I’m Jade from Aotearoa, New Zealand and Benjamin is from Alaska, United States. We met back in 2013 on the small island of Tonga in the South Pacific. Ben was sailing across the Pacific Ocean on his C&C40 and I was volunteering work on the island. I soon realised that I could sail back home and quickly cancelled my return flight. We ended up sailing on a friends boat for the next two months through the Tongan and Fijian Islands and down to New Zealand where we both then worked and explored.
Since then we’ve pretty much been stuck to the hip and continued on travelling for the next couple of years. Both by crewing across the Indian Ocean and then buying the first motorcycle we came across in Cape Town, South Africa. We then spent a year driving through Africa, Europe and Scandinavia living out of a tent and homemade bike panniers. We ended up flying to Key West, Florida in the United States and soon found Caprivi on the east coast in Maryland in 2016. We sailed her down to the Florida Keys, lived aboard, got married and extensively refit her for five years. She is a McCurdy & Rhodes Navy 44 masthead sloop that was designed and built for the offshore sail training division of the U.S. Naval Academy. More details about the vessel here and about the refit here.
In June, 2022 we finally left the comforts of island life and sailed north spending a summer cruising the beautiful New England coast and then jumped down to the Caribbean for five months of winter bliss. In May of 2023, we made the decision to realise a dream and head north for the Arctic and the northwest passage transit. After six months of intense sailing we made it to the Pacific Ocean and our new home port of Seward, Alaska.
Follow along below.
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- Kodiak, last minute crew and a homebound crossingThe weather was remarkable, at least from what I had assumed late September would be. The sunshine abundant and the seas glistened. We untied.
- An unexpected False PassWe didn’t mean to only spend two days in Nome but it happened quickly and precisely. Celebrations were minimal with a round of drinks.
- A thousand nautical miles to NomeA quick turn around in Tuktoyaktuk was both surprising and necessary. The Arctic weather bombs didn’t muck around, each giving us a few days.
