Hawai'i to Alaska: 23 Days, 23 Pictures

Day 1
Latitude 21N: in summer clothes, sailing past the tropical island of O'ahu

Day 2
Preventing potential chafe

Day 3
This pair of seabirds spent the night on our bow

Day 4
Gorgeous trade winds sailing!

Day 5
Hard to capture a photo at night,
but sailing in the dark is a special part of passage making

Day 6
A lovely way to pass the time

Day 7
One of my favorite spots:
Standing/leaning rather than sitting,
I can see out over the bow
while letting Jeeves (our windvane steering system)
handle the helm

Day 8
Sailing slowly in fog with a light breeze

Day 9
A rare treasure!
We spotted and snagged a glass ball,
an old fishing float from Japan

Day 10
Our route in red, versus the direction we were able to sail.
Sometimes you can go where you want,
sometimes you can't.
(Sailing. Life.)

Day 11
Why two fog photos? Because we encountered quite a bit of fog.
Here we're ghosting (barely moving), on a different tack than before.

Day 12
We left Honolulu with 25 hash marks on the board,
the number of days we expected the voyage to take.
Every day we erased one mark,
and made note of the weather forecast we received via radio.
When we arrived, we still had 2 hash marks to go!

Day 13
Celebrating the half-way point

Day 14
Preparing for the approaching low's winds
by moving the running back stay to the other side of the boat

Day 15
And we did get slammed for a few days!
Sorry, no outside photos of waves smashing over the boat in 35 knot winds;
but here's one looking up through a cabin hatch. 

Day 16

Day 17
Electronics are great,
but we have backups for everything--
including marking our positions on a paper chart.
(Most charts fit on the chart table,
but not the one covering this long passage.)

Day 18
The barometer is an important weather tool.
This large increase did (thankfully) foretell
an improvement the next day.

Day 19
Art took advantage of the weather break
to spread caulk thickly over the places he had neatly done
 before we left, but which hadn't withstood the days of
solidly slamming waves

Day 20
Latitude 54N (and counting): much colder than the first photo!
It didn't help that the heater stopped working;
we were cold all the time.

Day 21
We had some great 24-hour runs toward the end of the passage.
(Those are clouds on the horizon, not land.)

Day 22
This is an odd photo, but it shows the location of the sun at noon:
not anywhere near overhead, but south behind the stern.
One reason we wanted to come so far north was to experience extreme sunlight.

Day 23
At rest among the fishing vessels in Sitka Harbor, after putting more than 2800 miles under the keel.
We are back in the land of eagles and endless forests (and rain).