Afternoon swim anchored on the Tenn-Tom Waterway

Tricia's Stuff	Zion's Stuff	Family Pictures!

4/18/2000
We got some great pics now!
Also.... take the virtual tour of our South Dakota trip last September Family pics and tour page
Please check out the new pages and send some comments to MAIL!

4/17/2000
Check out our two new web pages!!!
Zion has uploaded his 'favorite stuff' page at http://www.calumetdreams.com/zion
and Tricia is uploading her poetry and stories at http://www.calumetdreams.com/tricia
Please check out the new pages and send some comments to mailto:calumetdreams@yahoo.com
 
 

<--- Drawing by Zion  4/13/2000  Welcome to the web site for the planned sailing trip of the Klos family. We plan to leave in early June and be gone for at least 1 1/2 years. Final destination? Unknown.... wherever the wind takes us. In the beginning, we will be sailing thru the Great Lakes and taking the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Erie Canal. After that? Maybe Europe, or Africa (we have friends in Ghana) or around the world.  Since a sailboat relies on wind, weather and water, it’s impossible to set dates or destinations. Rivers can be flooded or dry, canals or locks might not be operating and harbors might be closed. In fact, some harbors are already closed this year due to the record low water conditions in Lake Michigan. We will be determining routes only 1 or 2 days in advance, gathering knowledge from other sailors along the way.  The web site will be updated almost daily before our trip and make sure to check out the links to our personal pages. Tricia will be posting all of her stories and poems and Zion will be showing off his web pages he designed.

Our boat is a 33 foot catamaran sailboat, about 17 feet wide and weighs 6000 lbs. It has enclosed hulls and a central enclosed dining area. The parents have their own room with a queen size bed and each kid has their own rooms with smaller beds. No need for people to crawl over or walk past sleeping crew members. The right hull has a galley with propane burners (no oven) and the left hull has the head (toilet) and shower. We do have a hot water heater for the shower, our only luxury. There is no refrigerator, washing machine or dryer on the boat and only a camping cooler to keep food cold for couple of days.

We have two rechargeable battery packs to supply 12 volt electricity. Most the of power will come from a single 30 watt solar panel. Not a whole lot of power available. We do have a 9.9 hp 4-stroke outboard engine for moving around in the harbors. The engine can do some recharging, but we will only have enough gasoline onboard to run the engine for 5 hours total.

People are asking what happens if the wind dies? That’s ‘relax time’, we just sit and drift until the wind comes again. 5 hours of engine power doesn’t help much to cross the Atlantic.

We will be very low tech on the boat and will not have any ‘real time’ communications with anyone on shore. We will have couple of old 286 laptops for word processing. When in port, we will ask to borrow time on someone’s computer and email the pictures and text files back to our ‘webmaster’, who will then upload them to this site. We will also check our yahoo mail accounts at that time. Do not send any mail to abalux@pitnet.net.

We will be more than happy to give tours of our boat and boat rides. Just leave us an email message or give us a phone call (before June 1). If you like us to stop somewhere, let us know, and we will try to arrange it and call you when we arrive. Once again, the weather determines our schedule. We will always appreciate a home cooked meal and a chance for us to wash our clothes. We enjoy getting cultural tours and visiting museums.

We bought the boat used and do have some pictures of the boat before we started to restore it. At this time, the boat is tucked in between some farm sheds and is hard to take a picture of it. The boat will be put in the water in early May and lots of pics will be taken then.