Tokimata's Travels

Vessel Name: Tokimata
Vessel Make/Model: Ganley S130 steel cutter
Hailing Port: Coromandel, New Zealand
Crew: Peter, Rachel, Danny and Tom Garden
06 September 2023 | Bahia Nonda
07 August 2023
30 June 2023
07 June 2023
03 October 2022 | Santa Marta, Colombia
23 September 2022
18 September 2022 | Curaçao
11 September 2022
30 August 2022 | Grenada
13 August 2022 | St Lucia
21 December 2019
26 November 2019
19 November 2019
10 November 2019
24 October 2019
18 September 2019
Recent Blog Posts
06 September 2023 | Bahia Nonda

Panama Pacific Coast

It’s now well over a month since we left Panama City. La Brisas the free anchorage on the long causeway joining three islands, was free but not the greatest pace to stay, with poor holding and many disintegrating boats, but this amazing backdrop of skyscrapers behind. These free places where yachts [...]

07 August 2023

Panama City

We fuelled up on 20th July 2023 and filled with water, ready for the passage through the Panama Canal. We were to leave around 2 pm next day, staying overnight in Gatun lake with our local line-handlers, and should be through by 3 pm on the following day.

21 July 2023

Rio Chagres and Portabelo on the Caribbean coast of Panama.

We left the San Blas islands on July 10 2023, after a last visit to Ivin, the wonderful chef at Hollandais Cays. He gave a few more image files for his recipe book and we bought his terrific coconut cake one last time. At 11.30 we upped anchor and were off on our way back east, the transit through the [...]

13 July 2023

The islands of San Blas

On Friday 23rd June at last we headed across the busy canal entrance from Shelter Bay marina and into the Caribbean sea. We were sailing to the San Blas islands, Kuna Yala to the inhabitants, hundreds of small islands and coastal villages that are still administered by the indigenous owners of the land. [...]

30 June 2023

The jungles of Panama

Grinding rust on the hull of Tokimata eventually gave way to grinding rust on the decks, but this was made much easier by hiring energetic boatyard workers. Eventually this progressed to painting, using two part polyurethane over the various anti-rust treatments and primers they had applied. However [...]

07 June 2023

Two weeks in Panama

We arrived in Panama City Tuesday 23rd May from Manchester, with our usual heavy luggage: this time a Starlink system was the bulk of it along with other boat essentials. After travel via Amsterdam we arrived at last to see our taxi-driver holding a “Mr Peter” sign and were off for the hour and a [...]

Our stay in Tuktoyaktuk

10 August 2012 | Tuktoyaktuk
Pete
I last left you as we were approaching Tuktoyatuk - on the Mckenzie River delta. After Herschel Island, with the mountains of the Brooks Range (unashamedly known as the "British Mountains" to the east in Canadian territory) slowly giving way to flat, featureless landscape we followed a long line of navigation buoys through the shallow waters into Tuk. We initially missed the turn into the small town harbour but were directed back to the right place by the crew on tug in the commercial harbour. The harbour was once a busy centre supporting the oil exploration industry in this area, but is now pretty derelict with just a few barges passing through. We found a French yacht "Roxane" tied up on the small public pontoon and met Luc who had overwintered in Cambridge Bay this last year and had arrived in Tuk just a few days before. We anchored off the dock and were shortly joined by Sol.

After some radio calls to the Coastguard it transpired that despite our advance e-mails to NORDREG (the agency monitoring boat traffic in the NW Passage) no-one knew we were coming and therefore there was no customs or immigration officer in Tuk. He is based in Inuvik and has to fly over specially to clear boats in. So we had to do all the paper work via fax at the RCMP (Mounted Police) office which was no problem even though it took quite a long time. But they were a friendly bunch and very helpful. When we asked what the 800 inhabitants of Tuktoyaktuk did for a living the RCMP officer said "nothing". It seems the town had a boom 10 years in the 1980's after the Trudeau government had setup an 80% subsidy for oil exploration in the region. But despite some modest production wells, the industry collapsed in the late 90's when the subsidy was withdrawn. The many barges, drilling ships, tugs, big jets, helicopters and 3 big oil company bases disappeared and the town now subsists on welfare.

Tuktoyaktuk has no land connection to anywhere except in winter when an ice road is made to Inuvik, slightly further up the Mckenzie River on another branch of the delta. From Inuvik there is water traffic by barge and tug 1000 miles up the Mckenzie to Great Slave Lake and the city of Yellowknife during summer, or freight on an ice road in winter. There is a rail terminus on the south shore of Great Slave Lake at Hay River which connects the area to the rest of Canada.

We only had 24 hours in Tuk but had a great time. After sorting things out with the RCMP at 5:30 on Friday night we were almost immediately invited to a feast and drum dancing performance that evening by a local guy called "Boogie" sitting on a house step, and by a bunch of kids. We turned up at 7pm to find the meal nearly over but were given a plate and invited in to join what turned out to be a event for the participants in the annual polar bear resource management conference.

This conference is held each year, alternatively in Tuk and Barrow, Alaska for the locals, scientists and biologists to discuss the management of polar bears in the region, and to set quotas for subsistence hunting. It seems there are some 15,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the entire arctic, and the consensus of the scientists seems to be that the population is stable or increasing through most regions. Based on the scientists reports the native communities set quota for their hunting. We have read the stories about how global warming is threatening the polar bears survival because less ice means less chance for them to hunt seals. The view here was that this is a real problem down in the Hudson Bay area where around 2500 bears are found. The bears here are threatened and have become a nuisance in towns as they scavenge in dumps and around houses. But in the area further north global warming has not affected the bear population or behaviour - this may yet happen of course.

After the meal the locals put on a drum dancing concert. They were dressed in furs, decorated gloves and boots and the performers progressed through about a dozen different dances representing seal hunts, bear hunts etc. Behind the dancers were the drummers pouring out the rhythms on their seal skin drums by striking them from underneath. We had a chance to met a number of locals and scientists and learnt a lot about their traditions and the issues they face.

The next morning we heard another yacht on the radio and the Australian boat Teleport came into the harbour with Chris and Jess on board. They had also wintered in Cambridge Bay along with Luc and tied up alongside Roxane. However the west wind continued to blow and we wanted to keep going while the going was good, so we left around 5pm after a brief session with the crews of all four boats meeting on the dock.

We refilled our diesel in Tuk - the town gas station was right next to the dock so it was straightforward to fill our jerry cans and take them out by dinghy. We took on about 280 litres which was just under half our total fuel and this was all used from Nome to Tuk - most of it in the push up against the northerlies in the Chuckchi Sea to get round Pt Barrow before the ice closed in. There was no internet or laundry in Tuk, but there are a couple of good grocery stores that allowed us to stock up on fresh veg. There are no outside water taps so any vessel needing water has to buy filtered water from the stores, or get some from a tug or barge. With our water maker working well despite the cold water temperatures (65 litres per hour vs rated capacity of 80 litres per hour) we were able to pass on some water to Sol to keep them going to Cambridge Bay.
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