What a milestone on day 60! We reached mainland Alaska. And for the first time in 4 days we weren’t battling a headwind and adverse current. We needed to head north today so the persistent easterly was a nice sidewind. We put the sails up and felt the land fly by, relative to our 2.2 knot trudge of recent days. We continued until we needed to go East again and quit while we were ahead after 18 miles. We’re camped in a gorgeous sandy Cove at Kenmore Head with a panorama of steep grassy hills above. The bank immediately behind the tent is covered in purple lupins. Opposite us across a bay, the base of a snowy mountain is visible below the grey clouds. There are no bear prints on the beach which is a good sign although we’ve witnessed a fox fight and a fox running along the beach with an unlucky ground squirrel in its mouth.

Sarah has now completed her crossing of the Pacific ocean from mainland Russia to mainland USA. It’s taken her 4 years and 4 different boats! She’s understandably delighted and I’m happy to have been there at the start kayaking from Russia to Japan and now at the end. Not that we are finished kayaking, we still have quite a few hundred miles before we reach the first road in Homer. But we celebrated this milestone with popcorn and marshmallows!

Excitedly this morning we saw 2 orca whales. They were a couple of hundred metres away and they passed us pretty quickly but we got a few sights of a tall imposing Black fin and a flash of white. Sarah recons that fin would be higher than our sails. We also saw the blow of a different sort of whale as we approached shore ON THE PENINSULA!

Part of me is sad to have left the Aleutian chain. It’s proved to be a beautiful, unpredictable, temperamental, raw wilderness full to the brim with marine life and sprinkled with pockets of interesting people. Thanks for a great 2 months. Let’s see what the peninsula brings.