Jan Reyers tried to take it in stride when his father started calling him “my deviant son.” After all, his father had sailed until he was almost 70 years old, and Reyers had spent countless years sailing a Columbia 22 on Lake Superior. This was a family that lived by the wind. The mere thought of buying a boat without sails made Reyers, well, a wayward child. 

The thing is, Reyers wasn’t a kid ­anymore. He’d spent years working for 3M, and when he took on a new role with the company in Minnesota, the job required dinners with clients. He wasn’t too keen about that—but, he thought, meeting with clients could be a lot of fun aboard a boat.

There was just one problem. “On a sailboat, that wouldn’t be too ideal,” Reyers says. “That was the first time we chartered in the Pacific Northwest, to see if we could adjust to a stinkpot—uh, I mean, a powerboat.”

The thought process that Reyers went through happens in the minds of countless sailors as they move into middle age. After years of blissfully hoisting sails and rounding buoys, any number of factors can trigger the transition in thinking: a desire to do more long-distance cruising in retirement, back problems that make tacking and jibing a literal pain in the rear, or, as with Reyers, a job change that nudges the lifelong sailor to wander down the docks at the trawler section of the boat show for the first time. 

What many of these sailors soon realize is that they don’t actually have to quit sailing. Instead, they can broaden their idea of boating to include sailing and powerboating alike.

Reyers, trying to suss out his options, started booking trawler charters with companies in the San Juan and Gulf ­islands of the Pacific Northwest. He and his wife tried an Ocean Alexander, and then an Ocean Trader. Along the way, they saw a Tollycraft—a cruising boat that was built in the Pacific Northwest until the 1990s. 

“We liked the design of that and found one back in the Twin Cities,” Reyers says of the 1988 40-foot Tollycraft they ultimately purchased. “For the next eight years, we used the heck out of it on the St. Croix River. That taught us that we could survive with motors.”

Making the Mental Shift

Reyers and his wife soon realized that they enjoyed different types of boating. Reyers still loves to sail—he regularly charters Beneteaus in Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands—but eventually, he outgrew the Tollycraft.

“When it started becoming time for retirement, the entertainment thing was out the window, and I was getting bored with the river,” he says. “We got kind of captured by the thought of Alaska, and we found NW Explorations. We had seen their fleet once when we were out there, and we were really impressed with it. When we saw that they had the flotilla in Alaska, we thought it might be a good way to go cruising without buying another boat.”

NW Explorations, founded in 2004, is a charter, sales and service company based in Bellingham, Washington. Its fleet is exclusively trawlers, and it regularly offers flotilla charters in destinations such as Desolation Sound and Alaska. The charter boats can be booked with or without captains, and the flotillas always include a lead boat with a US Coast Guard-licensed captain, a marine mechanic and a naturalist to help everyone.

The flotillas visit some of the most stunning destinations for scenery and wildlife in US and Canadian waters. In Desolation Sound, boaters cruise beneath 7,000-foot-tall peaks. Boaters on the Princess Louisa flotilla typically see wildlife ranging from grizzly bears to eagles. The Alaska flotilla’s sights include orca and humpback whales, hot springs, glaciers, fjords, and more.

“We have definitely found over the years that the trawlers we have here are a good transition boat for sailors,” says Emmelina Mojica, charter manager at NW Explorations. “They just go slow and enjoy the ride. And especially with the Grand Banks boats, there is really good visibility from the helm. You feel connected with the water, as sailors do.” 

The company recommends that sailors take about three hours of boat-maneuvering lessons to adjust from single-engine maneuvering to handling a twin-screw vessel. 

“Once they do that, we find that they are really very comfortable; it actually ends up being easier than what they’re used to,” Mojica says. “It just takes a little bit of time for them to get used to it.”

That’s exactly the experience Reyers had in 2015, when he and his wife chartered a Grand Banks 42 for a flotilla cruise in Alaska. They liked it so much that they did another one, on a Grand Banks 46, in 2017, with an extra stateroom for their son and daughter-in-law to join them.

“It’s a very different experience from sailing,” he says. “Out there, you are going to be motoring anyway if you want to go up the channels to get to the fjords and glaciers. I’ve always been a guy who likes to go explore and weasel into places that are hard to get to. That was one reason we wanted to go to Alaska, just to go into gunkholes and get from one point to another in a reasonable period of time without having to rely on the wind. It’s better for that.”

John McColloch has found the same thing to be true. He’s a lifelong sailor who started out on Penguins when he was 8 years old (learning that he could sail those boats backward hooked him for life). He went on to own a Sonar class one-design, a 28-foot Alerion Express sloop, a J/42, a J/105 and his current sailboat, another 28-foot Alerion Express sloop.

But today, he is also a powerboat owner. His interest in owning multiple kinds of boats took serious hold in 2004, when he bought a 2001 Offshore 48 Sedan.

“Why did I go to the dark side? Because you can do things you can’t do in a sailboat,” McColloch says. “It’s not a speed issue; it’s the reliability-of-being-­able-to-move issue. I don’t know how many times I took the J/42 up to Maine, cleared the Cape Cod Canal, and never unfurled a sail. It takes a long time where you need to go, and a lot of times, there’s no wind. It doesn’t mean I’m not a sailor.”

The Broader Boating Life

One thing McColloch and his wife were able to do on the Offshore 48 was a route called the Down East Circle. They started in Newport, Rhode Island, and made their way up New York’s Hudson River to the Erie and Oswego Canal System, then over to Lake Ontario, then down the St. Lawrence River to the Bras d’Or Lakes, and then down the Nova Scotia and Maine coastlines. Some 2,500 miles later, they were back in Newport.

“We did that over two summers on the Offshore. It was a phenomenal trip,” McColloch says. 

Wanting to do certain types of cruising more easily is why today, in addition to his Alerion sloop that he keeps in Rhode Island, McColloch also owns a 55-foot Fleming pilothouse trawler that he keeps at the NW Exploration docks. He uses that boat not only for his own cruising in the Pacific Northwest, but also to lead group cruises with fellow members of the New York Yacht Club, as well as friends from the Seattle Yacht Club, of which he is also a member.

McColloch says he has a particularly strong memory of a fellow New York Yacht Club member who chartered a 36-foot Grand Banks and had a similar epiphany about different ways to enjoy the water. 

“We were sitting there at one of the stops, which was the private home of a member of the Seattle Yacht Club,” McColloch says. “It was 78 or 80 degrees without a cloud in the sky, and I asked him if he was having a good time. He said: ‘It’s warm and sunny, no bugs, no fog, and a lot of fun people. What’s not to like?’”

Some participants in those cruises are trying trawlers for the first time, he says, but they’re all sailors at heart.

“We all love boats,” he says. “That’s the central theme. It’s going out and finding another way to enjoy yachting and cruising with people who are like-minded.”

Reyers says that even his father has come to understand. He gave up sailing after a day when Reyers’ mother went overboard and landed between the boat and the dock on Lake Superior. “He tried to pull her out and couldn’t. He had to hook a halyard to her and winch it and pull her up,” Reyers says. “The boat was up for sale the next week. At some point, you just don’t have the energy and strength anymore.”

And all of the sudden, what Reyers was doing—messing around on trawlers in addition to sailboats—made more sense. Today, he’s planning two different charters: one aboard a Hunter 36 in the Apostle Islands, and the other in Desolation Sound aboard a 46-foot DeFever pilothouse trawler. 

For Reyers, it’s all quite simple. “I always want to be able to boat,” he says. “I don’t want to quit.”

Upcoming NW Explorations Flotillas

Want to give a trawler a try as part of a flotilla charter? NW explorations has several in the planning stages, with most charterers looking ahead to at least 2023. “Most people who do these flotillas plan at least a year in advance, if not more,” says Emmelina Mojica, the charter manager at NW Explorations. The company offers three flotillas each year. The first is a 10-day trip to Princess Louisa Inlet on the British Columbia coast. The second is a two-week trip during the last week of September and first week of October to Desolation Sound. The third is an Alaska flotilla that runs from May through the end of August, with various legs. “There are six or seven legs that we offer, and they run from two to three weeks long. People can drop in and do a two-week segment,” Mojica says. “We have one client this year who has sailed around the world and they’re doing four of the legs, but most people do one leg.”

NW Yacht Group

In August 2021, NW Explorations merged with Cooper Boating, which has a charter fleet of sailboats, powerboats and catamarans in Canada, and is a Transport Canada Recreational Boating school. Both brands are now operating under the banner of NW Yacht Group with four locations: Vancouver, Sidney and Powell River, Canada; and Bellingham, Washington. § “Both now have a larger charter pool to draw from, with access to all four locations, and in-house maintenance, repairs and detailing,” the ­companies announced. “With a broader range of services and efficiencies in how we operate, we intend to establish a leadership position in our industry.”

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When cruising-guide author and voyager Diana Doyle first approached me about contributing to her citizen-science project, Birding Aboard, I hesitated. I didn’t think I was qualified, having only just gotten into birding in a very amateur, casual way. I’m a sailor, not a birder. True, I’m a sailor who likes birds, especially the pretty ones and the comic ones, but I didn’t consider myself a birder, and certainly not any kind of scientist. I’m not always correct with my identifications and have been downright embarrassingly wrong more than a few times. With few exceptions, I don’t have the single-minded passion to do the research necessary for definitive identifications of birds of which I’m unsure. If I see a loon in winter plumage and I’m not certain whether it’s an Arctic, a Pacific or a common loon, well, I’m OK with letting it go at “loon.”

For me, the fun is much more in sighting a wild creature, appreciating its beauty, and identifying and learning about it if I can, but not really in an avian-life-list sort of way. It’s a lot like my sailing: I like the actual sailing, the ever-changing beauty of the sea, the solitude, the challenges—in short, the experience of taking a small boat across an ocean. It’s not about ticking the boxes of “circumnavigation” or “high latitudes.”

Diana managed to persuade me, though, mostly by assuring me that I could just submit incidental sightings. That way I wouldn’t have to spend my watches with notebook in hand, taking down every bird sighting complete with local time and coordinates. Instead, if I saw something that interested me enough to take a photo, I could go ahead and submit that. In short, any and all sightings are valuable to the Birding Aboard project, which catalogs the birds of the open ocean that are so underrepresented in bird counts around the world for the simple reason that not very many people spend significant time offshore.

