The weather comes through this anchorage in waves. First it’s a scene of summer idyll, the water and sky purest blue. Then dark clouds gather, making us wonder if there will be another hailstorm. The wind pauses here for an hour, or half a day, and then it comes again, screaming and running from the west.

The two islands protecting this spot are covered in low heath. Even in December, the middle of Southern Hemisphere summer, the vegetation is strangely the colors of Christmas — blood red and conifer green. No trees grow anywhere. There are sheep ashore, and cattle that run at the sight of us, and penguins that bray like donkeys.

My wife, Alisa, motions at the scene around Galactic, our 45-foot cutter — the thick beds of kelp, the elephant seals fighting on the beach with their weird moans and growls that carry so far. “Where are we?” she asks, with a kind of helpless amazement.

Alisa knows where we are literally, of course. We’re anchored between Barren and George islands, on the south side of the Falkland Islands. She’s referring to how unbridgeably different this place is from anywhere else we’ve been. And I understand just what she means. This kelp-infested, windy, lonely anchorage does a good impression of the end of the world.

We’ve been stuck here for days, waiting for the westerly wind to die. There are no other people around. And we — Alisa and I, and our sons Elias, 9, and Eric, 5 — are as happy as we can be. Before this visit, the Falklands were just another place that was indistinct on my mental map of the world, vaguely remembered from the war between England and Argentina in the 1980s and inconveniently located for a visit by sailboat. But now that we’re here, we’re discovering that the Falklands are a place from an earlier era, when the cruising scene was smaller, sailors visiting new places had the chance to discover them on their own and locals saw the arrival of a cruising boat as an event worth noting.

RELATED: Penguins in the Falklands

When we first arrived at Stanley, the capital and only town of any real size in the Falklands, we rafted up to three other sailboats tied to the working dock. These were all charter boats, mostly carrying passengers from the Falklands to Antarctica or South Georgia. The Falklands have long been an afterthought for visiting sailboats — a place to stop after rounding Cape Horn, or a launching-off place for the far south. Few boats have time, in the short southern ­s­ummer, to explore the Falklands themselves.

But when Galactic set out from Stanley, we had the month of December in hand to do nothing more than sail around the Falklands. We left on a day when the wind was absent, and we took the chance to make easy miles to the west with the motor, traveling along a flat and featureless coastline. Looking at the chart that day gave me ample opportunity to consider one of the great challenges of Falklands sailing: the legendary kelp. The chart indicated thick beds of kelp extending from every shore in a profusion that seemed like some kind of a joke. A closer look at some of the bays made me wonder where we would even sail, the open water appearing to be so scarce.

But as is the case with so many challenges of the sailing life, the kelp turned out to be more trouble in the anticipation than in the actual event. Kelp floats, after all, and so is easy to avoid. Better, kelp grows from rocks, so submerged dangers in the Falklands are helpfully marked by fronds of kelp. As we approached our first anchorage of the trip I began thinking of the kelp beds as a shadow shoreline that was more important to navigation than the actual land, and everything went fine.

The other thing for sailors to get used to in the Falklands is the wind. Twenty-five knots of wind just seems like more in the Falklands than it does in other places. And the wind often doesn’t satisfy itself with only blowing 25. Even after the year we had just spent in Patagonia, the gale that visited our first Falklands anchorage was an impressive thing. The muddy water of the inlet foamed and slapped around us. Galactic swung side to side and heeled over in the gusts. Not for the last time in the Falklands, we were quite happy with our large anchor.

That first blow lasted only for a day. But after we reached George and Barren islands, the westerlies set in as a part of those waves of weather that contributed to the end-of-the-world impression. A half day of fine weather would inevitably be followed by another blast of wind — wind that accelerated down the leeward slope of the Andes to rampage across the sea to the Falklands.

We were stuck in that anchorage for a week. These were the Furious 50s of southern latitudes, after all, and we weren’t surprised at persistent strong westerlies. Nor were we tempted to cross Falkland Sound, between East and West Falkland islands, until the west wind stopped blowing. Our determination to wait out the weather was helped by the fact that three of Galactic’s lower shrouds had broken strands, courtesy of our time in Patagonia and what was, in retrospect, undersize rigging. We had backed up the failing wire with a jury rig to keep the mast in place until we could return to Stanley to claim the replacement rigging that was coming from England on a ship.

We didn’t see another soul for the week that we waited, and that solitude made the remarkable natural history of the place seem like a gift that had been given to our family alone. Sea lions took every appearance of our dinghy as an invitation to play and would come charging out from the beach to see which of them could get closest to us. We watched elephant seals mock fight on the beach from only 30 yards away. Long walks on Barren and George islands showed us Magellanic penguins braying from their burrows and oystercatchers trying to distract us from their nests. A Johnny rook, the famously mischievous hawk of the Falklands, swooped down and grabbed Alisa’s hat right from her head.

Visitors in the Falklands should request permission before going ashore on remote properties, and we had been in email contact with the May family, the owners of the wonderful islands we were rambling around. When we shifted to Speedwell Island, their home island, we caught up with the Mays and had our first experience of out-island hospitality. We anchored off the Speedwell settlement and went ashore to say hello, and found ourselves suddenly in their comfortable house, ­having tea with the extended ­family. The only tension, or comedy, in the moment came with the sartorial transition from high-­latitude cruising to sipping tea in a stranger’s kitchen. Alisa apologized for her outfit as she pulled off her boots and rain gear and found herself having tea in her rainbow-striped long underwear — warm and comfortable, no doubt, but not quite the get-up for introducing yourself.

When the weather turned good, it turned good with a vengeance. A flat-calm day saw Galactic motoring across Falkland Sound to Albemarle, the 40,000-acre farm run by the Mays’ son. Here we were again met with spontaneous generosity and good company. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay, as the Falklands is no place to waste a fair wind. A day of brilliant sailing took us around the southern corner of West Falkland Island, where increasingly dramatic sea cliffs shone improbably in the sun. To the boys’ delight, gentoo penguins porpoised next to Galactic, and leaping Peale’s dolphins guided us into our anchorage.

The next morning, as we were charging out of the anchorage with a reefed main, we heard a familiar voice hailing us on the VHF. It was our friend Leiv Poncet on Peregrine, his rugged 37-foot cutter, returning to his home on Beaver Island after a charter trip taking biologists to an albatross colony. Leiv was our reason for visiting the Falklands, and his home on Beaver Island, at the far western edge of the group, had been a much-wondered-about destination of ours for years. It was a treat to sail to Beaver in company with Leiv, and a rare treat indeed — he later told us that it was the first time he could remember coming across another sailboat outside of Stanley.

While Leiv dropped his passengers at nearby New Island, we went ashore on Beaver to look around. From a rocky hilltop above the settlement, we had a clear view of the fascinating landscape of the far western Falklands. Moor-covered hills were interspersed with interlocking waterways of the clearest blue. Straight below us were the scattered buildings of the settlement, deeply weathered wooden structures out of another era. Hauled up above the high-tide line was the equally weathered Damien II, the famous 50-footer that Leiv’s parents, Jérôme and Sally, used to pioneer Antarctic cruising. A few sheep scampered in the foreground. And over the entire scene … there was silence. There were no boats traveling in the channels, and no roads on the outer islands. There was no evidence of human activity beyond the settlement below our feet. Our family of traveling Alaskans felt instantly at home.

We had met Leiv during a winter Galactic and Peregrine spent in Tasmania. Over shared dinners we heard stories about his home on Beaver Island and the singlehanded Southern Ocean voyage that had brought him to Tasmania. Leiv reminded us of our favorite commercial fishermen in Alaska — people who are hugely competent on the water, and don’t feel any need to show off about it. Leiv was clearly someone to listen to when the subject was sailing in the global south, and he was an eminently likable guy. We hit it off.

When spring came, Leiv set off for home — a nonstop passage from New Zealand to the Falklands via Cape Horn. His parting words stayed with me, a spell of an invitation from one sailor to another. “Come to Beaver Island,” he said. “I’ll give you all the mutton and reindeer that you can eat. You can dry out alongside our jetty to work on Galactic, and I’ve got an old Perkins 4108 that you can raid for spare parts.” Later that spring we left too, and began to follow Leiv, very slowly. It turns out that there are a lot of places between Tasmania and the Falklands where it’s worthwhile to linger. When we finally reached the Falklands, it had been almost three years since we’d seen Leiv.

Leiv turned out to be a man of his word. The tone for our visit to Beaver was set on the first day, when Leiv casually asked our boys if we should go out and shoot a reindeer. The island is home to a herd descended from animals that Norwegian whalers introduced to South Georgia Island.

The boys were delighted to find themselves in the back of a Land Rover, driving on off-road tracks and looking for reindeer. Galactic has been to any number of places where the boys have been told that they shouldn’t touch this or disturb that. Beaver Island is a working farm — unique in that its income comes both from sheep and from charter sailboats, Damien II and Jérôme’s more recent Golden Fleece. It was a revelation to our boys. After living their whole lives on a sailboat, all their romantic notions of land life were being confirmed.

