A Selene 66 in the time of Covid…
200,000 NM… That is what you can read on Captain Joel Marc’s logbook! After half a century of ocean passages, Captain Marc, 75, a radiologist in Nouméa hospital, has accumulated as many miles as many professional seafarers… At the helm of his beautiful Selene 66, M.V. Jade, acquired in 2013, captain Marc has crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean from New Caledonia where he lives to Alaska via Japan, the Kamtchaka and the Aleutians islands…
Bureaucracy…
With a range of 6,000 NM, Joel Marc’s Selene 66 is the perfect vessel for this enthusiastic wanderer… Even the Covid pandemic has not discouraged him from cruising in Pacific Northwest waters where unfortunately one stubborn US Customs officer has been less than cooperative with Jade’s port clearance because of the Covid restrictions, forcing Jade to sail back single-handed to Canada on an 800 NM trip… But everything ended eventually well with another more open-minded US Customs officer issuing a final clearance, and Jade was eventually able to sail again in the US waters after having been initially denied access by some kind of perverted bureaucracy…
The full story and adventure are detailed in a long article published in the famous French magazine Neptune, the European equivalent of the American Passagemaker.
