John and Tracey are residents of Nevada and have called Las Vegas home for well over 25 years. Between the two of them, they have three boys and four grand-kids. They take one day at a time and focus on traveling at their own pace. Pairadice is a Selene 47 Ocean trawler. They acquired her in May 2015. The Selene 47 Ocean Yacht is now replaced by the Selene 49 Ocean Yacht, a very popular model frequently operated by couples. Selene 49, hull #42 will be launched in a few days at the shipyard…
» We have completed the Canadian Inside passage summer of 2016 and South East Alaska summer of 2017. This summer we will cruise the Columbia up and into the Snake River. Next year we hope to head south to Mexico. Thanks to all the friends we have met along the way.
We have just finished our second extended cruise that started from our home port of Salpare Bay Marina in Portland, Oregon. After traveling west on the Columbia River, we traveled north 15 miles off the Washington coast, through Puget Sound, up through the inside passage of Canada, as far north as you can go in SE Alaska before turning around and heading south, ultimately returning to our home port 166 days later. »
» We are now, back in Las Vegas where we will spend the winter. The to do list is rather lengthy, with both personal and boat related projects. Our current plans are to cruise the Columbia and Snake River next summer, and prepare Pairadice for our southbound trip to Mexico in 2019. «
» You can read all the books, tech manuals, instruction books, discussions on forums and picking the brains of all those that have done extended cruises before, however, until you do a cruise of this distance and time, you have no idea what it takes. Yet, we met so many people that do this type of cruise year after year.
We used several publications in order to plan, track and gather information throughout this trip. I’m sure that other publications are available, however these were the ones we focused on to help insure a favorable experience. By far the Waggoner Guide was the publication that we used the most for Canada and Exploring S.E. Alaska for navigating Alaska. »
» The primary navigation that we used was Navionics on an iPad. For $50 a year you have a very nice, user friendly, chart program. This became our primary navigation tool. All you need is a tablet which has a built-in GPS so as to track your boat. If you choose to go this route, get a device with as much memory as possible! You can store so many charts without internet access.
In regards to staying in touch, while off the grid we did much better this year. We changed carriers to Verizon from AT&T. Rates and coverage are so much better and we think Internet access along the BC coast improved since last year. We also had our portable hotspot from Telus and as long as we were close to cell towers, we had internet coverage. We installed a cell phone booster and life was so much nicer and it really extended coverage no matter what device. AT&T is the main player in S.E. Alaska and so once we were away from the main cities internet was pretty much non existent. But we still had cell and text service. «
Days we traveled: 166
Number of ports visited: 71
Nautical miles traveled: 3,452
Gallons of diesel fuel: 1,854
Fuel burn rate gallons: 3.06
Main engine hours: 606
Generator hours: 565
Days at anchor: 53
Days in moorage: 113
Days buddy boating: 116
Story and all photos © 2018 John & Tracey Cerul
Visit Tracey and John’s blog: mvpairadice.blogspot.com