June 11. 2018. Departed Ballard North, AKA Dutch harbor at 0900 Alaska time. 6/11/2018 Admin 0 views A few thoughts about Dutch Harbor. There isn’t much to do here in town. The Wi-Fi is glacial. The cell phone service is spotty at best. The winter month are dark, dark, dark. Kids need to use a flashlight to find their way home after school. The air service is hit and miss. During the 4 days we have been here the Alaska Airline flights have been canceled for days at a time due to fog and low ceiling. Sharry and Kyle had flights to Anchorage scheduled. Sharry’s sister, Sheila, is meeting ... Read More
Damage Control 6/6/2018 Admin 125 views We are 291nm and 36 hours from Dutch. The wind has backed down to around 15kn from the WNW. I am an optimist so I’d like to think that the worst is behind us. Let’s do a brief review of what has broken or gone wrong. 1st. There was this itsy bitsy 24vdc hot water heating fan that quit running and put out a lot of smoke. There were no visible signs of any burnt parts. This is the second fan to go kaput in the past 10 years even though these guys get very little use. We are running a solid 27vd... Read More
Stabilizer Blues 6/3/2018 Admin 124 views Sunday June 3. The port stabilizer is making more chattering noise, where the torque arm is reversing direction in incremental amounts several times per second rather than making long smooth strokes. The starboard stabilizer is making a similar noise but to a lesser degree. I have reduced the Naiad Datum sensitivity settings to bare minimum with better results. The Velocity is at 40 and Angle, Acceleration and Heel are at zero. The port stabilizer is now out of the system and pinned locked into... Read More
The Thousand Mile War 6/1/2018 Admin 101 views MV Starr, Friday, June1. 34 09N, 161 37W 801nm from Honolulu 1234 DTG to Dutch Harbor Both Sharry and I have just finished reading, “The Thousand Mile War” by Brian Garfield, published in 1969 and updated in 1995. The story is a factually accurate and riveting tale about the battles between the United States and Japan that took place in the Aleutian Islands during WWII. The descriptions of the weather and hardships, even in the summer months, had both Sharry and I (mostly Sharry) questioning... Read More
Starr passage Hawaii to Unalaska or Kodiak 2018 5/28/2018 Admin 1204 views We are underway for either Unalaska/Dutch Harbor or Kodiak, depending on the weather. Sharry and I planned on departing a week ago but postponed the departure so we could fly back to San Clemente for my cousin Karla Gellers memorial. We are fortunate our friends who are crewing for us are all from Oahu and were able to rearrange their schedules so the Monday 28 departure worked out. Joining us for the passage are 3 great guys, Bill Noodle Leary, Clay Hutchinson, and Kyle Kim. I asked each of ... Read More
Twin Rudders: An Update after 18 Years 4/10/2018 Admin 298 views Having run Starr for 18 years, including crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific (we are about to start our 10th Pacific crossing), fixing Starr's steering problem (lack of control) is the single best modification we have made to date. As I listen to other trawler owners talk about their steering problems and how they might solve them with autopilot adjustments, I wonder if they would be better served by adding flanking rudders or the dual rudder solution we adopted on Starr. We wrote about maki... Read More