That evening on the beach, Leiv grilled us all the mutton chops we could eat. He showed Eric and Elias how to catch and cook minnows from the settlement creek, and how to pluck the geese that we ate for Christmas dinner. He taught the boys to harvest the succulent hearts of the tussac grass that grew on the island, and he took them to catch mullet for the smoke house.

Alisa set up shop in the settlement kitchen, and she and Leiv started canning jar after jar of mutton and reindeer to see Peregrine and Galactic through the long sea miles ahead. While Galactic would soon be off for South Georgia and South Africa, Leiv would be setting off on an epic solo adventure to our home waters in Alaska.

Leiv had delivered on his first promise, and he soon delivered on the other two. We’d been losing a battle with a troublesome holding tank on Galactic, and it was time for it to come out. I hoped I could make the job less noisome if the boat was out of the water. So on the day after Christmas, Galactic duly tied up on the jetty to go dry on the tide. As a measure of just how important scrounging and recycling are when you’re maintaining boats in an out-of-the-way place, consider that Leiv gave every indication of being happy to put our used holding tank on the Beaver Island scrap heap against the day when it might come in handy. In exchange, he pulled out his old Perkins, the victim of a fire on Peregrine, and soon valuable bits of the engine were tucked away on Galactic.

The time came for us to continue our circumnavigation of the archipelago. The southern summer would only be so long, and we had plans for the rest of it. We’ve left plenty of islands with a bunch of bananas hanging from the stern arch, but this was the first time we’d ever left an island with a leg of mutton hanging from the rigging — a parting gift from Leiv. And we came away with a more memorable gift. One of the great joys of our life on Galactic is the remarkable people whom we’ve been lucky enough to call our friends; the great downside is the way our constant motion means we’ll likely never see most of them again. Our visit to Beaver Island was a chance to reconnect with a sailing friend on his remarkable home turf. In the midst of the wandering that would soon see Peregrine and Galactic on opposite sides of the Earth, we had each come to rest at the same time, in a splendid corner of the world, to catch up with each other’s news. That was a highlight of our sailing lives.

Of course, there was plenty more to discover during the rest of our sail around the Falklands. There was the sailing itself, which, in spite of our parted shrouds, gave us many days of delight and easy travel. There was the fantastic wildlife. We had other elephant seal haulouts to discover, and albatross and penguin colonies where our family could sit just a few yards from an incredible concentration of avian life to watch the show. And there was the way that the islands seemed to glow on a midsummer day, in the heartbreaking colors of the unpolluted far south.

But, for all the physical delights of the place, it was the people who made the Falklands. There was the hospitality of Leiv, who took the time at the busy peak of summer to show us around his island, and who always had a patient answer for our boys’ endless questions. There was the May family, inhabitants of remote farms who made visiting strangers instantly welcome. But even on the busier islands that play host to cruise-ship passengers, we found that it was impossible to go ashore without sitting down for tea and cookies, and in the relative bustle of Stanley we found more kindness than I could relate here. People are the soul of cruising, just like they’re the soul of any travel. Is it any wonder that we left the Falklands thinking we’d found the best cruising in the world?

– – –

At press time the Litzows were back in their home port of Kodiak, Alaska, after completing a 10-year, 65,000-mile voyage. Get in touch with Mike and his family at thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

The post Friends at the Ends of the Earth appeared first on Cruising World.

Aboard the 60-foot cutter Hummingbird, we’d left Scottish waters some 40 hours earlier for the roughly 230-nautical-mile ­passage north to the remote Faroe Islands. With an intermittent southerly breeze, we tackled the voyage mostly under sail alone, though we relented in the truly light stuff and kicked over the engine to make some miles while motorsailing. All was going according to plan right up to our final approach to the islands when thick, dense fog enveloped us and our surroundings. We knew we were right on top of the stark, dramatic Faroes, and yet we couldn’t see a thing. We’d come looking for adventure, and we found it in spades.

The most surprising thing about our predicament, however, had nothing to do with the sailing. Just a week earlier, I’d never even met the seven sailors with whom I was now sharing a very memorable landfall. We were all clients of Rubicon 3 Adventure Sailing, a British company specializing in expedition-style yachting vacations on both sides of the Atlantic. The concept is simple: Buy a berth for a 10-day outing to a far-flung destination, pack your duffel and head to sea. Rubicon 3 is just one of many such outfits in the business of taking sailors of all levels on ambitious outbound trips. They aren’t charters in the traditional sense, though the aim is somewhat similar — to provide sailors the opportunity to visit distant locales without the cost or complexity of boat ownership. With this month’s chartering theme, it seemed like a good time to spotlight some of the options.

One of the oldest and best-known companies is American sailor Skip Novak’s Pelagic Expeditions, whose motto, “all seasons, all oceans,” pretty much sums up its all-­encompassing offerings. The Pelagic fleet of two expedition sailing vessels — one 54 feet, the other 74 feet — is available for high-latitude charters in both hemispheres, including such wild destinations as Antarctica, Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn, South Georgia Island, Norway, Spitsbergen, Iceland, Greenland and the Arctic. Most charters last between three and four weeks. In addition, Pelagic Expeditions offers annual delivery voyages between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

If you are looking to someday go long-distance cruising aboard your own boat but are interested in accruing the necessary skills and knowledge beforehand, John and Amanda Swan Neal’s Mahina Expeditions may be for you. Conducted aboard the couple’s Hallberg-Rassy 46, Mahina Tiare III, the course provides the chance to be actively involved in all aspects of operating and maintaining a contemporary ocean-cruising boat, including steering and standing watches, sail trim and reefing, anchoring, provisioning and maintenance.

2017 marks the 28th year the Neals have offered sail-training expeditions; to date, more than 1,000 students have successfully completed the hands-on curriculum, sailing nearly 275,000 miles in the process.

Should you prefer high-seas competition, consider signing up for a berth in the Clipper Round the World Race. The brainchild of British sailing legend Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the Clipper Race takes place aboard a dozen identical 70-foot racing yachts, all crewed by amateur sailors. Divided into eight legs and 14 to 16 individual races, you can choose to sign on for the entire circumnavigation or for individual legs. As the event’s website says, “If Mother Nature throws down the gauntlet, you must be ready to face the same challenges as the pro racer. Navigate the doldrums en route to South America, endure epic Southern Ocean storms, experience South African sunsets, face the mountainous seas of the North Pacific — and bond with an international crew, creating lifelong memories before returning victorious.”

Maybe you’re searching for a more altruistic adventure? Consider joining the crew of the 72-foot Sea Dragon, the flagship of ocean-conservation group Pangaea Exploration. Pangaea offers two types of trips: expedition voyages and sailing ones. The former involve marine research, exploration, education and conservation issues, and could include remote-­island surveys, diving and underwater video, offshore plastics sampling and collection, and water-quality monitoring. The latter are typically seven- to 21-day voyages in which you participate as crew in all aspects of sailing and living aboard. Prior sailing experience is useful but not required.

Back on Hummingbird, we were preparing to hone our radar navigation skills when the fog magically lifted as we made our way into the pass leading to the Faroes. The sudden scenery was otherworldly, and the sense of accomplishment at having knocked off the leg from Scotland with new friends was palpable. If you hanker for something more challenging than a spin through the Caribbean, give some thought to an adventure-­sailing trip. The memories are indeed lasting.

– – –

Herb McCormick is CW’s executive editor.

The post Adventure Chartering in the Far North appeared first on Cruising World.

My wife, Alisa, and I were determined not to make bad weather the focus of our trip to Patagonia. But there was one night when the conditions lived up to their reputation. Galactic, our 45-foot steel cutter, was swinging at anchor in Puerto Natales, halfway down the 900 miles of fjords that make up Chilean Patagonia. Puerto Natales is on the inland side of the Andes, where we found the dry grasslands of pampas instead of the dripping rainforest of the coast. Sailing around Natales was just like sailing around Colorado — if Colorado had salt water, flamingos, and more dramatic mountains and glaciers.

But Puerto Natales has no well-protected anchorage. The famous Patagonia & Tierra del Fuego Nautical Guide, more commonly called the “Italian guide,” which is the definitive reference for sailing Patagonia, calls the anchoring situation there “just a step short of tragic.” And being inland of the Andes means that Natales is also subject to winds that come screaming down mountain slopes to surprise visiting sailors.

We had just put our boys, Elias and Eric, to bed. Without warning, winds began funneling over the Andes and into the open anchorage. A routine night on the hook suddenly turned into something beyond our experience in eight years of full-time sailing.

