600 pounds of Vallejo coffee setting sail for the Arctic
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen, Vallejo Times-Herald, 05/18/15
May 19–One must carefully prepare for two months aboard ship in the Arctic, and among the indispensable supplies to be planned for, evidently, is the right coffee beans.
Vallejo artesian coffee roaster Fabrice Moschetti was contracted to ship 600 pounds of the fragrant legumes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association ship Fairweather before it sets off on a sea floor mapping mission in the Arctic, NOAA spokesmen confirmed.
“Coffee is a must-have item,” ship chef Frank Ford said in an email. “It helps keep them warm and it helps them stay alert. In our line of work, and the places we go, these are two very important things. For their well-being and safety, I for one have no desire to find out what it would be like to be around 54 coffee drinkers who have none. On a 230-foot closed space in 35-degree waters with 40 miles of ice between me and land, nope, I’m good on that one.”
The beans were scheduled to begin the first leg of their journey on Monday, Moschetti said.
“I’ve been working with these folks for a while — they do research — and a couple crew members were based in Vallejo a few years ago, though they’re usually based in Alameda, but they came to a coffee tasting, and loved the product and asked the chef on board to buy our coffee,” he said. “He came here, tried it and liked it, so now we do all their coffee.”
Moschetti said he usually ships the beans, a special NOAA blend, to Alameda, but has also shipped it farther away when that’s been necessary, as it is this time, he said.
“This time, when they placed a large order, I asked why, and the chef said they were going to the Arctic,” he said. “So, we’ll truck it to them in Alaska — and then it will go by barge to Kodiac. So, Vallejo coffee will fuel and warm the crew in the Arctic. That’s why the guy said to me, ‘No decaf!, no decaf!'”
The Fairweather is a hydrographic survey ship, designed for sea floor mapping, that was originally commissioned with the organization in 1968, according to NOAA’s website. The ship was deactivated in 1989 but reactivated in 2004, based mostly on a critical backlog of surveys for nautical charts in Alaska, it says.
The ship is scheduled to be in the Arctic from June 8 through August 14, and will then take on another project there, for the National Marine Fishery Services, testing an unmanned drone-type system, NOAA spokesman Lt. Michael Levine said when reached by phone.
NOAA spokesman David Hall added by email that the 231-foot Fairweather is named for Mt. Fairweather in southeast Alaska — the highest peak in the Fairweather Range which is the tallest coastal range on earth.
“NOAA Ship Fairweather is part of the NOAA fleet of ships and aircraft operated, managed and maintained by NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which includes both civilians and the commissioned officers of the NOAA Corps, one of the seven uniformed services of the United States,” he said.
The ship, home-ported in Ketchikan, Alaska, is equipped with the latest in hydrographic survey technology — multi-beam survey systems, high-speed, high-resolution side-scan sonar, position and orientation systems, hydrographic survey launches, and an on-board data-processing server, according to the NOAA website.
Moschetti said he sees some irony in the whole thing.
“It’s all kind of a full circle,” he said. “Vallejo, a former Navy town, is shipping coffee to a ship.”
