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Further information on Adventures in the Charlottes
Looking east through Selwyn Inlet. [20mm, F5.6, 1/80sec, Fuji Velvia] I wrote Around Vancouver Island (AVI) in 1996. I derived a great deal of satisfaction from completing that project and from the emails I received from people about the story. In 1998, I decided it was time to “out-do” AVI and create a new flagship story for my web site. Needless to say, my appetite was bigger than my stomach. I had grand ideas for this story. Most have been realized, but some have not. This story is 4 or 5 times as big as AVI in every regard. I had no idea how much labor this was to entail. I had (have) a million ideas, but the bottom line is that it takes a lot of time and hard work to implement those ideas.
Start to end, the web story took me over a year to write, edit and publish. Needless to say, this is far from full-time work, but nonetheless, it was a significant effort. I hope you enjoyed the story.

Credit Where Credit is Due
Many, many thanks to my wife Amy who was an incredible sport. If you find Adventures humorous, the source of that humor is probably Amy. Thank you to Scott for beaver sitting and Jim, Gary, Pam & Denny for house sitting. Thank you to Dad & Mary for putting us up in the land-yacht at Prince Rupert when it was wet and rainy. Thanks to my mom who always manages to find me the best reading material on any of the weird places we go to.
Gary Myers at Environment Canada who was kind enough to look up some historical weather data from the North Hecate Strait buoy, and not charge me an outrageous amount of money.
A huge thanks to the Canadian Coast Guard. These folks are a class act! Specific thanks to the Prince Rupert Coast Guard—for watching over us and monitoring our sail plan. They were always pleasant and professional to deal with. Thanks also to Eric Lange (Comox Coast Guard) for answering to my stupid questions on EPIRPS and the like over email. Lastly, many thanks to the Comox Coast Guard radio operator with the great French-Canadian accent! You are better than any talk-radio station. “Go to 22 Alpha, US MODE!!”

Photography
All photographs were taken by Tim Whelan with a few exceptions that were taken by Amy Whelan, Scott Whelan or Gary Rigsby. All photographs in Adventures in the Charlottes are copyright Tim Whelan.
All photographs were taken with a Nikon N90s, Yashika F4 or Kodak disposable panoramic camera (only one of these images made it into the story). I used the following lenses on the Nikon: Nikkor 20mm F2.8, Nikkor 35-70mm F2.8 and a Nikkor 80-200mm F2.8. I am very happy with all my lenses now. I would like something a little longer, but am unsure I would be able to keep it steady enough to get a sharp picture. I would like something a little wider, but am unwilling to spend the money since I already have a 20mm.
During the trip, I took 786 exposures. This is broken down into the following types of film:

FilmExposures
Fuji Velvia396
Kodak Royal Gold 100360
Kodak Gold 400 (Disposable Panoramic Cameras)30

786

I brought 10 rolls of Kodak Royal Gold 25 with me on the trip. Unfortunately, there was never really enough light (or stability) to use it, so I never shot a single exposure. I guess I would not recommend ISO 25 for images taken from boats. Kodak Royal Gold 100 scans beautifully, and is a great, flexible general purpose film. In my opinion, Fuji Veliva does not scan as well, and generally the scans tend to have kind of a blue haze. Although some of my Velvia images with a lot of color and contrast scanned extremely well. The Velvia slides themselves are generally beautiful.
All images were scanned to Kodak Photo CD at Pacific Color in Seattle, Washington. All images were subsequently edited in Adobe Photoshop. I started with Philip Greenspun’s advice on converting Photo CD's to JPEGS, and then started to develop my own process as worked my way through the images. All images have height & width tags which makes the text download faster.

Story & Web Pages
During our trip, I kept track of log entries in a small log book application (Visual Basic frontend, Access backend) I wrote called SmartLog. SmartLog took a lot of verbal abuse from the crew, and was not what I would call a smashing success. I got sick of typing log entries about half way through the trip and started using my mini tape recorder to make log entries. The entire story was subsequently written in Microsoft Word (based on the log entries). All the HTML was composed in a text editor called CuteHTML (a relative of my favorite FTP program-CuteFTP).

Attempts at “Localization”
It doesn't take a PhD in computer science to look at the access_log for my site and realize that 10-20% of my readers are from countries other than the United States. I notice a lot of visitors from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. I guess the presence of Canadian readers should come as no surprise since most of the stories take place in Canada. Anyway, whatever country you are from, thank you for visiting my site. In an attempt to make this story more readable for non-US visitors I have done several small things. Author celebrating 4th of July in Fitz Hugh Sound. [80-200mm, F2.8, Unknown Shutter Speed, Fuji Velvia]
First, I have tried to state both metric and English units whenever I mention distances or temperatures. You should always be able to find the metric equivalent in parenthesis after the English units. Second, I added an index chart to my main chart. Hopefully this will help people who are not from the Pacific Northwest figure out where this story takes place. Third, Each page has an encoded language meta tag that specifies that my pages are in English. Most of the search engines recognize this tag. This way, if you dont want to read a page written in English, my pages wont clutter up your search results. If you have any other suggestions on how I can better localize these stories shoot me an email.

About Me, The Author
My name is Tim Whelan. I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. I have spent most of my life around boats and have spent many summers sailing or power boating in the Pacific Northwest. I enjoy computers, photography and sailing. I am hardly what I would consider a professional writer or photographer, but I enjoy both. My undergraduate degree is in Accounting and I have MBA (concentration in Information Systems). I am happily married to my beautiful wife Amy. We have a golden retriever named Barkley. Barkley is named after Barkley Sound and not Charles Barkley (the basketball player). This is an important distinction for me, because I hate basketball, but love Barkley Sound.








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Adventures in the Charlottes was written by Tim Whelan.
All pictures and text ©Tim Whelan 1998-1999.
For useage, please see my copyright notice.