Leatherman Multitool: For Every Job - Big and Small

Chris Bray is Gear Supply’s resident adventure legend! He has traversed frozen oceans, climbed ancient ruins and photographs his adventures for Australian Geographic among other exceptional publications. In this adventure Chris Bray preps for a sailing adventure that would inspire Captain Cook!

In 2010, my girlfriend (now wife) Jess and I bought an old wooden boat together, a 29-footer, with a red chinese junk-rig sail. We bought the boat without seeing it on the other side of the world - it was sitting in a car park in Halifax, Canada while we were in Australia. We finally saved up the money to fly over and see the boat, but to our dismay we arrived to discover that it was mostly rotten wood, and if we wanted to get her ready for the water... “...it was going to take us the entire three months of our holiday to rip the boat apart, and rebuild it - while we lived out of it in the car park.” - Chris Bray. It was non-stop work, we were often up late past midnight making her seaworthy; scraping out rotten wood, fixing leaks, fixing the engine, re-wiring, adding insulation, and building a bigger cabin. One afternoon Jess decided that my scraggly hair had to go, but we couldn’t spare the time to go and find a barber. She pulled out her pink Leatherman Juice, that she uses for everything, and just started snipping away with the inbuilt scissors - she did a pretty good job, and we were back to work in no time!

By the end of that northern summer holiday, ‘Teleport’ was seaworthy. We decided to sail her back home to Australia. But rather than taking the usual boring route south to the Caribbean and across the tropical Pacific, we decided to sail north; up the Canadian coast, across the North Atlantic to the west coast of Greenland, further west through the infamous Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and Alaska, through the Arctic, and then down the dreaded Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.

We made it halfway, freezing the yacht in for the winter on a hillside on an island, and then sailed her the rest of the way through the passage when the weather warmed up again. We became the first people, and youngest couple, to ever sail a junk rig sailboat through the Northwest Passage!

We have sailed her every year since, finding amazing hidden glaciers, bays filled with bears and salmon, etc. All our efforts paid off - we now run small groups, high-end photo tours taking our guests (in luxury) to many of these magical places. I still occasionally get my hair cut by Jess and her Leatherman! See www.ChrisBrayPhotography.com.