We rushed to get our dinghy on deck and deflated as the winds began to howl in the rig. And then conditions became completely unreasonable. Galactic was knocked from side to side in the dark night, taking punches of wind so violent that Alisa wondered whether the mast would touch the water. We were caught out with only 4-to-1 scope as the water started foaming and spraying around us, and our trusty 88-pound Rocna dragged a tenth of a mile before we got another anchor in the water. And we were the lucky ones. The 70-foot commercial boat anchored next to us was blown out of the anchorage completely.

This is the kind of story that comes to mind when you think of Patagonia, right? Paint-peeling winds, driving rain, pitiless conditions?

What if I mentioned that this happened in mid-June, just as the southern winter was locking down, and that we were about to head farther south in the very heart of winter, down into the far reaches of Tierra del Fuego. Our conditions would be cataclysmic, right?

Well, no. First of all, winter in Patagonia is a not-so-secret golden season, when the polar high extends over the southern tip of South America, bringing long spells of settled conditions.

But Patagonia also suffers from a reputation problem. The need to tell a good story has created an outsize picture of the challenges involved. Alisa and I read a lot of tales about sailing Patagonia before we arrived, and too many of them read as accounts by self-styled “expert sailors” who wanted us to know they were dealing with “extreme conditions.” Their stories began to seem like endless repetitions of “Patagonia: It’s really windy!” Surely, we thought, there must be more to it than that.

Luckily, we were right. Occasionally rotten weather is a part of Patagonia, sure, but it isn’t the essence of the place. That essence has more to do with qualities such as stillness, majesty and solitude. Experiencing these aspects of Patagonia from the deck of your own boat is still one of the great adventures to be had on the planet. And by doing the trip in the winter, we doubled down on that adventure. Going in winter gave us solitude in anchorage after anchorage. We went months without meeting another cruising boat. And winter turned a place that is persistently gray in the summer into a crystalline wonderland of blue skies and frosty white mountains.

The wind raged for three hours that night in Natales, and then was suddenly gone. Alisa and I were both a little dazed by the experience, and impressed at how our two boys, who have spent their entire lives at sea, could sleep through the nautical uproar. Completely unwilling to trust the weather at that point, we stood anchor watches until drowsiness and dull calm convinced us it was OK to sleep.

The next day, the harbor was mirror-calm. But when I went to the Armada de Chile, the Chilean navy, to request a zarpe, the paperwork that would give us permission to continue southward,

I learned that the port was still closed and no departures were allowed. Bureaucracy hadn’t caught up with the change in conditions. I was told the port would be closed a day or two more. And no, I couldn’t have a zarpe until it was open.

In Patagonia the weather might not be that bad, but the bureaucracy can require your most determined go-with-the-flow attitude.

Eventually, the armada officer agreed to give me a zarpe on the off chance that the port might be open the next day. This made me as pleased with my improving Spanish as it did at getting a little concession from officialdom.

When we left Natales, the whole crew was gripped with the excitement of heading farther south. We already had enough snow to let the boys make snowmen on deck, and that first taste of real winter made us eager for more.

Leaving Natales, we transited the narrows of Angostura White, where the tidal currents can run 10 knots. The excellent current tables produced by the armada saw us through safely, and Galactic was soon tied into Caleta Mousse, a perfect little cove, or caleta, tucked into the base of a mountain wall. Only a day from the relative bustle of Natales, this was a place that gave us everything we had dreamed of in Patagonia. Dolphins played in the caleta, Andean condors soared over the high mountains across the fjord, there was good hiking through the Dr. Seuss-like vegetation on the hillside above us, and we had a perfectly sheltered nook where Galactic could wait out a few days of driving snow while held in place by four lines tied to massive trees.

Anchorages like Caleta Mousse are the key to Patagonia. There are hundreds of little coves where the deep water allows a cruising boat to tie securely to the trees, often only a few feet from the shore. With high trees blocking the wind, and shorelines fore and aft, there is nothing in the weather that can bother a boat tied in to points onshore in these places.

But getting in and out of such protected spots is when things can go awry.

And so it was when we tried to leave Caleta Mousse. The morning was calm. I started rowing around the anchorage, untying our lines from the trees while Alisa and Elias pulled them to Galactic. With the lines retrieved, we started to pull the anchor.

It was then that we realized the shape of the mountain wall west of the caleta was perfect for pulling the wind down into the anchorage. All we knew on this morning was that when the anchor was just about up, we were suddenly hit by williwaws that made the water smoke. Alisa quickly spooled out chain, but it was no good. There wasn’t enough room to swing. We needed shore lines again.

I jumped into the dinghy and rowed like a madman to the upwind side of the caleta, a shore line tied around my waist. Once I had finally tied us off to a tree I looked back in relief. And then I saw a sight that made all my confidence evaporate, a sight that turned all my dreams of sailing through Patagonia into so much fluff blowing in the breeze.

A williwaw had Galactic in its teeth and wasn’t letting go. I stared at the underbody of our floating home while the mast leaned over at a crazy angle. Surely we weren’t so close to the shore that the masthead was over the rocks? Alisa was desperately trying to power into the wind blast. She was trapped at the wheel and unable to go up to the bow to tie off the shore line that would solve all of our problems.

It was only for a moment, but that moment stretched out in the suspense of what might happen. Standing there on the beach, the adrenaline of the row ebbing from my veins, I felt my shoulders slump at the knowledge that I was nothing but a spectator. For that one moment, I just stood on the beach and watched whatever would happen, happen.

Of course, the williwaw passed, and Alisa soon had the shore line tied off. We agreed that we would have to be more cautious about picking our moments to leave anchorages. And Alisa reported to me, with some wonder in her voice, that through it all the boys hadn’t evinced any kind of worry. They had been down below, laughing their heads off and cheering the wind on to give them a better ride.

Complete ignorance at what might really go wrong — it must be one of the greatest blessings of childhood. And our determination to see Patagonia as more than a series of confrontations with outrageous conditions? That was getting a little threadbare.

When the weather forecast was ideal, we pulled the shore lines and slid out of Puerto Profundo at first light. In the weeks since we left Natales, I had become intoxicated with how sailing through Patagonia was such a linear adventure. It wasn’t at all like the incredibly open spaces that we were used to from the Pacific. We were always hemmed in on two sides by mountain walls, so the only decision open to us was whether to move forward or go back. Which was no decision at all. We traveled farther and farther south. The days grew shorter with every passing mile, and the scenery grew more and more splendid. The sailing was fantastic, with a scrap of jib being all that was needed to see us speeding along on the prevailing northwest wind. On Galactic, family life slowed down as we found the natural pace of living through the long nights of winter without any of the distractions of the Internet or television to dilute our experience of the place and the season. I was in heaven.

And things were about to get even better. From Puerto Profundo we motored into the Strait of Magellan. As we made the turn into the western entrance, the sun cleared the clouds to illuminate the snowy mountains on either side of us. Who couldn’t feel the moment? We were at the very spot where Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to sail into the Pacific and, finding it on the same sort of calm day that we were enjoying, gave it the name that we all know it by.

That night we tied in at Puerto Angosto, where Joshua Slocum anchored Spray during his first solo circumnavigation of the globe. Slocum was at Angosto for something like a month, and made six unsuccessful attempts to set off from that spot before the weather let him get away.

We were sailing legendary waters.

The eastern Strait of Magellan is a nightmare of huge tides, exuberant winds and few good anchorages. After Magellan made it through the strait, attempt after attempt to repeat his route failed. Luckily, cruising boats can leave the strait around Cabo Froward, the southernmost point of continental South America, and continue along the fjords into the Land of Fire — Tierra del Fuego. We followed that path, and found we had the whole spectacular cruising grounds pretty much to ourselves. There were a few fishing boats around, and every morning we came up on the Patagonia cruisers SSB net and emailed our position to the armada. But even with those occasional reminders of the rest of humanity, our family mostly seemed to be carrying our own envelope of solitude around with us, from anchorage to anchorage, through crystal day after crystal day.

The snow line came down to the sea. The mountainous islands through which we traveled were majestic, remote and polar. Each anchorage was mysterious, and a study in ice and snow and cold when compared to our expectations of what a normal cruising anchorage should look like. The best anchorages were surrounded by hills where the family could walk in the snow and build snowmen, and the boys could indulge in the ­limitless joy of throwing snowballs at their captain and generally causing a ruckus.

After we entered Canal Beagle, conditions seemed to be building to more and more delirious levels of thrills. Our destination of Puerto Williams, Chile, the southernmost town in the world, was less than 100 miles away. With every mile, the sailing got wilder, the mountain scenery more spectacular. It felt like we might reach takeoff before the trip ended, might attain some otherworldly plateau of sailing adventure that we couldn’t have imagined before we set off but which became obvious, even inescapable, to us now. Fully half of the anchorages we investigated were frozen over, and we got used to the sound of ice grinding against our hull at night with a change in wind or tide. Turning a corner with Galactic might bring us face to face with a cathedral of glacial ice spilling over mountain buttresses to the sea.