My correspondence with Diana coincided with the voyage that my husband, Seth, and I made to Alaska and the Arctic. After extensively refitting our 30-year-old cold-molded wooden cutter Celeste, we set out from Port Angeles, Washington, for a 3,500-mile cruise to Dutch Harbor, in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. That part of the world is incredibly rich in wildlife—avian and otherwise. In our very first port of call, an inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, we came face to face with seven—yes, seven—black bears, all intent on munching the rich grasses growing at the head of the cove. Overhead, eagles and ospreys circled on the thermals wafting up from the warm land, searching the water below for fish.

Throughout that cruise, most of our wildlife sightings—except, of course, for whales, porpoises and orcas—took place in our anchorages. We were sailing against the prevailing winds, and so we’d take “bad” weather windows to make progress west, weighing anchor whenever a low-pressure system was forecast in order to take advantage of the easterly winds that accompanied them. So our passages were pretty much all windy, rainy and cold, conditions that had us in full foul-weather gear, reefing down and changing our self-steering Cape Horn’s vane to the small heavy-weather vane. Not exactly wonderful weather for noting bird sightings. Nonetheless, we were excited to spot both Laysan and black-footed albatrosses on our Gulf of Alaska crossing, as well as northern fulmars, mostly the dark-morph sort.

As we moved farther west, we delighted in the comic little puffins—tufted and horned—and in the black-legged kittiwakes breeding in huge flocks on the cliffs of headlands and islands. The variety and beauty of the birds in the wilderness of the Great Land captivated both of us. By the time we were traversing the notoriously difficult passes between the Aleutian Islands, we were fruitlessly—but intently—scanning the waves for the elusive, endemic whiskered auklet, found only there.

Read More from Ellen Massey Leonard: Cruising the Alaskan Peninsula

On our voyage north the following summer, our first destination was the Pribilof Islands, a barren, cold, windswept place that was uninhabited (for good reason) until the Russians colonized Alaska and began harvesting northern fur seals for their valuable hides. Today a small population of Aleuts continues to live there—fishing, hunting and supporting a tiny tourism industry based on, yes, birding.

The Pribilofs is the breeding ground for enormous colonies of seabirds: murres, puffins, red-faced cormorants, several different auklets, and the endemic red-legged kittiwake. For serious birders, it’s a paradise for checking off “lifers” on their lists. The red-legged kittiwake is found almost nowhere else, and the various auklets are unique to the Bering Sea and North Pacific. Seth and I don’t have life lists, but we got unabashedly into it, lying atop the sea cliffs in the sand and high grasses, craning our necks and zoom lenses to get a good look at these beautiful birds. Even fog and high winds couldn’t keep us away; we’d tramp over from the little harbor to the cliffs, bent double into the wind and swirling dust. A fun fact about this part of the world is that 35-knot winds don’t necessarily disperse fog!

At the Fourth of July festivities in the village of St. Paul, on St. Paul Island, the largest of the Pribilofs, we met Alison, a young woman leading bird tours on the island. Not having any clients during our visit—the plane couldn’t land due to high winds and fog—she offered to show us around the island in her van. It was, of course, a bird tour. She first took us to her favorite place for seeing least auklets, where we promptly got the van stuck in the wet sand and had to place flat bits of driftwood under the tires to get it out. There were lots of the cute little auklets, though, only 6 inches tall and with strikingly colored eyes. But we quickly discovered that the seabirds nesting in the cliffs were far from the only avian attraction. There were teals, eiders and long-tailed ducks, Arctic terns, semipalmated plovers and snow buntings. Alison even found a two-day-old rock sandpiper chick.

Chatting away about birds later that evening with Alison and her colleagues, we managed to make one of the colleagues—a very serious birder—absolutely green with envy when we mentioned seeing lots of fork-tailed storm petrels on our passage north from the Aleutians. These lovely, graceful birds flit effortlessly over the gale-tossed waves of the Bering Sea and, like so many pelagic birds, had completely ignored Celeste in their midst, swooping close and then away and then close again. This poor land-bound birder, it turned out, had spent the previous two days sitting behind her telescope, staring into the 40-knot stinker of a gale—fog and sand whipping around her, getting into her hair and teeth and clothes—while she hoped and prayed for a fork-tailed storm petrel to get blown down toward her. None had.

Our next stop on our Arctic voyage was the gold-rush town of Nome, where we planned to check the ice charts and satellite photographs before continuing on through the Bering Strait. The Seward Peninsula, where Nome is situated, is also one of the few places in Alaska where one can see muskoxen, a large and distinctive Arctic herbivore that’s a kind of relic of the Ice Age. Being all-round wildlife appreciators more than true birders, we first sought out the muskoxen, and they more than lived up to our expectations. But we couldn’t help but notice the birds too. Arctic terns not only have beautiful plumage, but also the longest migration route of any bird, all the way to the Antarctic and back every year! The golden plover also migrates far, from the South Pacific to Alaska via Hawaii, and is said to have guided the first Polynesians who settled Hawaii. Our most adorable sighting, though, was the merganser with her little flock of day-old fluffy chicks swimming next to her in a tight pack.

Once through the Bering Strait and up in the Chukchi Sea, the bird life just continued. As we passed Cape Lisburne—the barren brown headland where the Brooks Range meets the sea—in a rare mirror calm, the blue sky was darkened by the huge flocks of murres, flying back and forth to their nests in the cliffs. Neither of us had ever seen such enormous aggregations of birds—such a stark contrast of vibrant, dynamic life in the seemingly lifeless, harsh tundra of the Arctic.

Point Barrow, the most northerly point in the United States and the second-most northerly point on the continent, felt the same. The tundra was as alive as it ever gets, the grasses green, red and yellow, and yet the flat, windy land felt as though it couldn’t possibly support much life. Yet every way we turned dispelled that notion. Pacific white-fronted geese waddled through the grass. King eiders in their spectacular breeding plumage dotted the gray waves of the Beaufort Sea. Once again, the sky turned black with flocks of long-tailed ducks and black brants. Phalaropes, already transitioning into winter plumage, turned their characteristic circles in the shallows nearshore. Black guillemots nested on the offshore islands, and occasionally a snowy owl would swoop across the tundra, going from perch to perch, hunting ground squirrels. Out at sea, high over the frozen Arctic Ocean on the top of the world, white-morph northern fulmars glided majestically over the drifting ice floes.

We hadn’t intended for our Arctic voyage to be focused on birds. Seth and I had simply had in mind that we would see this remarkable, little-visited part of the world from the deck of our floating home. We’d been focused on the challenges inherent in sailing up there, in the harsh, volatile weather, and the cold and ice, with few bays in which to shelter.

Both of us had been looking forward to the mammal life: muskoxen, whales, various seals, maybe even walruses and polar bears. We’d been interested to meet the people native to this tundra land and hear how their lives have both changed and remained much like that of their parents and grandparents. And all of that (except, sadly, for the lack of walrus and polar bear sightings) had gone beyond anything we’d anticipated: the people more welcoming, the whales and muskoxen more numerous, and weather both worse and more rewarding than we’d wanted to believe. But to find a world so alive with so many beautiful birds was an unexpected and wonderful dividend to the voyage. And to find, when we submitted our sightings to Birding Aboard, that we’d seen a variety and quantity of birds to impress any life-list type of birder was rather more gratifying than we as amateur bird nerds really should have found it.

Writer and photographer Ellen Massey Leonard has sailed nearly 60,000 miles on rudimentary classic boats, including a circumnavigation by age 24, a voyage to the Alaskan Arctic, and two more crossings of the Pacific. She and her husband, Seth, were the 2018 recipients of the Cruising Club of America’s prestigious Young Voyager Award.

The post Birdwatching by Sailboat in Alaska’s Northern Waters appeared first on Cruising World.

The currents were running fast. The bow was pointing 45 degrees northwest of my actual course, which was through a narrow pass between the shore and a nav buoy marking an underwater ridge, the moraine of Baird Glacier. The glacier had retreated a long way since forming that moraine, several miles up the bay to where it ends a few yards from the tide line. Yet it still makes itself felt. As soon as our cutter, Celeste, raced past the buoy, the color of the water changed. The division was as stark as the Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Maine: a sharp line between the dark blue of the outside channel and the milky green of the bay’s glacial meltwater.

We’d just entered Thomas Bay in Southeast Alaska, a large indent on the mainland coast 5 miles north of Petersburg. My husband, Seth, and I had come to see the glacier and to hike the trails into the mountains. We both love to sail and love to hike, so Alaska is a perfect cruising destination, with trails climbing into empty alpine territory right from the rocky beaches.

The glacier was first on our list though. The currents ­weakened inside the bay, so Celeste lost speed until she was ­ghosting past steeper and steeper mountains. Snow became ­visible on the highest peaks. The air temperature dropped perceptibly. We donned jackets and then hats and mittens. We spotted a small growler—the first bit of ice—off the port bow. Soon the glacier hove into view, a tiny strip of grass separating it from the ocean. I slipped into the dinghy to photograph Celeste and quickly discovered how much warmer the cool air was than the frigid water. Celeste was distorted by a heat mirage, the warmer air shimmering above the glacial meltwater in which she sailed.

RELATED: A Return to Cruising in Alaska

The next morning, we woke in an anchorage halfway down the bay. A waterfall thundered off our stern, and our intended trail began just a few yards from it. Once we’d carted our dinghy, Li’l Namba, above the high tide line and tied it to a tree, we started up the moss-covered boardwalk. Past the waterfall, it became a much rougher trail, with boulders and branches to climb over. In some places, the US Forest Service had cut steps into fallen logs and covered them with fishing net to provide a grip on invariably wet wood. We skirted the edge of a cliff that plunged to a gorge of white water. Reaching a fork in the trail, we chose to climb to Upper Falls Lake. The trail was completely disintegrated; we bruised our shins on rocks and logs, and sank to our ankles in muskeg. We were probably the first people to use it in years. We turned around when we found fresh bear scat accompanied by prints: one large set and several small—a grizzly with cubs.

