Monday, July 24, 2006



My Itinerary. I leave for Seattle on August 3rd at 730 am, I will be going to the Linblad office on Seattle for an orientation and will be staying one night there.

On August 4th leave for Sitka Alaska.

August 5th board the Sea Lion

August 5- November we will be off the coast of Alaska, British Columbia & the San Juan Islands working our way down to the Colombia river in Washington.

November; we will be docked in a shipyard in San Francisco CA. The month will be spent doing maintenance on the ship while no passengers are aboard.

December - February; The boat moves south to winter around Mexico's BAJA peninsula!

I have created this site so that I can share my six month voyage from Alaska to Mexico with friends and family. I guess I should start with a little history of myself and how I ended where I am.

My love of the water has been with me from the beginning. I grew up on the shores of the Chesapeake and have always found myself at home on her creeks and bays. Having graduated college last December I was faced with the same predicament that we all are of finding a job. As a present for graduation my mother was kind enough to send me to a local captains school in hopes that I could combine my love of the water with a profession that I would enjoy. I guess around January I started surfing all the job websites and posts on the internet determined not to settle into a mundane 9-5 office job where I would be staring at the clock every minute waiting to get out. In the meantime I had moved back home and had taking up substitute teaching at my old high school to earn a little cash. In addition I signed up to be an assistant lax coach which was very rewarding.

I would say sometime in march I stumbled across Lindlbad Expeditions, immediately drawn to its exotic destinations and beautiful photos I dreamed how awesome it would be to work for a company that did those things. That's all I thought it was though, I thought I didn't have a chance at getting a job with them, I had no ship experience and the company was all the way out in Seattle. So I wrote it down as some cool website to visit and an afterthought on a career pursuit.

A month or so went by and by now I was getting ridiculously bored of the glorified babysitting that they call substitute teaching when it popped into my head to visit the lindblad website and fill out an application. So I did, I can remember sitting in Sof's class completely ignoring the kids while I filled out the pages of applications and wrote the several essays required.

Over the next couple of months I made myself just annoying enough that the person in charge of hiring knew my name I was able to get an interview the last week of June. One week later on July 3rd the phone call came that I had been waiting for and I was hired!

So that's that, I now find myself 10 days from departure trying to get my life organized enough to leave for 6 months. I am going to make a conscious effort to update this site with photos and entries of my life onboard the Sea Lion.