Entering the Bering Sea (Patreon)

Hello all, I hope you're all doing good! We have now made it to False Pass on the Aleutian Islands. From here on it's just northwards, we will enter the Bering Sea to sail to Nome, Alaska, and from there further towards Greenland.

Things are still relaxed because the Northwest Passage itself is still blocked by ice, so we have some time to spend some time in the harbours and anchorages along the way. It seems to be an "average" ice year (in the context of the last 20 years) so far, so the area around Utqiagvik (Pt Barrow) should hopefully be opening up in the end of July. Our plan is still the same, we target to be in Nome around 3rd week of July and go from there depending on the ice conditions. From Nome onwards we will be on a tight schedule to make it to Greenland before the autumn freeze-up.

The last two weeks we've had a mix of very windy sailing (30 knots) but also a lot of motoring. There's been a few sunny days and we've been soaking up those warm days because there won't be that many this summer!

We're still fixing up some things with the boat but the main systems and engine etc are working very well so at the moment everything is going according to the plan! We also have spent a lot of cash on some "hopefully-never-needed" items, like a Jordan series drogue, $3500 worth of engine spares etc etc.

We came to False Pass two days ago to wait out the current gale in that is raging over the area. At some point last night or today our the wind arrow of our electric wind transducer had had enough and flew off. Others who have a working transducer reported 60 knot gusts. We've been marvelling at the fishing boats who still go out to try to fish... The wind funnels through the mountains and creates a venturi effect so it's actually more windy here than on the open ocean.

We really need to spend a lot of time with route planning, boat maintenance etc right now so I have decided that the Northwest Passage video series will be something that I'll mostly edit and release after the Passage itself. It's a challenging trip and we're trying to keep the stress levels as low as possible so we need to lower the workload a bit ;) Even just managing the footage (transferring from multiple cameras onto harddrives and backup drives) is taking quite a bit of time! So I really thank you all for the support here and ask for a bit of understanding that I won't have time to edit the videos "live". I plan to start releasing the videos starting this autumn.

I will post updates here on Patreon during the Passage and we plan to hold at least couple patrons-only live streams, first one either from Bering Sea or Nome. You can also the tracking live here: alluringarctic.com/tracking .