Back at the fork, we followed the real trail to Lower Falls Lake, where we discovered two large Forest Service row boats for hikers to use. This was an unexpected bonus: a hike and a dinghy adventure in one day! Rowing out on the placid lake, we heard the thunder of a much larger waterfall than the one in our anchorage. Then there it was, cascading down smooth rocks into the lake, wisps of spray ­flying out to catch the ­sunlight in little rainbows.

After lunch an hour or so later, we had just resecured the Forest Service dinghy when more hikers appeared, talking loudly in case of bears. Seeing us, one of them exclaimed, “Li’l Namba, I presume.” Here we were, four hours up a mountain trail, meeting fellow mariners. But that’s Alaska.

The post Waterfalls and Glaciers in Alaska appeared first on Cruising World.

Perched on Yahtzee’s high side with my back resting against the ­lifelines, I watched the early morning sunlight spread across the Gulf of Alaska to the south and the verdant mountains of the Kenai Peninsula to the north. Sailing closehauled for Kodiak Island in a fresh breeze and steep chop, green water washed over the foredeck and under our overturned dinghy while my wife, Jill, and I soaked in the scene.

Then, in what seemed like an instant, my face fell from a happy “We’re sailing!” smile to a sudden “Oh, no!” bug-eyed panic. We’ve all had this ­feeling before.

Rushing down below, I pushed quickly through the galley and saloon to the V-berth, where my fear was quickly confirmed: A lot of that water I’d been watching pour over the foredeck was now spraying like a saltwater hose into the boat. I quickly dogged the partially open hatch, surveyed the watery scene and rushed back to the cockpit, spewing choice words all the way. Though the rest of that 80-mile sail was picture-perfect and the forward cabin was no worse for the wear, I couldn’t quite shake my failure to ensure that hatch was closed.

I was disappointed in myself, because securing all ports and hatches is one of the last boxes I tick when making my rounds before heading offshore or even out for a daysail. Why I had forgotten to complete this small yet important task bothered me, and I later realized that, in this particular instance, I was still working into my groove of being underway again. Actually, our whole family was adjusting.

After a nearly two-year hiatus to top up the kitty in Seward, Alaska, and work on our beloved 1984 Grand Soleil 39, our family of four had set off a mere 10 days prior to return to the cruising life. In ­many ways, we were all finding our footing, clearing out the cobwebs of life under sail. And it certainly wasn’t just the instance of forgetting to close a hatch.

Days earlier, we’d made an error that rarely would have happened before and hasn’t happened since. In the excitement of being out exploring new places, we switched anchorages before adverse weather moved in. When it did, we began swinging uncomfortably close to a lee shore and decided to move to a more suitable spot. Ultimately, we would have been fine, but it was stressful because we’d known the weather was coming, and we weren’t on a schedule and didn’t have anywhere to be. We’d essentially gotten caught up in the moment.

Even seemingly routine things that we’d taken for granted before stopping in Alaska were being relearned and adjusted to. No longer being weekend warriors with the crutch of a nearby marina, life aboard with no shore power, abundant fresh water or a nearby fuel dock meant getting used to managing our onboard resources carefully once again.

Don’t let the faucet run too long! How many gallons of diesel do we burn per hour? Can we turn off the fridge tonight to save power?

Even the task of properly organizing the boat down below for life underway took some adjustment and revisions. Fortunately, these instances amounted to nothing more than minor annoyances, and we know it is all part of life underway on a cruising sailboat. We roll with it and learn as we go.

Personally, as an experienced sailor and cruiser, I took some of these mistakes hard because they were missteps that I pride myself in not making. In that vein, you can consider me humbled by the sea. The ocean doesn’t care about our sailor pride or ego. The best we can do is swallow it, learn from our errors and oversights, and move forward in a positive direction. Now, several months and thousands of miles later, I look back at those first two weeks of cruising with a smile. Those moments of frustration have passed far astern now, like so many miles under our keel.

The post A Return to Cruising in Alaska appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s taken me a ­s­urprisingly long time, given how much of my life I’ve spent around oceans, but I’m finally into fishing.

Fishing (and catching), I discovered as many others have before me, is the perfect complement to life aboard a sailboat. It’s fun—once you acclimate to the killing part. There’s nothing quite so delicious as truly fresh fish, and you have the great satisfaction of providing for yourself on the most basic level.

I caught my first fish 10 years ago when my husband, Seth, and I were cruising in Fiji during our circumnavigation aboard our Spartan 1968 cutter Heretic. That first fish was a 25-pound mahimahi, and it provided us with delectable ceviche once I’d gotten over the trauma of killing it. I was 22 years old and had never killed anything bigger than an insect, so knifing this beautiful fish was a lot tougher than I’d anticipated, both physically and emotionally. It took me about six hours before I was ready to eat the fish, but by then I’d decided that if I couldn’t kill something, I shouldn’t eat it, and if I had killed it, I couldn’t let it go to waste. Plus, I love mahimahi. So, we prepared it the Tahitian way—marinated in lime juice and served in coconut cream.

Seth and I continued to fish throughout our circumnavigation, catching wahoo, tuna, Spanish mackerel and more mahimahi. The strike was always exciting, and fighting them in on the hand line always a thrill. I got decent at gaffing these big fish, and we cottoned on to the trick of using alcohol in their gills to stun them before dispatching them to their fish heaven. But the actual fishing part was fairly passive; once we’d rigged up a few lures, we paid out the hand line in our wake and kept on sailing. If we weren’t catching anything, Seth would reel in the lines and tie on other lures to try something else. He enjoyed playing with different combinations, even concocting his own lures out of random bits and pieces. I couldn’t get into it though: If there was nothing biting, I preferred reading or watching the birds.

Until our last summer in Alaska.

We first sailed to Alaska five years ago aboard our current boat, a classic cold-molded wood cutter named Celeste. Having fished only for pelagic tropical species, we rigged up our hand lines as if we were on passage to Tonga. Anyone who’s fished for salmon will laugh as they read this. Unlike warm-blooded tuna, salmon swim slowly, and at depth. To troll for salmon, you need a downrigger to pull the line to 40 or so feet below the surface, and you need to drop your speed to about 2 knots. You also need to pick a good location—the salmon aren’t just anywhere. All of a sudden, you’re no longer fishing while sailing; you’re sailing in order to fish.

We couldn’t get the hang of this for two reasons. First, we hate going slow, and we were trying to cover large distances before we had to return to work ashore in the fall. We were trying to sail from Port Angeles, Washington, to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands—farther west than Hawaii—and hoping to see the Inside Passage, Prince William Sound and Katmai National Park along the way. The weather in Alaska, even in summer, isn’t consistent, so on any day with good wind, we wanted to make the most of it. And second, we really had no idea what constituted a good location for catching salmon, so we caught nothing and got more and more discouraged. Other sailors and local fishermen—both recreational and commercial—took pity on us, and, with our pride banished, we thoroughly appreciated their gifts of salmon, halibut and rockfish.

The following year, we didn’t even really try to fish. We had set ourselves perhaps our toughest goal yet—to sail to the Arctic Ocean and back to Dutch Harbor in the two months we had free from work. The distance, conditions and lack of sheltered anchorages were all challenging enough to keep us fully occupied.

RELATED: Sailing Alaska: Close Encounter with Orca Whales

Our third summer in the north was another rushed season, retracing our wake from Dutch Harbor back to Washington state, where we planned to do some big repairs to Celeste, so again we didn’t fish. It wasn’t until our final year in Alaska that we set off north with the expressed goal of catching lots of salmon. It was time to redeem ourselves.

Our first step was to contact a friend of ours in Anacortes, Washington, who is an avid sailor and fisherman. Jim has made 17 trips up and down the Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Juneau, and always has great success as an angler. He helped us enormously with several pages of tips on how to locate likely spots, and also the best gear for trolling for salmon, casting for salmon, and bottomfishing. We had a good casting setup, but we’d been loath to spend the money on a good trolling rod and reel. In the end, we went for it, justifying it by saying that it was burly enough to use as an additional line in the tropics too.

Thus armed, we set out to put in quality time inching along at 2 knots close to steep, rocky shores, preferably on an ebb tide, as per instructions. Still, we caught nothing. But then we reached Petersburg, Alaska, before Memorial Day and learned that the holiday weekend was to be the King Salmon Derby. We didn’t enter, of course, but we figured there had to be fish out there if they were having a tournament. So we tried again, this time from our dinghy, which is a 10-foot rowboat. And I got my first bite! The fish got off before I could reel it in all the way, but after that, we couldn’t not try.

We crossed the Gulf of Alaska for the Kenai Fjords in early June and quickly found a likely estuary in which to cast. We actually saw several salmon swimming where the river meets the ocean. This time I hooked one and had a long fight, letting him run out with my light casting line (not wanting it to break), and then reeling in fast when I got a chance, until, right in the shallows, he got off. I was very disappointed, but we’d both had a wonderful day casting, all alone on the banks of this beautiful river, surrounded by silent evergreens and colossal mountains, with a view of a tidewater glacier. It doesn’t get much better. Though we did vow that next time we’d wear more bug spray.

Seth and I both had so much fun that we bought another casting rod when we reached Kodiak so we no longer had to take turns. Meanwhile, though, we’d had our first success with our trolling rig. We’d set it up on a daysail in the Kenai Fjords, thinking the zephyr-like breeze would give us perfect speed for salmon fishing. Then the wind died to nothing. Not wanting to disturb the serene quiet, and also because we were running low on fuel in the middle of the wilderness, we didn’t start our engine. The trolling line sank to the seafloor, some 250 feet down, and when we brought it up, there was a fish! Not a salmon, but a black cod. Also called sablefish, black cod are valuable bottomfish that fetch high prices on the Asian market and rank among what some of our Alaskan friends term “Gucci fish”—expensive fish for fancy people. We filleted and grilled it, and its creamy white meat was just as ­scrumptious as you’d expect.

We caught two more bottom feeders this way—two rockfish off the coast of Kodiak. They were some of the most difficult fish we’d ever filleted—between their venomous spines and slippery, scaly bodies—but they were a real treat on the plate, once again just grilled with a little butter.

