Two Weeks Away

This has been an unbelievably busy spring for Nick and I. I have been consumed with finishing up my last quarter at school and all the little details of graduating. Nick spent the month of April working at Mt. Rainier with pre-season preparations and then returned to Bellingham to dive straight into trip preparations. This has been a full time job for Nick for the last month and a half. I think he deserves a degree too (B.S. in Expedition Logistics?). Nick has also been spending a lot of time customizing his Pygmy kayak, see photos below.

We have been working and living in a friends finished barn in Ferndale. It's about a 20 minute drive to Bellingham, but we have more space than we need and Nick is able to work on his boat in the attached garage. We have both been pouring over all of the available resources that cover this trip, charts, guides, trip accounts, etc. We have also purchased an embarrassingly large amount of gear , but justify it with the thought that this will be our life for the next three months, and that we want to be comfortable with good quality gear. Nick has worked magic with some of the techie stuff, constructing a deck mounted solar panel that will charge a battery pack or directly to our electronics: VHF radios,

camera batteries, i-pod, headlamps, etc. We have also been working on our food resupplies. It was quite intimidating at first, trying to plan food for a hundred days, but we then figured out that we could just plan for about 6 fifteen day trips. That felt manageable. And of course there are all the little itty bitty details. Where are we going to sleep when we arrive on the ferry in Juneau at 1am? We can't leave our boats. How much toilet paper should we bring? Do we need a pruning saw? Can we eat mashed potatoes for three out of ten dinners? All questions that will soon be strikingly clear.

We hope to continue to make posting through the trip. We are currently following one gentleman's blog who is about a month ahead of us and paddling in the opposite direction. Otherwise we will do our best to send word along through various other means.