (from earlier trips to Alaska in 2002 and 2003) so we have navigated around the world.

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At 16/10/2013 15:31 (utc) our position was 54°15.72'N 143°32.81'W