Do you remember our friend Enrico Tettamanti? Enrico is a professional skipper, sailed more than 150,000 miles around the world. In 2002 he created his first project Kamana, the extreme sailing for everyone, to navigate in remote areas of the planet. Since then Solaris 72 Kamana is synonym of exploration and shipping. Now he’s ready to attempt… the Northern Passage!
Enrico, “why” the Northern Passage?
I was attracted since many years to sail in the Arctic water from one ocean to the other. I think that sailing through the northwest passage still one of the most interesting route I can sail. Now the ice situation is changing a lot, with less ice every years more.
That’s means that for small sailing vessel it could be easy to have the possibility to pass it without getting stuck in the middle. But is not so certain, nature is still have total control, and that’s make it more challenging and interesting.
How did you set Kamana for this “cold” trip?
We are use to sail in cold weather, so Kamana (a Solaris 72) was close to be prepared to sail in Arctic water.
In any case for sail in the Northwest passage we did some improvement. We installed in this days a new Radar independent from all other instruments already installed.
We added an Iridium Pilot, for satellite communication to be able to download without any problems the ice charts on the way. For a big ice concentration we builded a mega fenders with the bow shape to reduce the impact of the ice to the hull. Now we just need some less concentration of ice in Point Barrow to start this new adventure and trying to sail thorght the Northwest passage.