Then we got down to the real business of catching salmon. We found an estuary where it appeared that a lot of salmon were running; commercial set nets dotted the bay. From the fishermen who operated these nets, we learned that we had found a run of pinks and sockeyes (or “reds,” so called for their deep red flesh). Sockeyes are one of the most sought-after salmon, but we didn’t catch any of those this time. As we cast again and again into the brackish water, only the pinks would bite our lures. Our fishermen friends confirmed this: The sockeye won’t bite at all once they come in from their offshore feeding grounds. To get sockeye, you have to snag them and, as easy that sounds, there’s a definite knack to it—and neither Seth nor I seemed to have it.

It’s a measure of our success with the pinks, however—and with our accelerating ­excitement over our success—that one day, when we were higher up the river than usual, we didn’t even notice as a young brown bear entered our territory. No doubt he thought it was his territory. He started lunging at the water with his front paws, not in a charge, but in something that looked like it could become one if we lingered. It surely didn’t help that we had a bucketful of bloody fish at our feet.

Both of us wanted to cede the creek to him, but we were trapped. We couldn’t get in our dinghy and row upstream and away from him because the water had become much too shallow. Nor could we row downstream because then we’d go right toward him, and the creek wasn’t broad where he was making his menacing stand. And, of course, this was the one day we’d forgotten both our bear spray and our 12-gauge shotgun, the latter of which would certainly have scared him off.

So, like dimwits, we just stood there, frozen. The bear climbed back up his bank and started through the grass, upstream, toward us. We scrambled to get our gear back in the dinghy in preparation to make as much of a dash for it as our oars could manage, once he was abreast of us and no longer downstream. But he just strolled right past. I was still all for getting out of there, but, now that the immediate danger was past, Seth was keen to keep casting. He got in one or two more before the bear appeared in the grass of the opposite bank. We quickly beat our retreat, happily still with our bucketful of fish.

Over the days we were anchored off this creek, we’d caught about a dozen salmon and felt that we’d finally redeemed ourselves. Not only had we finally caught fish, we’d caught so many that we couldn’t eat them all. Time for a little smoking. We turned our little Sea-B-Q into a smoker by adding green alder branches to it and turning the flame down low. That was step one. Step two was to can the meat in Mason jars in our big pressure canner. The canner does 16 half-pint jars (or eight pint jars) at a time and fits fairly easily on Celeste’s Force 10 galley range burners. Pressure canning is both safer and more forgiving than water-bath canning, and is the only safe way to can fish. Following a long afternoon and evening, we had 24 jars of smoky-flavored salmon preserved. Not only had we provided ourselves with dinner, we’d even provisioned our boat ourselves!

Now we were really and ­truly into it. As all anglers know, casting in a quiet river is one of the most calming, meditative, peaceful joys of life. This is (hopefully) punctuated by the thrill of a strike and the excitement, but at the same time, the controlled finesse of fighting and landing the fish. Then comes the satisfaction of cooking and eating something you didn’t buy.

So, although we were now sailing around with two dozen pint jars of salmon, we couldn’t help fishing yet again when we were back in the Kenai Fjords at the height of the sockeye run. I got another big pink for dinner on our first night anchored off the rivermouth, but the next day, things kicked into high gear.

Two Piper Cub planes appeared in the west, circled the fjord, and made superb bush landings on the beach. The pilots emerged with waders, rods and nets—two old friends out for a day’s fishing. Both men were in their 80s and had lived in Alaska for years. And could they fish! One cast and they’d have a sockeye, and another and another. And remember, the sockeye don’t bite lures. These guys were snagging the reds (snagging is legal in salt water), and we could tell that there was a definite technique to it. As we got to talking, they started to teach us: how to discern a school coming close; just how to cast into them and let the big snag hook sink a little; and then how to jerk fast and hard to catch the hook in one of the fish. Depending where you snag a salmon, you can be in for a long, hard fight. Snagging in the tail is the best, or worst, depending on how tired you are.

Snagging needs heavier line than I had on my reel, so I lost two or three hooks before I landed my first sockeye. Seth was better at it, and landed four salmon—a pink and three reds—before I finally got my sockeye toward early evening. I was all excited and ready to cast again when the resident black bear appeared. We’d seen him in the morning—in fact, we’d had to abandon our fancy Canon DSLR camera to his investigations (which fortunately ended safely for all involved)—and now here he was again, probably just curious. But after fishing all day for that one sockeye, there was no way I was going to be parted from my hard-earned catch. The dinghy was between me and the bear, so when I grabbed the bucket and ran for the dinghy (and in the direction of the bear), I so surprised him that he booked it into the trees. Seth and I launched the dinghy and rowed for home. The bear had to eat too, after all.

Back in the Inside Passage and heading south at the beginning of September, we trolled for silver, or coho, salmon, the last to come in for spawning. We must have picked a good spot because we got three bites and landed two, all within 20 minutes. They were our biggest fish yet and the first salmon we’d caught by trolling. Now we felt fully redeemed: We’d caught every type of salmon except king, and we’d joined the ranks of Alaskans who stock their larders each year with their own catch. When we said goodbye to Alaska, a shower of green Aurora Borealis lighting up the sky in our wake, we had over 50 jars of salmon to eat on the passages ahead of us.

Now that we’re back in the tropics, with the old hand lines trailing for tuna and wahoo, I haven’t lost my newfound passion for fishing. I miss the casting and the snagging, but the thrill of hooking a huge, pelagic gamefish is really one of the most exciting things afloat. And it’s great to finally have the roles reversed from our first Alaskan summer. No longer the sad, fishless cruisers hoping for a handout, Seth and I were happily giving away our excess catch as we sailed through Polynesia. And, of course, serving as hors d’oeuvres (read: showing off) our home-canned, home-smoked, self-caught Alaskan salmon.

Ellen Massey Leonard has been sailing offshore since age 20, when she and her husband, Seth, set off to voyage around the world. Following their circumnavigation, they sailed extensively in Alaska and the Arctic before returning to the South Pacific via Mexico, celebrating 50,000 miles on the crossing.

Alaskan Fishing Regulations

Alaska’s fish stocks are still holding up well in a world of overfishing thanks to strict regulations, enforcement by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and a culture of self-control. Booklets with the current sport-fishing regulations for each region (Southeast, South Central, etc.) are freely available in all fishing stores, harbor offices and tourism bureaus. They include information on seasons, bag limits and size limits for all species of interest, including shellfish; allowable gear; and special regulations for specific waters, fresh and salt. They also have useful pictures to help identify your catch, instructions for deepwater release of rockfish, and tips for fishing in bear country and for killing and cleaning your catch most effectively. All fishermen must obtain a license; nonresidents may choose between licenses good for one day, three days, one week, two weeks or a year. The annual nonresident license costs $145. If you plan to fish for king salmon, you’ll need an additional king salmon stamp.

Fishing Gear

All anglers have their own gear and tricks, of course, but this is what we have aboard Celeste:

• Two light casting rods (one for each of us) with 12-pound-test line on the reels.
• An assortment of spinners and spoons with small treble hooks for casting for salmon and Dolly Varden trout, and a bunch of weighted treble hooks for snagging salmon. (Heavier line would be better for snagging.)
• A 7-foot heavy rod with 80-pound-test line on the reel for trolling for salmon and bottomfishing. (You can use as light as 50-pound, but we wanted it to use it in the tropics too.)
• A planer, a big flasher, and an assortment of “twinkle skirts” for trolling for salmon.
• A variety of leaders, swivels, snaps, weights and the like for rigging different setups, depending on what we’re targeting.
• A hand-line reel with 300-pound-test line for tropical fishing, and bungees to prevent shock loading when a fish strikes.
• Bigger spoons for wahoo, and lots of different plastic squids and jet heads for mahimahi and tuna.
• Gloves for hand-lining and for handling Alaskan rockfish.
• A net for landing salmon and a gaff for tropical fish.
• A small club (or a rock) for killing salmon, and a bigger club, cheap liquor, and an incredibly sharp knife for stunning and then killing tropical fish.
• A big cutting board and long, sharp filleting knife for cleaning and preparing.

The post Sailing for the Fishing appeared first on Cruising World.

Seated comfortably in the cockpit on my second watch of the night, I set my book down on the cushion next to me to check the spinnaker and ­mainsail, and scan the horizon. All good.

A steady southerly drew us forward toward Kodiak Island, which was still a couple hundred miles to the west. Along with the swell, I could see the breeze on the water, illuminated by the moon. Over my shoulder and just above the southern horizon, it was full and glowing bright, sending a shaft of light across the water that seemed to extend all the way to us.

Fine on the port bow and above the mast, Jupiter twinkled like a sparkling, icy jewel. To starboard, the sun had set just over two hours prior, but a dusky, bruise-colored sky remained. Basically, it was still light out.

Picking up our ship’s log, I slid the green mechanical pencil from the top of the clipboard and, after the time and date — 0120 on July 8 — the first note I made was short and to the point: “Gorgeous early morning. Stunning.”

The next thing I jotted down was the distance since leaving Sitka: 242 ­nautical miles. We were nearly smack in the ­middle of the Gulf of Alaska, and I couldn’t have been happier. My wife, Jill, and our boys, Porter, 4, and Magnus, 2, slept peacefully down below, snuggled in their bunks with the sway of the boat and sound of the ocean.

In my glory. I was home.

Getting Here

Our track from Sitka to Kodiak started on a rainy Fourth of July. After three ­beautiful weeks cruising with us aboard our 1984 Grand Soleil 39, Yahtzee, Jill’s mom was set to fly out of Sitka on the fifth, and then it was go time for us. But where?

Having spent two and a half months in southeast Alaska already, we were set to move. Jill and I get antsy, and we ­wanted to see more of her massive home state. Plus, Yahtzee needed to stretch her legs on the ocean again. So we devised a monthlong plan that would have us sailing north to Prince William Sound, west to the Kenai Peninsula and then south to Kodiak Island. Cruising plans are tough though, especially for us. We don’t like them.

