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Hello and welcome to the Explorers Podcast.

Today is part two in our series on Matt Rutherford and the first silo non-stop circumnavigation of the Americas.

Last time we left Rutherford aboard his 40-year-old sailboat, the St. Brendan, into Beaufort Sea as he emerged out of the Northwest Passage.

Something I never mentioned the last time, but by accomplishing this, Rutherford broke the record for sailing the smallest boat through the Northwest Passage, a record he holds to this day.

That aside, two notes for today.

First, you can see a map of Rutherford's route on our website, Explorerspodcast.com.

Second, today we will wrap up the story of Rutherford's remarkable voyage.

But this series is not done, and that is because I conducted an extensive interview with Matt Rutherford, and that will be the third and final episode in this series.

That is it for notes, so let's go.

The date was September 16, 2011. Matt Rutherford sailed the St. Brendan out of the passage and into the Beaufort Sea.

It had taken him 99 days to reach this point.

He was through the Northwest Passage and headed west along the northern coast of the Yukon in Alaska.

The plan was to sail through the Bering Strait, meaning between Alaska and Russia, and then go all the way to the tip of South America and round Cape Horn.

He would then head north up to the United States and home.

What Rutherford had done was remarkable. He had endured a difficult journey, but he was still only a third of the way through his voyage.

He still had nearly 20,000 miles to go.

The good part was that Rutherford knew that the Northwest Passage would be the most difficult part of the journey.

This was because of the ice, which required him to be constantly attentive to his surroundings.

And while Rutherford had made it through the passage, there were still lots of challenges ahead, including the rounding of Cape Horn, which sport some of the roughest waters in the world.

Rutherford sailed west, then turned south into the Chukchi Sea. This took him into the Bering Strait, a roughly 50 mile or 80 kilometer wide channel that separates Alaska from Russia.

And so through the Strait went Rutherford and into the Bering Sea. These are the waters featured in the popular reality show Deadliest Catch and are famed for their treacherous conditions.

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