Last minute plans! Monday, July 02, 2007

So we’re nearly ready to go! We leave the San Juan islands tomorrow morning on the 7am red eye ferry! Tonight Body Boat Blade hosted a farewell BBQ which was fun & I gave a talk about some of my adventures. Shawna has designed some great t-shirts about the trip which her and Leon are sporting here. We’re selling the t-shirts to help pay for some of our food on the trips & also to raise money for the Sea Doc society who work to preserve the marine environment. If anyone wants to buy one then please contact Body Boat Blade – there are only a limited number ( 60 ). Email info@bodyboatblade.com

It will take us 3 days to get to Haida Gwaii. Tomorrow we drive up to Port Hardy at the northern end of Vancouver Island. On Tuesday we get the ferry from there to Prince Rupert in mainland Canada, then on Wednesday we take a ferry from Prince Rupert to Skidgate in Haida Gwaii. On Thursday we need to take an orientation to make sure we know how behave in the national park of Gwaii Haanas, then we’ll finally start paddling on either Thursday or Friday!

We have hired a satellite phone ( generously paid for by Kokatat – thank you very much!) so we hope to do daily website updates on this blog. We’ll phone Mike DuPas from Orcas island and he’ll kindly write up our daily report for us. He’ll show a google map of our position and hopefully the odd photo of the locations, as we probably won’t be able to email photos back for a while.


So here are a few brief details of the plan! We intend to circumnavigate the 2 main islands in a figure of eight, starting with Graham island in the north. We’ll head up the more sheltered east coast and then round the exposed west coast in a counter clockwise direction. We’ll cross back through the strait between Graham and Moresby island, stop in Queen Charlotte City to resupply with food and charge camera batteries before heading around Moresby island in a clockwise direction. Gwaii Haanas Park on Moresby will be the highlight of the trip so we’ve saving the best for last! Paddling on the more sheltered east coasts first will be a good warm up! So, I’m excited for the trip. It’s nearly midnight as I write this and a small group of us are still up chatting. The wake up call is at 5am – I wonder how much more of this whisky we’re going to get through!!?