About Me

My photo
Alaska, United States
I am owned by Pauline and Mark Blasky. My hull was built at the Duncan Marine Yard in Taiwan and launched in Dec of 1980. It is a William Garden design based on the Pixie Design and called by Duncan Marine a Freedom 45. They are the fourth owners and have owned me the longest. They have done extensive refitting to me including replacing my entire deck structure and rig. My masts are roughly 10% taller than original and now are made of aluminium as opposed to the original wood ones, which, though pretty, were always problematic. You can read more about me under "MORE ABOUT SARI TIMUR"

August 27, 2011

Sinking Roots

Oh no, we are slowly sinking roots into Guam.

Today, we went and applied for a post office box so that all of you who love us will have some place to send your snail mail to.  Now you have no excuse for not sending us mail.  Our address is P.O. Box 1913, Hagatna, Guam 96932, USA.  Look forward to hearing from you.

We have also been car shopping and job hunting.  Watch this space for more info about that.

August 18, 2011

Crossing the Ocean’s Deepest Trench

As an Oceanographer, the Mariana Trench is definitely one of those intriguing places we learn about.  When I was in school, very little was known about it, even its full depth was not known.  And man had not yet been down to the bottom to explore it.  As one of my professors used to boast we have put a man on the moon but only one trip to the bottom of the ocean.  Outer space travel is low tech; it only requires one atmosphere change from ambient.  Travel to the bottom of the trench requires high tech equipment; we have to cope with more than a 1000 atmospheres of pressure change.  This professor previously worked for the Apollo space program so he was always interesting when he would get slightly side-tracked from a regular lesson plan.  The manned trip was made by the Bathyscaphe Trieste Deep.  It went to 10,911 in 1960 but none since.  There have been 2 unmanned subs or ROVs to dive to the bottom, but the first wasn’t until 1996, and the second 2009.  There is a current project to revisit it and go slightly deeper.  Sir Richard Branson has taken over the project from his friend, the late Steve Fossett.  This sub was designed by Graham Hawkes who was one of the founders of Deep Ocean Engineering, the ROVs I sold while at Advanced Marine.
While working at one of my previous jobs, I sold equipment to JAMSTEC, Japan’s large Oceanographic Institute.  The equipment was for their deep under water remotely operated vehicle Kaiko.  This vehicle in 1996 became the only other vehicle to make it to the bottom at 10,911.4 metres.  I also sold this equipment to JAMSTEC’s manned submarine Shenkai 6500, which is rated to 6,500 metres and has been down that far along the trench walls doing scientific studies.  I thought that was probably going to be the closest I would get.
While we were enroute from Palau to Guam we were going right over this portion of the world and I felt this would be a monumental moment.  There is no ‘x marks the spot’, there isn’t even a spot on the chart.  We also didn’t get an exact latitude and longitude.  So we used our electronic charts and took their depth readings and figured that would be closest.  Here our MaxSea and our BlueCharts differed a bit.  MaxSea had the deepest spot at just under 10,000 metres while BlueChart had a depth of 10,909 marked a mile or so away from MaxSeas’s deepest bit.  We went to both places to be sure, but I couldn’t confirm it as my depth sounder maxes out at about 100 metres and my lead line is only for shallow water work.  But when the water depths are nearly 6 miles below you, I guess being within a mile on the surface has to be pretty close.  We were hoping to make it to this point in daylight but arrived slightly after midnight.  We also had a low pressure building just southeast of us and we were in kind of a hurry to get to Guam in case this low intensified to something nasty, so we didn’t dare stay around for the sun to come out.  Due to this low pressure, the seas were a bit lumpy and the wind was up for the rest of the trip into Guam.
Who would have thought way back in university, that I could foresee boasting of the fact that I have now sailed over the deepest of the deeps in ocean trenches.  Thank you Sari Timur and Pauline for helping me reach another milestone achievement. 


Page taken off MaxSea showing the boat going past the deep part


Page taken off the BlueChart of boat heading for the deepest part


August 7, 2011

We are in Guam

Just a short note to let everyone know that we arrived yesterday 7th August at 1530 hours.  It was mostly a good trip, certainly fast.  A few tropical squalls with lots of rain but nothing bad.  We did have a couple of glorious days and starry nights.  We lost the engine charging system 24 hours from Guam but otherwise no dramas. The seas were quite lumpy the last 24 hours and there is a depression east of us, which was why we kept going fast rather than stop along the way.  As we write this blog, we are waiting for Guam customs to clear us in.  We did immigration yesterday.  Later, we will be going into town and try to rent a wreck plus get the lay of the land, get a phone number, etc.  More later.