And then the day arrived when we came out of the metaphorical cold. After months of wandering on our own, we called the Puerto Williams armada on the VHF to give notice of our arrival. We pulled into the “uttermost yacht club in the world,” a 1930s-era freighter named Micalvi that has been scuttled in a shallow inlet to make a clubhouse and dock for visiting sailboats. We found about 40 boats rafted to the ship, most of them left for the winter while their owners flew home. Our arrival bumped the number of inhabited boats to six. We found ourselves immersed in a warm social scene of like-minded people who shared the bonds of common experience.

I can’t say enough about choosing winter for our first visit to the far south. Winter makes everything lonely and mysterious, the way Patagonia should be. We approached the whole undertaking with humility. We were confident, but we assumed nothing. We prepared adequately, and we consciously worked at making good decisions. Our goal was to make it look easy, with as few close shaves or harrowing tales as possible. And more than that, we wanted to have a blast. We wanted Patagonia in winter to be a really good time.

That part worked. The kids had a blast. Alisa had a blast. I had a blast.

And the sense of moving through the out-of-the-way corners of Patagonia independently? The feeling of choosing our pace and taking responsibility for everything? The relish of dreaming about a trip like this and then doing it, and finding ourselves equal to it?

It’s no wonder people find the sailing life so hard to give up.

• • •

At press time, the Litzows were crossing the Pacific, en route to Hawaii. You can follow the family and their travels aboard Galactic at www.thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

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We turned downwind, and as my eyes quit watering in the cold blasts, I could steer straight for a narrow, open slot in the rocky shore. Inside, the water was wider as I turned the boat into a squall and had to rev up the motor to keep moving. Suddenly my wife, Nancy, and our friend Trish, who were on the bow, began waving their arms and yelling, “Rock, rock!” With the engine now screaming in reverse, the bow rammed it while the wind punched us on the beam, and good old Frances B, our Mason 44, heeled over and slid off.

We had just reached Færingehavn on the west coast of Greenland. We anchored in a spot that we had found was free of bottom weeds during our cruise there the year before, then we slipped below to warm up over mugs of tea. Night came, in name only, since at 63 degrees, 40 minutes north on the Fourth of July, the light stayed on. A gale whistled in the rigging and moaned over the surrounding hills. We thought of Evans Starzinger, at sea now on his 47-foot Hawk. He left Hawke Harbour, Labrador, three days after us, but he was sailing fast across Davis Strait and catching up quickly. During the nearly six-day passage, scattered ice had forced us to slow down and even heave-to once. The radar would not detect low growlers, and in those lower latitudes, the nights, though short, were dark. Evans, singlehanding, would have to get some sleep now and then. But at 0600, I stuck my head out and, amazingly, there was Hawk at anchor.

Færingehavn, once a busy fishing harbor, lies about 30 nautical miles from Nuuk, a small modern city and the capital of Greenland, where almost a third of the country’s 56,000 citizens live. Judging by our experience from two previous visits, we knew that lousy weather tends to linger in the fjords near Nuuk. Farther north along Greenland’s western shore and past the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees, 33 minutes north, conditions often improve. In a hurry to get back into the wild, raw seascapes of grand mountains and icebergs, we weighed anchor as soon as the weather eased. The goal was to stop in Aasiaat, a port on the southern edge of Disko Bay. If you are an iceberg freak, which we were fast becoming, this is where heaven begins. In the eastern corner of Disko Bay, near Ilulissat — a settlement established in 1740 and now a tourist hub — giant tongues of ice slide toward the sea from the Greenland ice cap. Glaciers calve enormous chunks, which fan out west and north toward open sea.

Greenland’s waters present plenty of navigation challenges. Countless rocks, islets, islands and sparsely marked ­channels stretch along the coast between Færingehavn and Disko Bay. Frances B alternated between sailing offshore in foggy light air and taking the scenic inner channels like real tourists. Our friends Trish Baily and David Hildred joined us for this Greenland trip, and the extra eyes proved useful in navigating through the hazards. In the port town of Maniitsoq, Frances B hooked onto the only floating-dock marina in Greenland with spaces open for visiting yachts. Denmark takes care of the economy and security of Greenland, and here, a Dane — a ­policeman in the town station — cleared the boat into the country. His enthusiasm for the area was contagious, so we followed his recommendation and went northward through Hamborgersund, an inner passage banked by sugarloaf-shaped mountains and sharp towering peaks. A glacier glowed in the distance in one of the main fjord branches.

Aasiaat, the gathering place for vessels bound north — some for the Northwest Passage — lacks facilities for transient vessels, apart from a fueling dock and a rough float with derelict fishing boats. Hours after we tied up, three other yachts arrived: the British Festina Lente, the Dutch Albatross and the Canadian Gjoa (Taonui when sailed by Tony Gooch, a Cruising Club of America Blue Water Medalist in 2003). The Dutch 168-foot charter schooner Rembrandt van Rijn, a regular visitor in western Greenland, lay at the main wharf. La Louise — a Thierry Dubois-built and -owned, Nigel Irens-designed 63-foot cold-molded schooner shaped for shunting ice — was moored stern-to under the Seaman’s Mission building, the meeting place of visiting ­sailors because of its Internet, hot showers and laundry service.

The iceberg chase began after Aasiaat faded astern in a haze that soon thickened into black, impenetrable fog. The radar painted a massive blob ahead, so I slowed Frances B to a crawl. Suddenly the sea glowed green. Our bow went over the underwater forefoot of a berg whose ghostly pallor loomed high above. We were taking stupid chances.

The fog thinned near Kronprinsen Ejland. Threading the narrow approach yards from a stony shore, we followed the track line left on the plotter from the year before. The rolling fogbank stayed back, hovering. Inside, sunshine burst over the anchorage, houses ashore leaned over every which way in deep grasses marking Imerigssoq as an abandoned village. The crew peeled off layers as the thermometer reached 70 degrees F in the sun, with the sea at an almost-swimmable 45 degrees. Rowing ashore, I could see small arctic cod working the bottom in clear water. Among the hills, pine fences with flaking white paint stood guard around weathered crosses, most names upon them erased by time.

The Holy Grail for iceberg chasers is the Vaigat, the ­northward arm of Disko Bay; it turns west, then narrows, thrusting the drifting ice close together. We headed into the fray on a calm sea. Frances B purred on with Disko Island shores to port and icebergs to starboard. Up where the Vaigat turns northwestward, the wind came on strong on the nose, and at 2100, the low sun burned into our eyes. It turned our path aglitter with whitecaps and rendered the wreckage of broken bergs floating low, indistinguishable. I thought we should heave-to until the sun went overhead, still many hours away. David was for tacking across the river of glare under power, since by now the boat navigated through a thickening ice litter of growlers and floes. Motoring against the rising chop was painfully slow. A heavy dark-gray band of fog appeared across the mouth of the Vaigat. At midnight I had had enough of Vaigat, spun the wheel, unrolled the genoa, and Frances B took off with the wind like a sled downhill. The sun, now behind, clearly lit the path through the maze of ice. The new free course took us south, then west and north along Disko Island’s western coastline where bergs were scattered wider and several bays promised good shelter.

Qeqertarsuaq (formerly known as Godhavn) used to receive scores of whaling vessels working Baffin Bay and Melville Bay all the way to Ellesmere Island. Now and then failed North Pole seekers called in as well. Panther (a sail and steam bark), visiting in 1869, carried the first iceberg chasers in history. William Bradford, a prominent painter from the Hudson River School, chartered the ship to reach the dramatic ice landscapes in the farthest-accessible north. Having already made six ice-painting voyages to Labrador, Bradford was truly an iceberg enthusiast. The Greenland voyage made him famous even in Britain, where some of his works were commissioned by the Royal Family. It seems that Bradford pointed to Greenland as a source of aesthetic inspiration.

After sailing north by western Disko Island, Frances B carried on to Uummannaq Fjord. A dark, forbidding heap of cliffs, Ubekendt Ejland rises as the western sentinel of the fjord. Its village, Illorsuit, faces east onto dramatic mountains peaking in razor-sharp pinnacled ridges. Rivers of icebergs stream by out of glaciers hidden within bays that penetrate the mainland to the ice cap. Another prominent American artist, Rockwell Kent, immortalized these views in the best of his canvasses. There at 71 degrees, 30 minutes north, we couldn’t anchor; depths ran 90 feet next to the shore, and an iceberg had already taken the best berth near a tiny wharf. Ashore, arctic char dried in the sun, huskies were curled asleep, and children raced on the black-sand beach of a hamlet set in the shadows of a vertical mountainside.

