Hi Boys & Girls! We haven't posted on the blog for awhile. Since driving back up from Sonoma County first week November, we've been working on the boat; doing Thanksgiving / Christmas (Dorothy's mom and our daughter Kate flew up from Santa Rosa for Thanksgiving)... and speaking of Thanksgiving, for the 4-5 days prior to turkey day we had snow on the ground, almost no one driving to avoid slip-sliding-away, the result of quite a snow storm the Sunday prior to T-day.

DavidEllis goes back into the water early tomorrow morning, and after another week of boatwork, we'll be on-the-road-again, in a nautical kind of way. We're heading back up the Inside Passage to Wrangell, Alaska (north of Ketchikan, south of Juneau), where DE will be hauled out again for a complete sand-blasting of the boat bottom, then re-doing both the anti-corrosion and anti-fouling layers. The contractor doing the work gets into his busy season starting March, working on the fish-boat fleet, so we've got a 1 February haulout appointment. It will be a different kind of passage, than the summer season cruises up and down thru BC we've done the past two years. The daylight is much shorter (and running at night in the Inside Passage is not a great idea with all the logs and other floating obstacles) and of course it will be much colder. So we're giving ourselves almost a full month to make the run - mostly all protected, just the openings at Queen Charlotte Sound and Dixon Entrance to cross. There are lots of protected places to wait out any weather that might make the passage uncomfortable. Our Diesel Duck is more than up to the task - you may recall we brought her all the way from Hong Kong via Japan, the Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska summer '09.

What else is scheduled for 2011?

After the boatwork in Wrangell, we'll leave the boat up there, and head back down to Sebastopol, where I've got an appointment for shoulder surgery beginning March... again?! Third week March we'll fly to Hong Kong to visit friends; attend the Rugby 7s tournament (where I'll do physical therapy on my shoulder by lifting pints); visit the Seahorse boatyard and take a quick trip across to Subic for a visit with friends there. Back to Seattle mid-April.

We should be back up to the boat in Wrangell by 1 May. We're planning to base ourselves out of Sitka for the cruising season. We're considering staying over in Sitka next winter... more on that as things progress.

We'll post more frequently now that we're getting underway again...

Dave, Dorothy and Rusty