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May 2008

Our Prince William Sound bear hunt is over and now we are able to spend all our time preparing for this upcoming trip. Shanna's cousin Donnie got his bear, but Shanna did not get one this spring, so.......after calling an Alaska ADFG biologist in Haines we've decided to end our Inside Passage Cruise with a black bear hunt if the opportunity presents itself. A little extra gear to add to the packing list.

I called up and down the highway and to all the docks to get an idea of what we would have to spend for diesel for the truck and unleaded gasoline for the boat. The following charts are a summary of my results.

During our bear hunt we learned how to extend our 2 MPG boat to a 5 MPG boat by only running one motor and running that motor at 1800 RPM, this gave us a 5.5 MPH cruise speed, instead of our normal 25 MPH, but the fuel savings kept money in the bank and allowed us to stay out for 10 days and 9 nights while bear huning without visiting a port.

Continued problems with the port side engine (a Honda BF-90) has promtped us to order an entire intake assembly including all 4 carburetors. This motor backfired and generally ran bad for the entire 2008 bear hunt. ALL this motors problems are contributed to a faulty design on our particular boat from C-Dory that allowed large quantities of salt water to enter the fuel tank thru the vent. In March over 1 1/2 gallons of water was removed from the port fuel tank, but not before the carburetors attempted to run on vast quantities of it.