Instead, we defer to our tried-and-true method of letting the weather decide and then routing accordingly. The ­weather rules, and in Alaska, especially on the ­formidable Gulf of Alaska, it’s everything. Being in Sitka and looking for a weather window to head north, what we didn’t want was anything out of the north. We were ­absolutely not beating, and if the wind was going to be west, it better be moderate to light, because there is a lot of fetch on the Gulf for a nasty swell to develop. And if we didn’t get the weather we liked, we’d just make a different plan. Simple as that.

When I started analyzing what weather we’d see upon the vast reaches of the Gulf from July 6 to about July 10, I noticed something we’d like, a southerly wind. If that forecast held, Prince William Sound was a green light.

As go time neared, the southerly ­forecast was staying firm, but the wind was supposed to be light at times, moderate at others. No problem, I thought. Let’s just get out there and see what we’ve got. Clearing Sitka’s breakwater on ­July 6, Jill’s birthday, Porter and I raised the mainsail and turned west toward the open ocean — destination unknown.

At that point, we still hadn’t decided where we were headed exactly, and were going to leave it up to the wind. Moving out past conical Mount Edgecumbe, I ­assessed our current situation, plus the latest weather information we had, and gave an analysis as to what we could expect over the next three to four days. Just before losing cell service, I texted my mom and dad to update Yahtzee‘s float plan: “The way the wind is shaping up on the Gulf of Alaska, don’t be surprised if we end up on Kodiak Island. But we probably won’t make the decision for a day or two.”

Related: The Far North West

We lost cell service, and just like that, Yahtzee spilled out into the North Pacific Ocean, sailing fast on a broad reach to the west-northwest. That’s when we seriously started thinking about Kodiak as our first landfall.

Knowing the southerly wind was ­going to be light over the next three to four days, we reasoned, why try to slog ­downwind when we could keep some ­apparent wind whipping through the sails while power-reaching fast to the west? We could essentially sail across the wind on a f­aster beam reach, and then from ­Kodiak we could turn north and hit the Kenai ­Peninsula before ending up in Prince ­William Sound. Decisions, decisions.

The Passage

Shortly after clearing the ­Southeast ­Alaska coast, we settled onto our ­fastest point of sail, flying our big blue ­asymmetrical spinnaker. Beam-­reaching due west now in a light southerly, our ­options turned into only one outcome: We were going to Kodiak Island.

It was about this time when the sun came out in earnest. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t mind the rain, but after several weeks of seemingly unending downpours, drizzle and gray skies, the Gulf of Alaska rewarded us with splendid sunshine, blue skies and puffy popcorn clouds that were reminiscent of trade-wind passages Jill and I had experienced years before.

As was predicted, though, the southerly wind came and went. Up and down went the spinnaker. In and out rolled the genoa. And on and off went the engine. From ­Sitka, we had roughly 550 miles to go ­until Kodiak Island, but the distance never seemed to matter. Ever.

In the realm of time and space, we hadn’t really planned to sail all the way to Kodiak when we left, but deciding to go there while already underway didn’t really seem much of a bother. We plodded along happily, slept, ate, stood watch, played, blew bubbles, read and horsed around like we would have on any normal daysail from point A to B.

But the reality of our situation was that we were crossing a very large body of ­water that, even in summertime, is known for being inhospitable to commercial fishermen, let alone recreational sailors. From Edgecumbe Point, near Sitka, to the channel entrance to St. Paul’s Harbor, Kodiak Island, we didn’t see a single boat. Nearly four days and nights with no vessel traffic. None.

I guess that’s saying something, though our reality was we were just moving with a favorable breeze and nearly sailed the rhumb line along the entire route. We might not have come across another human soul out there, but the North Pacific Ocean wilderness and its beauty more than made up for any human contact we ever could have had.

Along the way, we spotted every ­manner of seabird, including the ever-present black-footed albatross, shearwaters, puffins, gulls and birds we still don’t know how to identify. Pacific white-sided dolphins played on the bow wake at 0400. ­Minke whales breached around us on a ­daily ­basis, and a large pod of orcas passed on our ­starboard side one night during ­dinner in the nonchalant way that residents of our familiar San Juan Islands wave by just ­raising a finger or two off the steering wheel to signal hello. Hello, indeed.

Overall, our spinnaker was everyone’s best friend. Not only did it provide the speed we needed to beam-reach ­smoothly to the west on a forgiving sea, but it was also a source of work and banter as it went up and down with the rise and fall of the wind. And when the kite or genoa weren’t flying, it was up to our engine to pick up the slack and keep us moving toward a landfall that always seemed very distant yet easily attainable.

Besides ably and confidently standing her night watches, Jill is an absolute ­wizard offshore and can keep a crew of kids, men or women going no matter what the ­conditions. Fortunately, the weather was mostly flawless, and her steady hand at passagemaking with a crew of 2- and 4-year-old boys was a sight to behold. Sure, when all was said and done, we had our moments as a family, but for the most part, we could have kept going, day after day after day.

As for our own wildlife, Magnus and Porter found a rhythm offshore that was all their own. Yes, they acted their ages at times, but for the most part they were the kids who had grown up on Yahtzee since they were hours old. Trimming sheets, walking decks with harnesses and ­tethers, begging to steer, eating everything in sight and reading everywhere possible on the boat, they didn’t seem to skip a beat. And when I think about their overall ­behavior at sea, I have to say they are true ­watermen, practicing knots, calling out wave troughs and crests, telling me which line is which, and so on.

Landfall

Just like that, four glorious days of sunshine, sailing and a bit of motoring came to an end much how the planning phases of the voyage had begun — in the rain. We were sopping wet, but at least used to it since we’d been cruising year-round for three years in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska. But this passage was our family’s longest together, and was, by all measures, one of the most memorable ­experiences we’ve had aboard Yahtzee.

Approaching the verdant and unfamiliar mountains of Kodiak Island, it was hard to believe we were actually seeing this. Had we even meant to come here in the first place?

Clearing the safe water and lateral buoys into St. Paul Harbor, I jibed us while motorsailing, and then 2-year-old Magnus said in a matter-of-fact sort of way, “Dad, shut off the engine. Let’s sail in.” I could hardly believe my ears, yet it seemed fitting.

Shutting down the engine and sheeting in to clear the buoys and fetch the harbor entrance, I had almost forgotten where we were and how we’d arrived here.

In my mind, I guess, it didn’t really ­matter. We were all home on the sea — in our glory.

Andy Cross and family have been cruising and living aboard their Grand Soleil 39, Yahtzee, for over six years.

The post Family Cruising in Alaska appeared first on Cruising World.

No sailor can fail to have at least some sense of excitement whenever marine mammals appear. Whether you sight the characteristic spout of a sperm whale far off on the horizon or watch a pod of dolphins ride your bow wave, it’s always an occasion for wonder, appreciation and, of course, a scramble for the camera! After four summers sailing Alaska, I still reach for the binoculars every time I see a humpback, numerous though they are. I still rush to the bow to watch Dall’s porpoises dart around the boat, and I always smile to see sea otters lazing on their backs. If my husband, Seth, or I spy the tall dorsal fin of an orca, it’s time to luff the sails or — if we’re motoring — throttle back to neutral and watch them till they grow small in the distance. This summer, upon leaving Kodiak for our slow-paced return to Washington state, Seth and I were debating making an overnight passage across Shelikof Strait or breaking the trip into two days. A perfect 15-knot northeasterly had beckoned us on the overnight, but the tiring days in town, doing chores, working and socializing rather more than was good for our livers, meant that in the end we opted to put into an anchorage. We slept soundly, but regretted our decision when morning dawned without a breath of wind and with thick, damp fog. We weighed anchor around 0700 and puttered out of the cove and then west to cross Shelikof Strait, feeling a bit glum. Very slowly, though, the fog began to lift and we could see the hills of Kodiak Island on the beam. Astern, we caught a glimpse of the Canadian yacht that shared our anchorage. She seemed to be coming along on our course.

Then we saw the orcas. The first ones we spotted were spouting to the south of us but coming our way, so we throttled back and waited, zoom lens at the ready. One of the whales in particular had a huge fin, the patriarch of the pod. Dall’s porpoises were cavorting around them, their quick splashes and rushing speed a contrast to the more stately orcas. While that group approached, we sighted another to the northeast, apparently on a converging course. In all, there must have been more than a dozen, probably more like 15 whales!

Soon, the Canadian yacht had caught up to us and was also watching the show, drifting along in the calm. The orca pod swam between our two boats, unperturbed by our presence. From a photography point of view, it was one of the best coincidences of our time in Alaska: a pod of one of the most iconic cetacean species, surfacing right in front of a yacht built to sail the kind of waters where such animals live.

The wind piped up an hour later, and we were off across the strait on a tearing beam reach. It turned out that we were all bound for the same anchorage, so Seth and I were able to meet Ken and Carol on board Voyageur. They had left their Ontario home some years ago and sailed a big Atlantic loop before transiting the Panama Canal and sailing north to Alaska via Hawaii and British Columbia. Seth and I have sailed some of the same waters on our circumnavigation and subsequent Alaskan voyages, but none of us had ever seen a better show of whales.

The post Sailing Alaska: Close Encounter with Orca Whales appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s not often that you get buzzed by a Coast Guard helicopter wondering what you could possibly be doing so far from civilization. But then, it’s rare to be sailing a wooden cutter toward the U.S.-Russia border in the Bering Sea in the first place. My husband, Seth, and I were a few miles away from the border — an imaginary but important line across the heaving, gray seas — on a cold, overcast day in July when the helicopter appeared. Our American voices blithely responding over the VHF that we were bound to Nome, Alaska, and thence to Barrow, to see the northernmost point of our country, satisfied them, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were privately still mystified. A little wooden sailboat? Heading for the churning seas of the Bering Strait and the hard plates of ice covering most of the Alaskan Arctic? Crazy. Maybe, but then again, maybe not. Seth and I had done the “30-year refit” that was due on our cold-molded cutter, Celeste, at Platypus Marine in Washington state a year and a half earlier. It had included a Kevlar belt at the waterline to protect against ice, a new diesel engine, new satellite communications from OCENS, new electronics, a revamped electrical system that included new Rolls AGM batteries, and all kinds of safety equipment down to a Katadyn Survivor manual desalinator in our ditch bag.