Precise route planning just doesn’t work in Greenland. Based on our visit the previous year, we’d promised Trish and David an ice-free, all-weather anchorage in Qeqertat with spectacular views from easily walked hills. A year later, at 0300, Frances B hovered just outside a large iceberg aground right in the channel, and the inner basin was corked with growlers. Disappointment soon vanished. In search of another place to anchor, our boat slipped along past sheer cliff walls. Ever hopeful, we let the escarpments of Appat Island lead us into a narrow-necked inlet, its waters bottomless till a shelf at the very end. The anchor went down in 70 feet, good enough for our 400 feet of chain. Fulmars, usually common boat companions in the open sea, floated around in white flocks, shoals of capelin wrinkled the water’s surface, many of them spent, dead in the shallows. The fragrance of summer plants floated down from the hillside above us. At the cost of a hands-and-knees vertical scramble, a stupendous panorama opened up from the top ridge. The Greenland ice cap glowed, icebergs sailed by, the 3,380-foot-high twin-peaked Uummannaq Island pointed the direction to the largest settlement (population 1,200) in the fjord. With dreams of cafes and Danish pastries, we ventured back out.

In half an hour, the 25-knot wind from the mainland met us head-on, and it was cold! Fifteen miles later, we could see a ­relentless convoy of ice — big bergs, ice hummocks and bergy bits — silently running ­downwind at a couple of knots by the south end of Uummannaq Island. Reaching the small harbor around the corner was out. Spraglebugt, a bay on the west shore, opened up. Hills surrounding the bay blocked the wind, and an offshore reef kept the ice outside. Around midday, a sailboat blasted into the anchorage. Bob Shepton (winner of CCA’s Blue Water Medal in 1996) on Dodo’s Delight (his Arctic chariot of 33 feet) doesn’t just chase ice, he barges through it to reach the most death-defying walls to climb. Reverend Bob retired from climbing at age 79 and now takes other adventurous climbers to the walls he missed. The current four climbers were also talented musicians, even when stormbound in their portaledge hanging a couple of thousand feet over the freezing sea. Having scored several firsts in Greenland, they were about to sail to Baffin Island. We walked across the island to town to look at the harbor, now under siege: Flat-topped monster slabs of ice leaned against the town cliffs.

The sailing season in Greenland is short. In August, the sun began vanishing after midnight — a signal to head south and visit places we had highlighted on our charts. We longed to climb again to the red buttes of Disko Island’s Fortune Bay. Off Grønne Ejland, thousands of arctic terns had returned to their breeding colony — ­almost abandoned in 2013 — and ­feverishly raced between the sprat shoals and their nests ashore. To make up for missing the access to the glaciers of Uummannaq Fjord, Frances B entered Hamborgersund again and ­anchored at the end of Sermilinguaq Fjord. Just above the ice cliff, the glacier, darkened with soil blown from the hills, was melting quickly. Sinkholes on its surface opened into caverns roaring with fast streams of meltwater underneath. Maniitsoq, a few hours away, became our departure point for crossing Davis Strait to Resolution Island in Canada and the southward course through the Labrador Sea ­toward home.

Tom and Nancy Zydler are currently cruising the Southeastern United States and preparing Frances B for another trip to the far north.

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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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My husband, Seth, and I stood less than a yard from an Alaskan brown bear. We could see every hair on his body and his powerful muscles underneath. His claws stretched three inches out from his paws, and he was studying us with slightly bloodshot eyes. His nostrils flared to take in our scent. But then he turned back to the stream on whose bank all of us — humans and bear — were sitting or standing. He leaped into the river after a salmon. He missed it and charged again, back toward us! But his focus was concentrated on the spawning pinks, and this time he caught one. He started upstream, ignoring us as he passed so close I could see the blood run from where his jaws pierced the fish. Geographic Harbor was turning into an exciting place to be weather-bound.

By this point, Seth and I were a week into our cruise of the Alaska Peninsula aboard our cold-molded cutter, Celeste. The peninsula and Aleutian Islands were the last leg of our 2014 cruise. It was the portion for which we’d had the fewest expectations, and it was turning into the most memorable by far.

This region of rocks, wind and currents deserves its reputation for difficult voyaging. It’s rarely visited by cruising yachts, partly because of the conditions and partly because — unless you’re crossing from Japan to America — it’s not on the way to anywhere. Seth and I had faced the gales and short weather windows of New Zealand and the Cape of Good Hope, but opportunities to progress westward here were fewer and farther between. If we missed one, we could be stuck for a very long time. We were finding the Alaska Peninsula to be a quite formidable teacher of high-­latitude­­ sailing skills.

All-weather anchorages along this coast are scarce and poorly charted. Seth and I were lucky to have tips from local friends and sailors who were familiar with the region. Originally, we had planned to sail from Kenai Fjords, cruising along the Alaska Peninsula to the Aleutians with stops in Kukak Bay, Geographic Harbor, Agripina Bay, Chignik, Sand Point and King Cove before leaving Celeste for the winter in Unalaska (also commonly known as Dutch Harbor). But the weather didn’t want to cooperate.

At first it wasn’t bad. We left the Kenai Peninsula in light air, taking the most direct route, 130 nautical miles to Kukak Bay between the Barren Islands and Afognak, the island just north of Kodiak. We were soon engulfed in fog, listening for fishing boats until the wind died and our Yanmar drowned them out. I passed the Barren Islands in my graveyard watch, the sea heaving sickeningly despite the calm. We learned later from fishermen that the safer course would have been the less direct one, north of the islands, as standing waves can form between the islands when the tide sets against a blow.

Dawn brought one of the most spectacular landfalls in our 35,000 nautical miles to date. Mountains gripped in ice climbed into the sky, dusted by alpenglow. A layer of fog clung to the shore, so that the glaciers seemed to float above the sea. As the sun rose, a 10-knot breeze sprang up on our quarter, and Celeste bowled down to Kukak Bay under spinnaker. The wilderness around us — striking, glaciated and immense — felt as if it was likely unchanged since mammoths roamed its hills. A bend in the bay revealed a vast river delta, utterly deserted. Awe-inspiring as it was, this delta also made anchoring tricky: Its sands extended a long way out and then abruptly dropped off. We were finally able to anchor in about 17 feet, and as we settled down to dinner, an enormous brown bear ambled down the beach astern of us.

We woke to a still and shining world. Given that such weather doesn’t usually happen here in August, or at all, we probably should have pushed onward. Instead we explored ashore. I’ve experienced the immensity of an ocean crossing and the forbidding beauty of high peaks, but as I stepped onto the sand, I knew this was something different. Nowhere else have I felt so small in such a vast wilderness — one that truly belongs to the bears and wolves whose myriad prints crisscrossed the delta. I couldn’t help thinking that this feeling of acutely sharpened senses must have been a permanent state for the people who’d crossed from Siberia thousands of years ago.

The fair weather held the next day, so we beat to Geographic Harbor against 15-knot winds and a 1-knot current. The 35-mile sail was within Shelikof Strait, which runs between the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island and is a body of water universally abhorred by seasoned fishermen. Their tactic to avoid the tidal currents and washing-­machine seas is to hug the coast, advice we heeded to our benefit.

Geographic Harbor is nearly landlocked, and a poorly charted rock makes the narrow entrance nerve-wracking. To seaward, a small archipelago breaks the swell, so you have little idea of conditions in Shelikof Strait when inside the harbor. The mountains rimming the bay also cut off VHF signals, so it was difficult to get NOAA forecasts. Of course, all this makes Geographic Harbor ideally sheltered, but when the weather deteriorated outside, we were blissfully unaware.

We saw several brown spots moving along a stream on our way in, and as we anchored, I spotted some ruffled fur and two ears in the water astern of us: a bear swimming! Thinking we would have only one day in Geographic Harbor, we launched the dinghy to observe the wildlife. Our swimming bear was preening himself in the shallows. We carefully approached the stream, where I counted eight more bears fishing. Two of them were mothers with cubs. The mothers were piling their catch on the bank, but the cubs — like children everywhere — seemed more interested in playing than eating dinner with Mom.

Once underway in the morning, we found 40-knot winds and steep waves tearing across Shelikof Strait. NOAA predicted worsening conditions, followed by a more moderate low, 25 knots from the southeast, in a few days’ time. We returned to Geographic Harbor.

Our solitude was broken the next day by a tourist boat bearing a “photo safari.” Seth and I were at first horrified and then intrigued: A skiff took passengers ashore, where they set up their tripods just yards from the fishing bears! An hour went by with the bears unfazed. We grew envious of their photos and decided we’d follow suit, armed with bear spray. The eight guests and their guide, an Alaskan biologist, welcomed us. Within minutes, the huge male bear was a yard from my face. The guide sensed my fear and murmured not to move. I knew he was right, and as the morning went on and four more bears passed close, I was amazed to find myself relaxing and appreciating these incredible encounters.

Seth and I stayed at anchor that night, inviting the biologist and the boat’s captain to drinks, and attempted to leave again in the morning. The predicted 25-knot southeasterly turned into a 35-knot southwesterly, so again we retreated. A brief consultation with the tour boat’s captain about common weather conditions revealed that we’d have to grin and bear it. Another low was coming with southeast winds; we knew we had to take it all the way to Sand Point, skipping Agripina Bay and Chignik, if we ever wanted to reach Unalaska.

