Kiteboarders end bid to cross Bering Strait

Troy Henkels, 43, of Eagle River, and Geza Scholtz, 28, of Switzerland, were in Wales from early August until this month, awaiting favorable weather to help push them 56 miles across the notoriously rough and windy Bering Strait.

In the end, though, they were foiled by wimpy wind barely above a whisper.

"The forecast looked quite good today, so we decided to rig up our kites, get the (support) boat ready and go," Scholtz said in a Sept. 10 diary entry on the expedition website. "We started kiting and were heading out there, and after around 10 miles the wind kept decreasing and decreasing and decreasing -- and suddenly there was no wind anymore.

"The kites just dropped in the water."

Wales is village at the western tip of the Seward Peninsula on a sandy beach regularly negotiated by villagers' four-wheelers. Only the school and the washeteria have running water, and most structures look weather-beaten as soon as they're built. When it's clear and sunny, Little Diomede Island is visible in the Bering Strait, but the weather can change in a blink of an eye and bring in banks of thick fog.

Henkels, a Matanuska Telephone Association communications technician who has kiteboarded since 1998, and Scholtz, a Swiss dentist, wiled away their days in the village of about 150 people. They exercised on land to keep fit and met many of the residents.

"It's a pretty interesting place, not only in Alaska, but in the world," Henkels said. "I feel fortunate to spend the time up there and experience it. Folks were incredibly friendly and took us right in. "

But the duo ran out of time waiting for the weather.

"This expedition is over for me," Henkels wrote in his blog. "Unfortunately, my three-week window away from my job is up."

This was the second time Henkels was thwarted in a bid to cross Bering Strait. In 2005, he and Dixie Dansercoer of Belgium attempted a crossing on foot during the winter, but strong winds and a fast-moving ice pack left the duo 55 miles south of Wales, where they were airlifted out by Evergreen Helicopters.

This time, Henkels and his partner had persistent problems with the team's support boat and weather that never turned ideal -- strong winds and relatively calm seas, which tends to occur when a northern wind flip-flops to a southern wind.

"It was slightly disappointing not to make it across," Henkels said. "The locals were kind of surprised by the lack of wind for so long."

Even when conditions near shore were favorable, there was no way to know what was going on in the middle of the strait, dozens of miles away.

"There were whitecaps out here today and it looked really good to us," Sholtz wrote of the Sept. 10 bid. "I think today we had onshore 13-14 knots and then (when we got out there) it was just going down, down, down, down.

"(Ideally) you will have on the whole strait 15 knots of wind and then you'll have no problem, but that's very unlikely."

Henkels said the duo had not decided whether to make another bid to cross the strait, which they estimated would take six to eight hours. Securing sponsorships can be taxing. An upscale Swiss timepiece maker, Maurice Lacroix, was the expedition's lead sponsor.