Even if we were prepared — and experienced, with almost 40,000 miles under our life vests — we might still be crazy, because why would anyone sail up there? Why risk the ice? Why endure the cold and the nauseating waves? Our answer was simply that we wanted to see the Arctic Ocean from the deck of our own little boat. That’s akin to Everest explorer George Mallory’s “Because it’s there” and mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary’s “You really climb for the hell of it” — not a very satisfactory reply for those who don’t share the same desire, but the truth.

In 2014, we had made — to our minds — a breathtaking voyage northwest from Washington state to the Aleutian Islands (see Cruising the Alaskan Peninsula). We’d observed black bears and sea otters on western Vancouver Island, sailed past waterfalls dropping hundreds of feet to the sea, gawked at the snowcapped peaks of southeast Alaska and picked our way among icebergs calving off glaciers in Prince William Sound. We’d marveled at humpback whales bubble-net feeding and brown bears fishing for salmon. At the end, we’d reached the misty islands of the Aleutians, a forgotten outpost of America that lies farther west than Hawaii.

Instead of retracing our steps in 2015, however, we swung the bow north out of Dutch Harbor. As we hoisted sail, the mountains and glaciers of the Aleutians behind us glowed in the sunset. Ahead lay the Bering Sea, Bering Strait and the Arctic Circle. Two days passed among lumpy seas, 20-knot southeast winds and hundreds of seabirds: murres, fulmars, storm petrels, even a Laysan albatross. We even saw a humpback whale spy-hopping, just before we reached the Pribilof Islands.

Originally uninhabited, the Pribilofs served as a kind of penal colony for Russians and enslaved Aleut natives, who turned the fur seal population into coats and hats, but are now — more happily — known for their nesting seabirds. Being amateur bird nerds and obsessive wildlife enthusiasts, Seth and I spent several days — in rain, fog and sun — lying above the cliffs, training binoculars on red-faced cormorants, crested auklets, tufted puffins and red-legged kittiwakes. We crouched in blinds to watch bull fur seals bark at each other over their harems, and we hid behind rocks to photograph the blue morph arctic foxes that are endemic to the Pribilofs. We also made friends with the fishermen sharing the harbor with us and celebrated our coldest and windiest Fourth of July ever in a modern Aleut community.

There are in fact three definitions of the “Arctic:” the Arctic Circle (66° 33” N), the timberline and the 50-degree-­Fahrenheit summer isotherm. The Arctic Circle is the best known, but in terms of climate, the latter two are actually better definitions. They exclude most of Scandinavia, which is warmed by the Gulf Stream, and some of interior Alaska, Canada and Russia, but they include all of Greenland, the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. Climatically, we were already well into the Arctic.

Certainly our next passage, 500 miles to Nome, felt arctic. Despite the fog, we had almost no darkness, only three hours of twilight. And despite our well-insulated boat, we slept in two layers of long underwear in sub-zero-rated sleeping bags. We were bundled in down jackets, foul-weather gear and insulated sea boots when the Coast Guard helicopter buzzed us.

Surprisingly, though, when we reached Nome itself, we discovered why most of mainland Alaska isn’t included in the 50-degree isotherm: It actually heats up in summer! Off came the layers as soon as we’d maneuvered Celeste into the dock, and we reveled in sunshine and 65-degree highs.

A generous local couple took us under their wing there. They regaled us with tales of their own Arctic voyages, of winters in Nome with the Bering Sea frozen, and of Iditarod sled-race champions they’d hosted. They took us fishing and pointed out the exact spot on the river where gold was discovered in 1898, starting the rush that created Nome. Today Nome is still a ­miner’s town: homemade dredging boats vacuum up rocks from the seabed and sluice them for nuggets. We shared the dock with several dredge-boat miners, and like gold rushers from the beginning, there were some hard workers and more big talkers.

Best of all, our new friends lent us bicycles to explore the vast Seward Peninsula on which Nome is just a speck. Pedaling along dirt roads, we found the hilly tundra alive with its short summer breeding season. Red-throated loons patrolled their ponds; arctic terns dived at our heads; a mother merganser fed her newborn flock. Most exciting — and high on our list of hoped-for Arctic sightings — were the four herds of muskoxen we saw. Musk oxen are a relic from before the last ice age, a ­prehistoric-looking creature with big horns and long, fragrant guard hair (hence the name musk ox) covering some of the warmest fur on Earth. Their range has been much reduced, and the Seward Peninsula was the only place on our voyage we could hope to see them. So it was with near disbelief that we spotted our first placid giant munching tundra plants.

Summer in the Arctic is short, so we couldn’t linger with the musk oxen if we wanted to voyage farther north. Consequently, Seth and I set out from Nome in worse conditions than we’d have liked. Beating against strong westerlies in order to round the Seward Peninsula and get into the Bering Strait was slow thanks to the steep chop that tried hard to stop Celeste dead. The strait’s ripping currents then helped us north, but they added to the already sickening motion of 100-foot-deep water and a 30-knot breeze. To add insult to injury, pea-soup fog enveloped us despite the high winds. Conditions didn’t improve for three days — we crossed the Arctic Circle still shrouded in fog and lashed by spray — until the wind clocked into the north. At first this was a relief, but the forecast called for it to build, reaching 30 knots two days later. We didn’t want to spend days beating against that, especially given the short, nasty chop of the shallow Chukchi Sea. But there was nowhere to hide. The only place was 50 miles behind us: Point Hope, a low peninsula that would block the waves if not the wind. It turned out that nothing better could have happened than our retreat. Point Hope was everything we’d anticipated when we dreamed up the voyage. At first glance, the peninsula appeared flat and bleak, with dust swirling through a modern Iñupiat village. But then we saw the blue foothills of the Brooks Range rising in the east, and the sun circling low in the sky but never touching the horizon. It brought a sense of eternity. We witnessed wildflowers flaunting their vibrant colors, ground squirrels hurrying to their burrows and a regal snowy owl lifting off from his whalebone perch. We watched thousands of gulls and terns, spotted seals, salmon, belugas and gray whales.

Seth and I also got to know some of the villagers, who showed us the deep human history of the place. Point Hope has been continuously inhabited longer than anywhere else in North America, and the modern residents have retained a traditional way of life. The last person to move out of her sod and whalebone igloo did so in 1975, and many people still use permafrost cellars to keep their whale meat cold in the summer. Racks of drying salmon lined the pebbled beach, and even smartphone-wielding teenagers described the spring whale hunt — in open sealskin umiaks propelled by wooden paddles — with enthusiasm.

So it was hard to tear ourselves away when southerly arrows appeared on our GRIB charts. But sail we did. The anchorage was an open roadstead exposed to the south for 200 miles, and as wet and nauseating as the low-pressure system would undoubtedly be, it was our only chance to reach Point Barrow.

For nearly 10 months a year, the Beaufort and Chukchi seas surrounding Point Barrow are frozen and impassable. In July, the sea ice along the coast breaks up and, if southerly winds push the pack and floes north, an alley of open water appears. In 2012, this was more a 12-lane highway than an alley, but 2013, 2014 and 2015 had colder summers, with more ice. Seth and I had watched the ice charts, satellite images and webcams closely while we were in Nome and had seen the ice stick stubbornly to the shore. The northerlies we’d had while at Point Hope had kept it there: The one other pleasure craft we’d met — a big motorsailer in Nome — had emailed us to report getting badly stuck in 70 percent ice near Barrow. We’d also been in touch with Jimmy Cornell, bound on his Northwest Passage transit, who reported similarly. But these strong southerlies, we hoped, would push it off.

Ellen and Seth ran with a husky dog team over the tundra outside Barrow.

This time, we left in the calm before the storm and motored through glassy water. We passed the cliffs of Cape Lisburne where the Point Hope Iñupiat harvest seabird eggs by dangling on ropes. The place was teeming with murres — thousands upon thousands — one of the awe-inspiring sights of an Arctic summer. Then low pressure overtook us and we had yet another taste of the white-crested chop that comes with high winds and a shallow ocean. Two days later, we successfully rounded Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, at 71.4° N.

We were lucky: The ice had retreated as we’d expected, and the strong winds moderated just long enough for us to navigate the 8-foot-deep entrance to Barrow’s lagoon. Once inside, it wasn’t long before we made friends with the locals; ours was the only sailboat they’d seen all year, and possibly the only one ever to make Barrow its destination rather than a place to scrounge for fuel for a Northwest Passage transit. Very soon we were running with a dog team on its summer exercises, playing on ATVs and exploring the endless tundra.

On a tip from a scientist, we took a day to sail north to the polar pack ice and look for walruses. We didn’t find any, though we did see gray whales and ringed seals. But my strongest impression was of the ice itself. Seeing the ocean in a frozen state filled me with a sense of awe. The uplifted and twisted shapes of pressure ridges marched into the distance as far as we could see. White, foamy floes drifted all around us, and as we approached even closer, I could hear surf breaking as the liquid swell met the solid Arctic ice cap.

One day the National Weather Service announced that the sun would set that night. It would rise less than an hour later, but it marked an important transition. Then, a week later, great flocks of birds darkened the sky, and we knew it was time to leave the Beaufort Sea and head south. Black brants, white-fronted geese and long-tailed ducks gathered by the thousands on tundra ponds to begin their own southerly migration. So as soon as a moderately hopeful forecast came over both the VHF and GRIBs, we weighed anchor.

The rhumb line back to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians was a little over 1,200 miles, but we must have sailed a good deal more. At first, we could lay a course to the Bering Strait, and we flew along, averaging 8 knots before a ripping northeasterly. This time we could actually see the famous waterway: The Diomede Islands — one American, one Russian — and St. Lawrence Island were wreathed in cloud. Then the wind came south and we ceased to make headway on our course, so we hove to. When the breeze came southwest, we made two long tacks to reach Nunivak Island, where we planned to wait out the southerlies at anchor. But that was not to be: A northwesterly drove us out of the exposed anchorage, only to clock back into the southwest at 35 knots. Fortunately, we’d made enough westing to be able to reach for a day without hitting land; then finally the wind came north again and let us lay our course to Dutch Harbor. On the last day, we forgot all our travails as we dropped off the continental shelf and regained the long, smooth swells of deep water. Before we knew it, we were back in Dutch, snug among the Deadliest Catch boats and already reminiscing about the Arctic.