The following day found us tearing before 35 knots, spray whisking from the whitecaps around us. As night fell, the wind increased to 40 and then 45 knots, so we doused the triple-reefed main and flew only the high-cut yankee jib. The forecast was puzzling. NOAA divides Alaska into weather zones, and our two zones, Shelikof Strait and Sitkinak to Castle Cape, had wildly different predictions. Yet sure enough, as we passed between them, 35-knot head winds greeted us. Despite clear skies, the blow built all day, until gusts funneling out of the bays and between mountains hit 50 knots. The whole sea foamed white. Spray drove over the top of the boom. Celeste’s bow submerged in every wave, and her jib sheet and windward shrouds were taut as piano strings. We debated turning back for Agripina Bay, but we were 30 miles past it already. Chignik was not protected enough, but a place on the chart called Ross Cove might be. Our chart didn’t give elevations, so we didn’t know how wrong we were.

The thousand-foot cliffs guarding Ross Cove were reminiscent of Dante’s eighth circle of hell, and the wind funneling between them made our 50-knot gusts look pleasant. Clouds of spray flew high into the air at the head of the cove: terrifying, hurricane­-force williwaws.

We did what the weather commanded and swung the bow 180 degrees, steeling ourselves for another windy night at sea. I dug out a just-add-boiling-water meal to fortify us. Almost as soon as we’d eaten it, the wind lay down. We raised the main, and an hour later it was slatting as Celeste rolled in a calm. I overstayed my turn at the helm by two hours that night, watching the silhouetted mountains pass by as our engine hummed. Around 0500, I noticed a greenish glow in the sky and assumed it was dawn. Then the glow brightened and started to dance: It was the aurora.

Sand Point, which we reached that afternoon, at first looked forlorn, its small, brightly painted houses scattered over the tundra. But when we rounded the breakwater, we were astounded to find a beautiful new marina, provided by the state for the fishing fleet. We stayed only one day, but that was long enough to explore town, buy vegetables, and be invited by three different strangers to the Salmon Derby dinner.

We were sad to leave, but we’d learned our lesson about weather. Light and variable winds were forecast for the next day, so we left at 0430 to cover the 75 miles to King Cove in daylight. Dawn brought low clouds and a 20-knot northerly on the beam. Celeste threaded between the mainland and the Shumagin and Pavlof islands, keeping to the channel. Beyond lay a reef thick with poorly surveyed rocks, so even the fishermen don’t stray from the buoys. The sky gradually cleared, and we hoped to glimpse Pavlof Volcano, the 8,000-foot peak that had last erupted a few months before our visit. But it stubbornly refused to reveal its top, so we contented ourselves with the puffins floating around Celeste.

As we crossed the open water toward Deer Passage, the sun came out, the wind slackened, and a pod of humpback whales approached. One giant surfaced just yards from Celeste. Seth and I abandoned the helm to the autopilot and stood on the foredeck watching. Two whales started lifting their heads out of the water and then fully breached, again and again.

As abruptly as they’d come, they left. Equally suddenly, the wind was back in force, which was no surprise to us anymore. By now we’d learned how quickly conditions could change and how much flexibility and readiness were required to sail these waters. Turning into King Cove, we tacked against the funneling north wind and entered the fishing basin. We took a slip next to a gill-netter, and before the night was out, we were fast friends with the crew.

Seth and I had known little about King Cove. We’d stopped because it was a convenient jump-off point for our last passage to Unalaska. Perhaps because of this, it was one of our favorite ports. Sheltered between volcanic peaks at the edge of a vast lagoon, the village has no road access. Scrub bush covers the lower slopes, and above is open tundra. Seth and I fought our way through the scrub, scrambled over rock screes, and finally gained the top of a ridge.

Below us stretched a green, untouched valley, different in its vegetation from Kukak Bay, where we had also hiked, but the same in its immense wildness. The whole Pacific lay before us, and to the southwest stood the end of the peninsula. The mountainous Aleutian Islands pierced the sky beyond. To the north we beheld for the first time the sea where we were bound, the Bering.

As we walked along the ridge, a golden eagle — the eagle of Europe and Siberia — swooped below us. Ends of the earth? This was it.

Watch the first episode of Gone Floatabout here, and stay tuned for more videos from Ellen and Seth’s travels!

Ellen Massey Leonard completed a global circumnavigation at age 24 and recently sailed her classic cutter to the northernmost tip of America, in the Alaskan Arctic. She chronicles her adventures at gonefloatabout.com.

Read More: Cold Weather Cruising | Cruising Alaska | Gone Floatabout Videos

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A pod of orcas caught up with us in Gray Strait, off the northern tip of Labrador. They closed in as much as possible without bumping the hull; I could have touched the 6-foot dorsal fin of the leading male if I had dared to lean over. A couple of days earlier, my wife, Nancy, and I had sailed through the Button Islands, watching the sheer cliffs at the northern entrance through a blizzard of flitting birds — thousands of fulmars and kittiwakes. Inside the channel, seals frolicked, keeping wary eyes on a massive polar bear scouting the water’s edge for a meal.

Welcome to Labrador, where the 200 miles of northern coast rise high above the water. Mainland rivers run out into the Labrador Sea through long fjords. The primary surveyed boat channels lead close to precipitous cliffs, so our Mason 44, Frances B, often navigated by what looked like the ramparts of gigantic fortresses. Mountaintops, sliced flat or molded into giant mounds, told of the destructive movement of ancient ice caps. Above them stood higher peaks, 3,000 feet and more, of hard granite patched with winter snow. Caribou lolled on the snow near the coast, seeking a cold breeze to keep away black flies and mosquitoes. The fjords are deep, and we often found icebergs planted in spots where the depth was perfect for anchoring. Most of the time, Frances B dropped the hook on a shelf of river detritus. The river outlets had the best view of the action ashore.

At the end of one fjord, caribou came to graze on a mound of gravel and grass abeam of Frances B. When the incoming tide changed the pasture into an island, the animals swam away. Across the water, a large inland lake sent out a roaring stream — just the place to do laundry and have a cold bath. Burdened with buckets, green soap and towels, we brought the dinghy to the rocks and looked up right into the eyes of a polar bear. During summer, seals — the main food source for polar bears — migrate out of this area; hungry bears will stalk humans. We sailed without firearms on Frances B, and the flare pistol and whistles we carried seemed puny when facing a 9-foot, 800-pound carnivore. We quickly backed out, the noise of the outboard sending the bear into the hills. In another fjord we watched a foraging polar bear cross a river. An equally massive black bear fishing there took one look at it and sprang for the hills, leaving no doubt about who was at the top of the power heap.

Strong winds off the highlands funnel through ravines and gaps in the hills, accelerating into violent williwaws. After getting boxed by stray squalls in Kangalaksiorvik Fjord, we tried to make sure to anchor in places facing across the axis of any hills to windward. It worked. Afterward, only once did we make such a mistake again, when we trusted the name Calm Cove on the south side of a mountainous landmass stretching west from Mugford Tickle. A frontal passage brought north-northeast gale winds that hurled down the river valley at the head of the anchorage. White-spume squalls raced across the bay, whipping up waterspouts; 40 hours of 50-plus-knot gusts made this a memorable visit. The 3⁄8-inch chain on our 72-pound Bruce anchor held well even though the boat tacked through 90 degrees, the gunwales hitting the sea. We did break a venerable 3⁄4-inch three-strand snubbing line and had to tie in a spare braid.

Most of the fjords lie within Torngat Mountains National Park. The park’s base camp on Saglek Bay afforded us a chance to see new faces after weeks in the wilderness. With a lecture/library tent, electric bear fence, helicopter, two ex-longliner tripper boats on moorings, hot showers, and cafeteria meals — civilization has some advantages — the camp hummed with students, geologists from Japan, Inuit children, and rifle-toting bear guards. South of Saglek, the coast returns to wilderness, with the exception of caretakers in Hebron, an old Moravian mission station being revamped as a historical monument. Both the base camp and Hebron stay open only about three months each summer.

When an east wind arrived, we sailed from Mugford Bay, avoiding the offshore fog and swell. As we made our way south, a low, dense forest stretched behind the foreshore. Four wolves pranced at play on an open meadow. They spotted our movement and bounded into the green shadows as we pulled out cameras. Downwind, a black bear grazing through low grasses suddenly rose on his hind legs and swung his head, sniffing.

Labrador fishermen of the past had a way with words. A “tickle” warned of a narrow passage, but a “rattle” was more serious. Although the 25-mile Port Manvers run is more than a tickle, the tides race through the Second Rattle at the north end and the First Rattle at the south. We anchored off the northern end to time the currents.

Each morning, before going berry-­picking ashore, we first made sure that the black bears had already made their rounds. In August, blueberries and cloudberries ripen, and bears like to eat them. Most of our way south from Port Manvers led through inner channels interrupted by occasional sorties into the Labrador Sea. Wherever trees thickened and the land greened, there would be black bears. Mostly on a vegetarian diet, they reputedly don’t attack people. Still, they tower over other American black bears and may not like competing foragers.

