INTO THE GREAT BEYOND

I grew up the son of a career Coast Guardsman. I have 8 mm home movies of my father on board the Coast Guard’s oldest icebreaker, Storis, its hull breaking ice and bringing supplies to native villages in the Aleutians. He often told stories of visiting two of the most remote military bases at Adak and Attu in the late 1940s and early ’50s. So, when my good friends John and Kathy Youngblood asked if I’d help them bring their well-traveled Selene 53 Mystic Moon from Japan to Alaska via Russia and the Aleutian Islands, I jumped at the chance.

My wife and I were aboard Mystic Moon when John and Kathy’s 11-year cruise started back in 2007. We helped them take the boat down the U.S. West Coast from Puget Sound to San Francisco, and then rejoined them for the first FUBAR (now called CUBAR) powerboat rally from San Diego to La Paz, Mexico. We’ve had the privilege of being aboard several other times since, including transiting the Panama Canal and a couple of weeks in the Bahamas. In 2013, they crossed the Pacific to the Marquesas, and had cruised the South Pacific and Asian coast for five years, reaching Japan in 2018.