Was it crazy? Probably. But we’d witnessed the Arctic Ocean from the deck of our own little sailboat, seen rare birds and animals, learned about Iñupiat culture and run with a dog team. In the end, not a bad way to spend the summer.

Ellen Massey Leonard has a new video channel! Watch Ellen and Seth’s adventures at Gone Floatabout.

The post The Far North West appeared first on Cruising World.

Green mountains tucked us into the quilted mattress of gray water spreading to the stone-lined shore. Seals popped their heads through the glassy surface that mirrored tall trees, wispy clouds and a boat of three women rowing toward a nook in the green. We were simply looking for a shallow spot to anchor to wait for the tide to turn so we could continue on into Johnstone Strait on the east side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Instead, we found ourselves tied up to an empty dock in an idyllic cove with an army of playful seals entertaining us into the evening.

Before I could help myself, I turned to my crewmate Katy and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to stay a bit longer?” She sighed. I winced, ready for her reply. “Jenny, this is a race. It’s called Race to Alaska, not cruise.” Now it was my turn to sigh. We had to pass by all these cute little towns, secluded anchorages and humpback-filled bays. Or, on this particular evening, we dipped in for a few hours of rest before pushing on into a foggy and windless morning as we tried to keep ahead of the other teams. Why was I doing this to myself? I’m a cruiser, darn it. I mean, I enjoy sailing for sailing’s sake, but I equally love the exploration of new waterways and the journey that begins when the sails come down.

And yet, this racing thing … it was ­starting to infect me, kind of like the ­cruising bug. As much as I wanted to poke around the anchorage, I felt the race beckoning me back on track. I wanted to be out among my new community of competitors clawing our way to Alaska.

We were participating in the second annual Race to Alaska, affectionately known as R2AK, a 750-mile race from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska. R2AK rules stipulate that no motors or preplanned support are allowed, but stopping to buy things along the way is fair game. That’s basically it for guidelines. Competitors could sail, paddle, row, drift or do whatever they needed to do to get to the finish on whatever kind of craft they wished (entrants included everything from paddleboards to fancy racing ­trimarans). According to the R2AK website: “It’s in the spirit of tradition, exploration and the lawless self-reliance of the gold rush that Race to Alaska was born. R2AK is the first of its kind and North America’s longest ­human- and wind-powered race, and currently offers the largest cash prize for a race of this type.” The first-place prize is $10,000 in cash; the second-place finisher receives a set of steak knives.

Games of train dominoes excluded, I was finding several similarities to cruising that were stoking my fire. We racers were deemed crazy by land-loving folks — just like cruisers. The 750-mile race ­without engines was reminiscent of much of the cruising I’d ­done on my own sailboat, cursed with a faulty transmission and lacking reliable communication devices. And the 5200-strength bonds I was forming with racing sailors were setting up just as quickly, and I knew would last as long as those I still had with cruisers I’d met long ago.

That bond was how I ended up in the Race to Alaska.

I met Katy Stewart 14 years ago on another 750-mile jaunt. That time it was southbound toward sunny beaches instead of northbound to snow-capped peaks. We were part of the “kids” crowd doing the Baja Ha-Ha rally down the coast of Baja California, Mexico. At the time, we were in our mid-20s, sailing classic-plastics with our partners. They were on a Golden Gate 29; we were on a Kendall 32. Our two boats were the smallest and slowest in the fleet, often arriving into ports a day or two after everyone else.

None of us had seen the Baja Ha-Ha as a race, but rather as a deadline to stop working on our tired boats, untie the dock lines, and get cruising. We’d seen too many potential cruisers languishing in marinas fixing up “one last thing.” We knew we could easily fall into that trap with all the work our boat needed, so we threw the solar panels and uninstalled SSB down below and ghosted from the dock. We also saw the rally as a great way to meet other cruisers. Little did I know then that we would forge friendships that would last the ebbs and floods of time and distance.

I hadn’t seen Katy in about six years when she messaged out of the blue, “Want to race to Alaska with me?”

“Hell, yes!” was my immediate reply, even though I had a new catering company to run, chickens to supervise, and a garden to tend. How could I not go sailing?

Katy, like some sailors, has settled down, had kids, and works a 9-to-5 job. I have had a less-conventional life working and cruising on sailboats up until recently, so my anchor is a little less set. It’s been a blessing (sailing!) and a curse (the inability to stabilize on land). There is a veil that is lifted when you live on a boat for an extended period of time, especially in your 20s. As an older cruiser in a Mexican anchorage once told Katy, “You know you’ve messed up your life, right?” He didn’t mean it in the way that many folks at home did when they warned that as a 20-something you would screw up your life trajectory when you quit climbing the corporate ladder and emptied out your savings to buy a leaky old boat — how would you save up for retirement without a 401k? Instead, the old sailor half-grinned with the wisdom of living off the grid with the wind and waves. He knew that we “kids” would never be able to fully accept the conventional way of life. He knew we would always be glancing toward the horizon, checking for another glorious sunset or adrenaline-inducing squall, for something to jangle our nerves and wake us up to the present moment. That we would remember hanging off the bowsprit for midnight sail changes while bioluminescent droplets of water shot up from rocketing dolphins. How the taste of salt would linger on our lips and make us thirsty for the sea, our liquid home. We were screwed because we had not just a taste, but a solid swallow of how simple and hard and beautiful life can be on the water.

So, when Katy asked me to go sailing, I didn’t know the details (like that we’d be sailing a small home-built trimaran that had been sitting on a trailer for five years), but of course I said yes. It had been ages since I’d been sailing on a boat on which I wasn’t employed, and I was ready for some freedom. Well, as much freedom as you can have on a loosely set 750-mile course and a two-week job-fringed timeline. I couldn’t wait to be out there.

Our crew was comprised of Katy, her ­sister Emily Silgard, and myself. Our ride was Coyote, a 24-foot trimaran built by Katy and Emily’s dad, Larry Silva. The race was like speed-cruising. Except most of the time we were not speeding. In fact, due to a high-pressure system, we spent many more hours rowing through glassy stillness than I would have ever thought possible. We were on a foiling trimaran that weighed in at only half a ton. We should’ve been flying, right? Maybe it was the 20 gallons of water, three weeks’ worth of provisions, and obscene amount of wool socks and long underwear slowing us down. More often than I’d like to admit, we were happy to move forward at 1 knot — 1 knot! Sometimes we cheered that we weren’t losing ground in 4 knots of current as we frantically rowed from a stern-mounted sculling station we’d welded on for the race.

Luckily we were surrounded by astounding beauty the entire way, even when going in circles. Snowcapped Mount Baker watched over us for two days as we slalomed the San Juan and Gulf Islands and tacked up the Strait of Georgia. I kept an eye out for possible anchorages on the charts, but the timing was always off. If we’d been cruising, the long slow tacks into headwinds and current would have sent us ­gunk-holing into the Gulf Islands for the night. Instead, we beat into the northwest wind for days, and during the brief-but-dark nights, tried to stay out of the way of lit-up cruise ships, towering ferries, and powerful tugs pulling massive log piles on cables. Cruising sensibilities set in: Our priority was to stay safe, stay visible, and steer clear even if it meant losing time.

And then we got antsy.

We rowed through the notoriously treacherous Seymour Narrows with 11 knots of current roiling the waters all around. The massive whirlpool licking our stern was plenty of incentive to row like hell through the tidal bottleneck. A sensible cruiser would have waited for full slack, but the racing bug got the best of us, and we shot it during the ebb tide. Our bravery (or stupidity) was nonetheless rewarded with that dreamy seal-occupied anchorage. It was as if passing through the Narrows was the gateway to another world: dramatic wooded mountains with little sign of civilization, misty inlets leading into the wilderness, and hours without seeing another boat but visited often by seals, porpoises, humpbacks, orcas and eagles.

Near the north end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the battery we were using to power our electronics died. Navigation lights, emergency transponders and VHF radio were all critical to the safety of our operation, and with no sun in the forecast to power up our solar panel, we were forced to row into Port McNeil. We tied up among the fishing and cruising boats and were met with a community spirit that deep-charged our exhausted souls. The local marine store opened up after-hours so we could get a new battery. The dockmaster offered free showers and the encouragement, “You girls don’t ever give up!” Fellow mariners updated us about race and weather conditions, gave us advice about crossing Cape Caution, and donated a battery charger, food and medical supplies to our cause. Just like in my cruising days when I would dinghy over to a stranger’s boat to ask to borrow a wrench or offer an invitation to dinner, these sailors were instant community. Luckily, due to the relaxed rules of the R2AK, all of this assistance was inside the boundaries of acceptable racing because none of it had been planned.

Our final injection of community spirit came after a total of almost 13 days fighting currents, sloshing over ocean waves, and rowing through glassy open water. Humpbacks splashed off the bow as we ghosted into the entrance channel approaching Ketchikan. After spinning a full revolution in some nasty tidal eddies near the harbor breakwater, we landed at the dock to the applause of a healthy — albeit tired — crowd at 0200. We were stunned as they handed us beers, congratulated us on finishing, and asked us about our favorite moments out there.

Out there! Those watery ways! This sailing lifestyle!

We are screwed. Thank goodness we have 5200-strong bonds of friendship, community, and cruiser/racer craziness to hold us all together.

Jenny Goff is a sailor, writer and chef who learned how to cook diagonally on various cruising boats and yachts over the past 18 years. She is currently based on Whidbey Island, Washington.

The post Race Like a Cruiser to Alaska appeared first on Cruising World.

Of Otter Cove, in the Bainbridge Passage approach to Prince William Sound, our cruising guide said there would be “harbor seals, sea otters, black bears, gulls and bald eagles. Humpback and killer whales can also sometimes be seen.”

“Can it possibly live up to that billing?” we wondered.

Yet it did. Harbor seals and sea otters greeted us as we wove our way through the rocky entrance aboard Sunstone, our 40-foot Sparkman & Stephens–designed sloop, and eagles soared over the masthead. “There’s a black bear on the beach,” my wife, Vicky, announced. The only missing attractions were the orcas, though we saw humpbacks feeding the next morning shortly after leaving the cove. Prince William Sound on the Gulf of Alaska coast is like that.