We were on our way south and home after our third summer at the tip of the North American East Coast’s end. Now that it was August, Labrador was at its best: warmer air, fragrant meadows, and small flocks of eiders feeding for the flight south. The ice — both offshore bergs from Greenland and the native ­winter floes — was mostly gone, except for a few persistent bits here and there. The sky stayed clear and the winds eased out before the autumn onslaught. Even the severe, stony mountains looked softer. At Nukasusutok Island, just south of Nain, the setting sun painted the bare rock cliffs red.

We navigated mostly among islands, both for interest and safety, as the charts showed accurate depths along the “track usually followed” but only blank spaces farther out. Some major headlands required poking our bow into the big seas outside, but we were able to use tides to squeeze by inland of most of them. Three years ago, we’d been scared out of visiting Cape Harrigan Island by giant, confused swells and a lack of wind. Now we used the rising tide to sneak our 7-foot-draft vessel inland. While waiting for the right tide in a bay on the north shore of the island, we trekked to the top and counted icebergs still afloat far offshore. But we made sure to have our bear spray and noisemakers ready, as the area is a veritable black bear garden.

Normally you can’t dine out when cruising Labrador. In Hopedale, however, we had caribou burgers and caught up on emails in a restaurant overlooking the wharf. Hopedale was once the site of a Moravian mission to convert the Inuit to Protestant beliefs, foods and writing. The mission buildings stood well maintained and included a museum. Hopedale was probably the northernmost harbor to see large numbers of the Newfoundland schooners that once worked the coast every summer to collect fish. For close to 300 years, cod fishing constituted the livelihood of thousands of people here. There were “livyers,” who came to fish and stayed in Labrador for good, and “floaters,” the seasonal fishermen from Newfoundland. When a moratorium in 1992 closed the dying fishery, countless seasonal stations began to crumble.

Small-scale, strictly regulated ­fisheries continue for crab, shrimp and turbot. The processing plant in Makkovik welcomes longliners from Newfoundland at the well-maintained wharf and has a small yard with the only Travelift in these northern waters. Yachts are also welcome. At the end of August we sailed to Cape Harrison, the only headland we couldn’t cheat. A wet northeasterly wind carried a bite of autumn. Running down big swells, we sent immense rafts of shearwaters flying, their wing beats loud over the water. Farther on, we passed a slew of little bays that had served as cod-fishing stations, with names like Indian Tickle and Ice Tickle.

At Hamilton Inlet, a vast wedge of the sea slices into the waist of Labrador for some 125 miles. It ends in Goose Bay, a major hub connected by roads and air to the rest of Canada. To us, the heart of Hamilton Inlet was in the Gannet Islands, just south of the mouth of the inlet. There aren’t any gannets there, but there are thousands upon thousands of puffins and razorbills. The air was thick with birds streaking between the islands and the water at astonishing speeds. Stationary puffins stood by the breeding burrows, and razorbill sentinels watched over their eggs, laid in the open on flat rocks. Protected from human invasion by law — and by 30 miles of open ocean from the closest town of Cartwright — this breeding colony thrives. The last researchers we heard of were chased from their hut by a polar bear stranded by receding ice.

Soon after leaving Hamilton Inlet, we followed the coast south. For the next 80 miles or so, we found cove after protected cove, joined by inner runs that used to shelter cod stations. Some houses still stand: piles of gray, weathered planks, a few maintained as summer cabins and used by descendants of the old fishing families who now live full time in half a dozen nearby small towns. In one harbor, we slipped between the towering cliffs of a long bay and then passed a ghost assemblage of timber sheds careening on broken legs into the sea. At low tide, the beaches around our anchorage appeared, covered with hundreds of scallop shells. On an island nearby, splashes of blue guano covered the rocks; gulls like blueberries too.

Cod wasn’t the only quarry in the sea. There was a whale slaughterhouse started in Hawke Harbour in 1904 that lasted 55 years before being destroyed by fire — just about the time whales joined cod on the way to oblivion. Frances B had to squeeze by three awash rocks to reach the inner sanctuary of the harbor. Ahead, against a green slope glared an industrial dump of rusty red tanks and boilers. A gutted vessel leaned against the shore nearby.

We needed to top up our fuel and groceries. Conveniently, the wharf of a defunct Fox Harbour fish plant always keeps a free spot for a visiting yacht. Just behind the wharf began a planked trail with steps over the hills to the outer coast. From the top, we could see dozens of blue lakes to the northwest and sparkling white dots of ice on the ocean to the east. After tunneling through a tangled forest, we met a fork in the trail that descended to Deep Creek, once a small fishing hamlet, where heavy swell foamed almost all the way into a small cove.

“How hard was the life there?” I asked new acquaintances Elaine and Warrick Chubbs, sitting in their home in town.

“Well, it was handy to the cod-­fishing grounds,” said Warrick, who grew up in Deep Creek. To keep the past alive, he maintains a fishing stage complete with boats and a cod-curing shed on the shore of Fox Harbour, a few steps down from their new house.

About an hour’s sail away lies Battle Harbour, with hot showers and laundry. For more than 200 years — until 1992 — this was the virtual capital of Labrador fisheries, thronged with schooners and fishing boats. In 1909, explorer Robert Peary telegraphed the world of his success reaching the North Pole from the Battle Harbour Marconi station. Battle Harbour lives on as a museum; the village, fish factories, doctor and missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s clinic, and dories are preserved by the tenacity of the descendants of the old Labrador hands. During summers they come from Mary’s Harbour (10 miles away) to talk, in their lilting accents, of “them old days.” Tourists rumble to Battle Harbour from Mary’s Harbour on Iceberg Hunter, a venerable classic itself.

A strong northeaster filled in, and we carried the fair wind into the Strait of Belle Isle. The strait has a bad reputation for fog and odd currents, but this time luck was with us. Unexpectedly for September, Frances B passed a clatter of ice — what looked like tabletops, watch­towers and giant, glossy meringues. One icy hillside sloped into a flat skating rink that served as a beach to a harem of seals, only mildly stirred by the white apparition sailing silently by. And then, suddenly, it was all open water and fair wind until the west coast of Newfoundland.

Tom and Nancy Zydler are cruising the western coast of Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle.

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Jeanneau 49 Ruby Slippers, Sail Alaska 2014

Like many small boys, Jim Rard was fascinated by boats. While there were myriad fishing skiffs and canoes populating the rivers of his logging-focused hometown of Sutherlin, Oregon, Rard’s eye was always drawn to proper seaworthy sailboats. Rard’s youthful dreams required a vessel, and — to his inquisitive but inexperienced mind — the easiest way to acquire one was to pick up his tools and build his own steed using his fledgling carpentry skills. “The first boat that I ever built was off of a picture,” recalls Rard, some 55 years later, with a laugh. “The only problem was that I couldn’t see what was below the water, so I assumed that it was flat!”

While Rard’s first vessel utterly lacked righting moment, the important thing was that his young mind was already scheming to find paths to the sea and a life of adventure far removed from Oregon’s mossy old-growth forests. Other homespun vessels followed, including a raft that was fashioned after Kon-Tiki, and while Rard never completed his plans to float down Oregon’s rivers to the Pacific Ocean, the hundreds of thousands of cruising miles that he’s amassed since then — including an extensive Pacific Rim cruise and 15 trips to Alaska from his adopted state of Washington — more than compensate for this (likely prudent) shortcoming.

But to focus only on Rard’s personal cruising would be to completely miss the fact that he has introduced hundreds of sailors to the magic of cruising Alaska’s forever-wild coasts, and that he is also the founder of Marine Servicenter, one of the Pacific Northwest’s most successful boatyards and dealership/brokerages.

While there’s no predetermined route to a life of cruising adventures, it helps to learn the fundamentals at an early age. True, Sutherlin, Oregon, is a landlocked logging town, but Rard’s childhood taught him to diagnose and fix all things mechanical while also giving him a solid work ethic — skills that would reward him when he opened the doors to Marine Servicenter in 1977 on the shores of Seattle’s Lake Union.

As for learning sailing’s many ropes, Rard’s knowledge was largely self-taught from books and from hours spent on his different boats, beginning with a humble Columbia 22 that he bought in 1974 (which was quickly replaced three months later by a Ranger 33, and then by a Tartan 37 the following year) and culminating in his present Jeanneau 49P, Ruby Slippers, aboard which he has logged more than 45,000 nautical miles, including a two-year South Pacific voyage and five Alaska trips. Sandwiched in between these adventures have been hundreds of bluewater races, offshore deliveries, smaller cruises and milk runs on both coasts as well as on foreign waters.

