Advertisement
Published: April 21st 2006
Steph outfitting the Greenlander
Trying to answer the eternal question of "why don't they make expedition boats for small women?", but solving the problem with lots of outfitting foam and a can of bonding glue.
Greetings, and welcome to the madness that is expedition planning! This trip has been two long years in the making, but with a mere 47 days until we launch our kayaks in Skagway, Alaska, we are coming down to the proverbial wire with working out all of the ever-so-complicated logistics of making this trip happen.
Our apartment has been a bit of a mess these days (for those of you who have visited recently, you can insert your own description). Since January we have had three food dehydrators running nonstop, heating our house and drying everything from indian curry to spaghetti sauce to blueberries to beef jerkey. We will be bringing over 600 lbs. of rations, divided into 3-week caches, so we truly are faced with the challenge of drying, vaccum-bagging, measuring, repackaging, and dividing mostly everything we will consume over the course of five months. I never thought I'd intimately know what five months' worth of dried, pulverized, mom's secret recipe spaghetti sauce would look like, but... things change. We've also been incredibly busy with researching and gathering equipment and clothing that we will be using on our trip. This has included writing numerous sponsorship proposals, calling, re-calling, and
Raw beef anyone?
Jeff "the butcher" Frigon, slicing beef to marinade for beef jerkey emailing anyone and everyone who might possibly sponsor us, as well as (gasp) purchasing the remainder of what we need. Recently we converted an entire room of our apartment into a staging area- it is now piled high with bulk rations, related books, and gear of every shape, size, color, and description.
Not to mention the boats, which present their own unique set of challenges and tasks. We finally own both of the boats we will be paddling, and recently paddled them on nearby Madison Lake, Minnesota. It was a calm, chilly, early-spring day, perfect for me to get re-acquianted with paddling a boat 2 feet longer than usual, and for Jeff to paddle his shiny new boat for the very first time. Overall the day was a success, but it gave rise to growing concerns about lack of space. It is difficult to imagine the complexity of carefully packing a high-performance sea kayak for an extended expedition- at their widest they are 21 and 22 inches, respectively. We were also able to identify some of the work that needs to be done such as outfitting the cockpits with foam, skeg replacement, moving fiberglass bulkheads, and fiberglassing keel strips
onto their bottoms. Sigh...
In addition to trip preparation, most of you know we are both working and in grad school- Jeff has been busy with wrapping up his second semester in the Experiential Education Department at Minnesota State, and I recently turned in my thesis and am anxiously awaiting graduation from the same program on May 13th. We're prepping to pack up our apartment and move the very same day!
Needless to say, our lives have been, as you read in the title, a true three-ring circus. Stay tuned for more preparation and logistics updates over the next few weeks, as well as more information to come about Exeter Alternative High School!
Many thanks to our growing list of sponsors: Kokatat, Icebreaker, Midnight Sun Outfitters, Portsmouth Rent and Ride, New England Small Craft, Kittery Trading Post, Gunstock Ski Resort, Annie's Homegrown, St. Peter Food Co-Op, ECHO Food Shelf, Red Fish Blue Fish Dye Works, Portsmouth Flatbread Company, and Nature's Wonders....
If you are interested in becoming a corporate or private donor either to the expedition or to the school, please contact us!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.071s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0424s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Jonah
non-member comment
Nic e Haircut
Steph - looking good. Jeff, always looking good. Nice bikerack in the background