Author: Igor

Posted on

We are sailing down to the Ocean!

After two months of work preparing the sailboat for a voyage, packing our house, and instruments for measurements, finally, the day has come – today, the 16th of July we set sail from the Crysler Park Marina on a long voyage. Hurray!!!

At the first stage of our voyage, we must pass the St. Lawrence River, with all its locks, past Montreal, Quebec City, the Saguenay River, Gulf of St. Lawrence and reach our first goal – Nova Scotia.

Great help in the preparation of the boat was done by Steve, who saw us off, and Frank, who is sailing with us – many thanks to both, dear friends!

Also, my big thanks to the RBR’s staff Ariel, Jon, Tekai, and Minh to help with the last-minute updating of my CTD with the Tridente sensor! You made it!

Thanks to the Crysler Park Marina for keeping us over winter and almost two months in the dock!

Thanks to The Chandlerry staff, for helping us with purchasing equipment and providing a good discount!

Thanks to our family and friends for supporting us all this time!

Loading our stuff on board

Farewell photo with Steve
Crew of SV Oceanolog – Igor, Iryna and Frank
Good bye, Steve!
Waiting for big ships to pass the Eisenhower Lock
42 feet down!
Gates open!
Out of the lock…
….to the open waters!
Good bye, Eisenhower Lock!
Passing power lines
Big fraighters on the Seaway
Safe navigation!
Posted on

Christening ceremony of S/V OCEANOLOG

The Christening ceremony of our sailboat took place on July, 2nd in the Crysler Park Marina with the presence of our family and friends. Following the tradition, we remembered the glorious past of this yacht, which circumnavigated the world in the 1980s-90s under the skipper Sean Johnston. Also following the tradition, I had to drown a piece of the sailboat’s name artifact that remained on board – we found only a ceramic plaque with a mule riding spallpeen. Goodbye, Spallpeen!

Because seawater is our subject to study, during the Christening ceremony instead of a bottle of Champagne we decided to break a bottle of Standard Seawater, aged for 21 years (as long, as I worked at RBR). Iryna performed this operation flawlessly, sprinkling the bow of our sailboat with real standard seawater from the first attempt! After that, I uncorked a bottle of our homemade red wine with the “Sail for Science” label and shared it with Poseidon, Neptune, Nymphs, Mermaids, and our friends and family. The kids got a fuzzy-bubbly kombucha.

Cheers! Godspeed OCEANOLOG, Fair Winds and Following Seas!

Posted on

A new name for new endeavors!

We are not big fans of renaming, but it so happened that together with the registration of our sailboat, we had the opportunity to change her name to a more suitable one for our project “Sail for Science”. With respect to the glorious history of the Spallpeen, the old name was very attached to the personality of the previous owner Sean Johnston and his Irish roots. We decided to choose a unique name that would reflect both our personalities and the goals of our project – recording the ocean data. Many years ago, we chose the profession of Oceanologists, which in Ukrainian sounds “okeanolog“, and it was our youth’s dream to do ocean research on our own sailing vessel. At the same time, Oceano-log could also mean recording (log) the state of the Oceans – this is what we are planning to do on our boat with project “Sail for Science”

The first step was removing the old name on the hull and sticking the new one, which was sometimes not easy, but we managed it! It happened on Canada Day, so, Happy Canada Day and Happy New Name!