For most cruisers, the gateway to the sound is Seward, Alaska, some 30 miles to the west, perched at the top of ­Resurrection Bay among snowcapped mountains and glaciers. In the Seward Small Boat Harbor are the yachts of most of Alaska’s sailors. The state’s largest city, Anchorage, is only a two-hour drive away. Prince William Sound is the sailors’ playground, and local knowledge is easy to pick up as you walk the docks.

We timed our arrival in Seward so we could catch the annual Mount Marathon Race, which takes place on July 4. The race is an extreme-sports event that caters to the wilder spirits so often found among Alaskans. Mount Marathon is a 3,022-foot peak immediately behind the town. Its steep, wooded lower slopes are twined with narrow trails tangled with roots and bordered by thorny devil’s club. Halfway up, the slopes open and steepen, covered with scree, a surface on which a climber slides one foot back for every two upward. The race is to the summit and back by any route from the start in town. The fastest men make it to the top in about 33 to 40 minutes. They then scree-slide down and leap from rock to rock in about 10 to 15. The men’s record is 42 minutes, 55 seconds. Limbs are regularly broken. Amazingly, vacant spots in the race are auctioned every year for up to $2,400. The exuberance and wildness of Alaska are personified by the competitors and their event.

As we moved north into the sound proper, the place names became either literal or ­evocative of some story. In Whale Bay we saw humpbacks blowing and feeding along the shore. Crossing Icy Bay, there were indeed bergy bits drifting down from Tiger Glacier at the head of the bay. Jackpot Bay must have a story, but its secret is the narrow entrance to beautiful Seven Fathom Hole, a perfectly protected, landlocked  anchorage.

Up Dangerous Passage is Ewan Bay, where at its head are a lagoon and skookumchuck, the Alaskan name for a reversing tidal waterfall or rapid. The tidal rise and fall can be as much as 15 feet, which can leave you very high and dry if you catch a shoal or rock at the top of the tide. Oftentimes you can spot playful river otters in these tidal waterfalls.

The summer weather in Prince William Sound is mixed: There are sparkling days and then heavy rain, particularly in the extreme east and west of the sound, near Whittier and Cordova. The winds are often light, so the motor gets a workout. This is true of Alaskan cruising in general.

The whole of the sound is above 60 degrees north, so it is no surprise that Prince William Sound is full of tidewater glaciers that calve directly into seawater. One of the most accessible glaciers is Nellie Juan. Just east of the lagoon created by Nellie Juan’s moraine is Nellie’s Rest, a one-boat hidey-hole. From the anchorage, the really intrepid — who have no fear of bears — can bush-bash to get close to the glacier on land. The less adventurous may choose to take the dink into the lagoon and, dodging the bergy bits, approach the glacier by water to hear it groan and watch it calve. As we sat and watched the ice slides, we hoped that the calving wouldn’t make a wave big enough to swamp the dinghy.

When first looking at a chart of the sound, you might think that it seems a limited cruising area, easily covered in a week or two. Truly, years of cruising here would be needed to explore all of its anchorages, as can be seen from Jim and Nancy Lethcoe’s wonderful Cruising Guide to Prince William Sound. Choosing where to go is a challenge, and many of the anchorages have intricate approaches through rocky channels. Our guide spoke casually of anchoring in 80 to 90 feet, and many of the anchorages have gravelly or rocky bottoms, sometimes with kelp. Cruising the sound is not for the anchor-challenged. However, the careful pilotage of narrow entrances to Surprise or North Granite bays is paid in full by the dramatic scenery inside, with mountains rising sharply from the water or forming amphitheaters around the bay.

On the northern side of the sound, College Fjord is lined with a number of glaciers with monikers from Ivy League and Seven Sisters universities, and the nearby, massive Columbia Glacier continues the naming pattern. With the warming trends of recent years, virtually all of these have receded significantly, and Columbia has moved dramatically. For us, the most accessible of the northern glaciers are in Barry Arm and Harriman Fjord. When we first visited in 2002, Barry, Cascade and Coxe glaciers all came together at the head of Barry Arm. On this visit in 2014, they were separated and farther back, but still approachable and impressive. We nudged our way in, avoiding the brash ice to approach and hear the groaning movements of the cracked and creviced blue ice. True to the glacier’s name, cascades of ice fell regularly from the steep face into the water below. Moving through the ice demands care in any but the very strongest of metal hulls. Even small pieces of brash ice can damage a wood hull like ours, or a fiberglass hull. Prolonged pushing through ice can carve up the waterline area significantly.

On Alaskan car license plates is the nickname the Last Frontier, and indeed, while surrounded by the wilderness of the sound, we thought the name was accurate. When moving from anchorage to anchorage, hours or even a whole day can pass without sight of another vessel, and those that we did see were mostly fishing boats. Amid the vast scenery of Alaska, even larger vessels such as the Alaska ferries and the occasional cruise ship appear as mere dots of color against the snowcapped mountains and blue-gray water.

In contrast to this colossal landscape was the sudden immediacy of our contact with the ­natural inhabitants of the sound. A sea otter backstroked idly past our bow, stared for a ­moment, and then turned back to open the mollusk on its chest, while a mother otter tended to a wide-eyed pup riding on her tummy. As we moved along Knight Island ­Passage, we were suddenly surrounded by flashing black-and-white shapes. A pod of Dall’s porpoises had come to play. Bright in the clear, dark water, they crisscrossed under and in front of the boat. They seemed much faster and even more agile than any dolphins we’ve seen.

Two very small towns mark the far western and eastern ends of the sound. Whittier to the west was originally built as an army base, and nearly all of its few hundred inhabitants live in a single condominium tower that rises incongruously against the glacier-capped peak behind the town. Whittier has become something of a tourist hub since cruise ships began to dock there. The town’s road connection to nearby Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city, also makes it a convenient place for cruising sailors to change crew, reprovision or access parts for repairs.

In contrast, Cordova is isolated at the eastern end of the sound, and can only be accessed by water or air. Fishing is its lifeblood. The boat harbor is packed with fishing boats large and small, from big seiners to one-man gill-netters. Cordova is the closest port to the Copper River delta, to the east of Prince William Sound. The delta is a rich fishing ground, but also a dangerous one, and the men and women of Cordova who fish are a tough breed who push their luck in shoal waters open to the Gulf of Alaska and its volatile weather. The town has a strong cultural life of its own, and the few hardy cruisers we know who have wintered there praise the warm welcome they have had — to contrast with the howling winds and snowdrifts.

Unlike the glacier-strewn west and north shores of the sound, the eastern side is lower and greener, with bays that are less ­rock-encumbered. At the head of most bays are salmon streams. When a run is on and the tide is low, it’s tempting to try to walk across the stream on the backs of the thousands of salmon, which fill the stream like a wriggling carpet, struggling up through the shallow water to spawn on the gravel streambed.

Beartrap Bay in Port Gravina was a delight once we worked our way through the narrow, tree-lined gut leading to the anchorage at its head. Salmon were leaping all round the bay, and harbor seals were on patrol, lifting their pop-eyed heads to check us out between feedings. The stream at the end of the bay was full of huge dog salmon, a popular species for sport fishing, though they are known locally as food for Eskimo dog teams.

Between the mainland shores of the sound are its islands. For those who prefer not to dare the bears, a stop at West Twin Bay on Perry Island is a great opportunity for a hike. The island has no salmon stream and so has little to tempt bears to make the long swim to its shores. When hiking in Alaska we are mindful of being able to find our way back to the dink. There are two methods: The high-tech way is to carry a handheld GPS and put in waypoints as you go, then follow them back. For low-tech, we carry several white or yellow plastic bags and tie them to very visible bushes and trees along our route, retrieving them as we return.

Visiting tiny Disk Island, between Ingot Island and Knight Island, is a challenge. As we approached its very narrow entrance, we wondered if Sunstone’s shrouds would clear the overhanging trees as we wove through the rocks at the mouth. The depth shoaled and shoaled. A heavy branch clattered on the ­rigging. A little to starboard, and the depth increased. We were through, and into the almost perfectly circular, landlocked anchorage.

Knight Island is the mountainous jewel in the middle of the sound. All around its coast are anchorages, giving the possibility of shelter from any direction. The west arm of the Bay of Isles indents the northeast coast of Knight so deeply that it almost reaches the west coast. Deep in the arm we sat out some windy weather with barely a ripple. Our favorite Knight Island anchorage is in Snug Harbor, on the southeast coast. Tucked in at the head of the bay, we looked around at the waterfall on the steep cliff and up at the remains of winter snow on the peaks above. Two streams poured in at the head of the bay, one swirling with pink salmon, also known as humpies, which are the primary harvest for the big seiners. Also circling at the mouth of the stream, waiting their turn to go up, were schools of silvers, the higher-value coho salmon. The origin of their nickname was evident in the light flashing off their backs.

Ashore at low tide, we walked up the gravel bank of the stream. We spotted a sleek black bear a hundred yards away, fishing in a pool. Though smaller, the black bears are somehow more elegant than the bigger brown bears we’ve seen. This one sidled back and forth across the shallow pool, then leapt down with a huge splash, stunning a fish and grabbing it in his teeth. At the bank he threw it down, inspected it and rejected it back to the pool. Three times he did this. Finally he pounced, grabbed a fish and contentedly lumbered through the grassy sedges and into the trees. We guessed that he was so well fed that he could afford to be choosy.

All the best things come at a price. Prince William Sound is a beautiful wilderness set in the magnificent backdrop of Alaskan scenery. It’s a long way from almost anywhere else, and an area of volatile weather. We sailed 7,000 miles from New Zealand to get there for the second time, and it was worth every mile and every day of the journey.

Tom and Vicky Jackson have lived aboard, cruised and raced Sunstone 180,000 miles since 1981. Most recently they have completed a circuit of the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand to Japan and the Aleutians, followed by the Round New Zealand Two-Handed Race. They are now back cruising in Alaska and British Columbia for the third time. When not out voyaging on Sunstone, they are now based in Nelson, New Zealand.

Click here for more resources about cruising Prince William Sound.

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