When asked about the challenges that Duff will face in his bid to row to Iceland, Cook cited the fact that Duff is using manpower as his primary means of propulsion in a small boat. In 2009, he attempted to journey through the Great Lakes and around the vast northern edge of the continent through the fabled Northwest Passage in a Corsair F-31 sailboat called the Cap’n Lem.Ĭook ended his solo journey when the Northwest Passage froze up.

Tommy Cook of Port Angeles and his friend Ken Birdwell loaned Duff a satellite phone and a distress beacon, which Duff described as essential.Ĭook knows a thing or two about adventures himself. “I’ll wait for a high pressure over the North Sea and hopefully some winds from the southern quadrant.” certainly not the winds I want for the Faeroe Crossing,” Duff wrote. “Now that I am on the Isle of Lewis, I am in waiting mode - there is a series of low pressures that are stacked up behind one another but they seem to be spinning northeast and north winds. It took Duff about 13 hours to cross the Minch. “The land slowly takes on details of rock and cleft, and further inland, fresh snow on the higher elevations.” “Gulls appear from nowhere - shadows silently wheeling and circling overhead veering off and calling out in the darkness. “Flat calm water for the first two hours - a crescent moon rising between bands of predawn black clouds,” Duff wrote. He crossed the Minch, the strait that runs between the Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland, and posted a Wednesday blog entry from Stornoway, a town on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides some 50 miles from his starting point in Ullapool. There, he made modifications to the Northern Reach and tested her sails while staying with friends he met last year. “I also have a parasail that I’ll be experimenting with if I get winds straight aft of my course.”ĭuff arrived in Ullapool, a small village on the shores of Loch Broom on the northwest side of the Scottish mainland, on March 29.

On Celtic Tides by Chris Duff