Greetings all!
On April 7th Roberta and I will return to Japan to begin our next big adventure.
Our journey this year “should” be much easier than last year. We’ll be traveling from Osaka Japan, into Japan’s inland sea, where we’ll visit Hiroshima and Fukuoka. Somewhere along the way we’ll visit South Korea, but we won’t be taking the boats. It’s too complicated, and expensive, to clear the boats out of Japan, into South Korea, and then back into Japan. Instead, we’ll park the boats somewhere and take a ferry into South Korea. Once back on the boats we’ll explore Nagasaki and Kyushu Japan, then head south along the Ryukyu Island Japan, visiting Okinawa along the way. Allegedly the Ryukyu islands are a chain of tropical islands, reminiscent of Hawaii. We’ll then leave Japan from the island of Ishigaki and head to Taiwan, where we’ll visit the factory where our Nordhavn boats were born. Our group will be the first Nordhavns to ever return to the factory, so everyone is very excited. After that we’ll head to Hong Kong.
In aggregate we’ll be cruising just over 2,000 miles, and with the exception of the long passage from Tawain to Hong Kong there shouldn’t be any overnight passages. This should be an easy trip in good weather (I hope!), and very different from last year’s GSSR cruise.
That said, I’m not expecting our trip to be boring. Very few boats have cruised these islands, and I’m sure we’ll find much of great interest. As we get closer to departure I’ll talk a bit more about all that we expect to see and the challenges that I foresee.
A few of you have been following my blog during the offseason, at www.kensotherblog.com. Most of you thought have not read the past blog entries. If you are curious to discover what we’ve been doing to prepare for the trip, visit my normal blog at www.kensblog.com and look through the past blog entries (I moved them from the other site).
More importantly…
If you have friends that you think might enjoy receiving my blog entries, this is a good time to get them registered. Give them my website address, http://www.kensblog.com, or, if you have their permission, you may register them yourself. Just click on the link on the homepage.
The other GSSR boats also will be producing blogs, and as long as you are at it, you might want to register for their blogs:
Seabird – http://www.seabirdlrc.com
Grey Pearl – http://greypearl.talkspot.com
And, joining us for at least part of this year: http://starr.talkspotblogs.com
Thank you everyone! I am very excited about getting back to the boat, and continuing our voyage.
Ken Williams (with Roberta and Shelby)
Nordhavn 68, Sans Souci
www.kensblog.com
And, for my books: http://www.lulu.com/kenw
PS Since I mentioned my book, I should also mention that I’m about a third of the way into a book about a Nordhavn 43 that finished a circumnavigation last year. It’s a terrific book and hard to put down.
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2 Responses
Ken,
I anticipate lots of photos and really enjoy the videos as well, I hope to see more of those. I know that there are a bunch of us techie people that do enjoy your technical series of videos as well and behind the scenes at the systems too, so I will put in the request for some of those this year. I have been going through withdrawals during the off season.
Have a safe flight back over… You guys going via Hawaii again on the way back? I know you mentioned that you might stay there a few days on the return trip as getting Shelby in might be simpler.
Thanks,
Chris
Ken,
This sounds like a very interesting journey. I look forward to riding along. PassageMaker has yet to run the piece on boats and blogging. I should run soon.. You can now signup for the on-line version of PM which might work for your travels. Best of Luck,
Bill Jacobs