Rard says his career in the marine industry began thanks to a spike in oil prices. In the early ’70s, he was working as a crew chief on a helicopter team that was paid to fertilize Oregon and Washington’s sweeping timber forests, but the job came to a surprise landing when oil prices — and, as a result, fertilizer prices — became prohibitively expensive. Fortuitously for Rard’s career track, this was around the time that his yacht dealer in Seattle noticed his marine-diesel skills — a rarity in that era, as most vessels still used gasoline-fired engines. Rard was soon renting the dealer’s workshop, and Marine Servicenter took its nascent steps. “I was looking for an adventure, and sailing came to mind,” remembers Rard of his transition to the still-fledgling marine industry. Since those modest beginnings, Rard and his team have built Marine Servicenter into a trusted dealership, brokerage house and full-service repair yard, with two locations in Anacortes and one in Seattle. Along the way, the company has sold more than 400 new sailboats and some 1,600 brokerage boats, while helping countless other sailors with issues ranging from dead starter batteries to extensive refits.

In 1995, Rard took the year off to build a new house (by hand) for his family in Arlington, Washington, shortly after the arrival of twin daughters Jessie and Molly. “I told my wife, Jeanna, we have 12 years to get ready to get out of town and go cruising,” recalls Rard of the day that his daughters were born. So, in October of 2006, the Rards took a leave of absence from their lives ashore, provisioned their brand-new Jeanneau 49P, which they christened Ruby Slippers, and sailed south from Anacortes, first to Mexico and then across the Pacific, eventually reaching New Zealand and Australia before arriving back in the United States in October 2008.

“If you get a perfect piece of sailing about once every 10 years, it’s enough to sustain a sailor,” says Rard. “We had a few of those moments on this trip that lasted for days at a time. Being able to see it through my daughters’ eyes was pretty special.” These perfect times included a 17-day passage from the Galápagos Islands to the Marquesas that included a 14-day spinnaker set, as well as a glory run from Minerva Reef to New Zealand. “The boat was flying along at 9.5 knots, and we hadn’t touched the wheel or trimmed the sails in two days,” says Rard of the run that delivered his family to New Zealand, a country he’d been waiting to see for 20-plus years. Along the way, the Rards befriended the crews of three other boats, and together the four sailboats cruised the two-island nation, lending help and — in Jim’s case — expertise and spare parts as needed, while also sharing great times and camaraderie. This was the Rards’ first real experience cruising with a small flotilla, and the New Zealand sunshine left an indelible impression. “I always thought that I’d do some singlehanded sailing,” says Rard, “but then there’s no one there to share it with.”

Sharing sailing with others has always attracted Rard, both in his business and on his personal boats. While Rard’s New Zealand cruise taught him about the upsides of flotilla cruising, it was a previous experience that helped prepare him to lead his legendary trips to Alaska. In 1992, David Rockefeller Jr. asked Rard to supply and outfit a fleet of four Jeanneaus, which Rard delivered to Ketchikan, Alaska, so Rockefeller and 300 or so of his friends (who commuted via floatplanes, coming and going in rotating groups over the course of a summer) could sail to Kodiak after first visiting Prince William Sound and the Aleutian Islands. After the trip, Rard arranged for delivery captains to bring the boats back to Seattle, where they were sold. “This planted the seed for my Alaska trips,” says Rard. “After my South Pacific trip, I was looking for other ways to use the boat.”

The impetus for Rard’s progression to flotilla leader came in 2010 at a Pacific Northwest Jeanneau owners rendezvous, where an owner was sharing a slide show from a recent Alaska cruise. Afterward, the presenter asked how many other owners were planning to cruise Alaska the following year. A single hand punctuated the otherwise empty airspace. “So I asked, ‘Who would go if I took my boat and my tools and led the way?’” says Rard. “All 12 people raised their hands!”

So, in 2011, Rard led a group of 10 of his Jeanneau customers from Anacortes to Alaska, offering five-, seven- and nine-week cruises, depending on each owner’s interest level and availability. He dubbed the program Sail Alaska. “I started out leading these trips wanting to thank people for being customers — giving back to the sailing community and getting the owners out there,” says Rard. “I never thought I’d lead a flotilla cruise — much less 15 of them — but the New Zealand experience morphed into this.”

While Rard requests a sailing resume from each Alaska-bound flotilla skipper, he is careful to always have at least one extra helmsman aboard Ruby Slippers who can pinch-hit aboard other boats as needed, and he’s also careful to carry enough spare parts and tools to negotiate most jobs. The combination of Rard’s cruising experience and his floating boatyard has given hundreds of cruisers the courage and conviction to follow their dreams to Alaska, where they watch orcas hunt seals, spy bald eagles too numerous to count, and smoke freshly caught salmon on otherwise deserted beaches. And that’s not to mention the fantastic scenery, sailing, elaborate potluck dinners, beach parties, pack ice, blueberry-hunting missions, or the lessons of seamanship and smart cruising practices that flotilla members enjoy, along with errant bear encounters and the occasional opportunity to land a 160-pound halibut.

“Part of it is selfish,” admits Rard, who loves to document his cruises with photography and videography projects that he self-produces on his laptop (typically set to guitar music that he often plays and records, sometimes with his daughters’ help). “I want to see the cruising grounds myself, so each year about half of our destinations are new and half are places that I’ve been. We maximize the trip as far as scenery while being as flexible as we can for weather.” To date, Rard’s leadership resume is clean of any mishaps. “It’s the same as bringing my girls sailing — you get to see people being kids again,” he says.

As for his future plans, Rard recently wrapped up his 2016 Sail Alaska cruise, but 2017 is ripe with exciting possibilities. Both Jessie and Molly Rard fell in love with cruising and with “perfect days of sailing” during their two-year South Pacific odyssey aboard Ruby Slippers, and are wisely asking their parents for a second antipodean adventure as their graduation gifts, once the ink dries on their college diplomas. “I want to do one more South Pacific warm-water cruise. Tahiti to the Tuamotus to Tonga and home,” says Rard wistfully. “Alaska seems to get better each time we cruise there, and I think I can make the South Pacific better this time, with more cameras and the chance to visit some of the places we missed, while also revisiting our favorite spots.”

David Schmidt is Cruising World’s electronics editor.

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Aasiaat is far from a metropolitan city but it feels like one at this point. We have spent so much of our time in the far north that even basic luxuries seem extravagant. For instance you can do laundry, which is something we haven’t done since May. You can take a fresh water shower, it costs $6 but after 100 days of saltwater showers, who cares? Best of all you can get a draft beer along with a burger and fries; it’s not cheap but we have worked hard for it.

We made it down Baffin Bay to Upernavik without much trouble. We gave the local police the spare anchor the Danish Naval vessel had loaned us, as requested by the captain. We also bought three more large grapple anchors to add to our Bruce Claw anchor rig. That should hold us in a gale.

We needed to get back down to Arrowhead Island to retrieve RBR’s “Solo” pressure sensors but we could no longer operate 24 hours a day. By the third week of August summer ends rather abruptly with the sun beginning to set. The sun doesn’t set completely until the end of the month but once it starts dipping low in the sky at night the seasons change quickly. First off, you can say goodbye to blue skies as grey cloudy skies and near constant light rain becomes the norm. Second, the temperature starts to drop to 30-40 degrees. Last but certainly not least the weather deteriorates; although we had horrible weather in the high Arctic this summer, we haven’t seen anything nearly as bad down here in the low Arctic. The biggest problem of them all is the darkness.

From Upernavik we had to do day jumps from anchorage to anchorage. Normally sailing at night is no different than sailing in the daytime but when you have uncharted rocks and icebergs roaming around at random you really need to see what’s ahead of you. From Upernavik to Aasiaat there is a lot ice and uncharted rocks.

Arrowhead Island (it’s really called Igdluluarssuit Island) was our last hurrah with heavy ice. We were surprised to see just how much ice there was blocking the entrance to the fjord. I decided that we should drop anchor early that day and wait for the wind to die than we could slowly motor through. Luckily the wind died the next day and we were able to wind our way through the maze of ice back to Arrowhead.

Things went well for the most part. The mosquitoes were gone as it was now too cold for them. We retrieved the pressure sensors without too much fuss. Some of the sensors had disappeared, swept away by large icebergs but the rest were there. There was more brash ice and mélange near the southern glacier than before, forcing us to push through very heavy ice. At times we had to push Ault hard. I never thought we would get stuck but it was important to keep momentum in order to have steerage. There wasn’t one square inch of open water for several miles, just ice, all shapes and sizes.

Disko Bay was also quite icy with lots of larger bergs, mixed with small pieces. I steered the boat through that ice Greenlandic style, meaning at top speed. Greenlandic people fly through the ice on little open fiberglass boats at 20+ knots. If I tried to do that I would die in 5 minutes, all I can think is they must be ice ninjas. Our top speed is still very slow, but over time you get better at navigating ice.

Aasiaat was the last stop for Dana, who was the mate. He flew out this morning and I have another sailor, Mike, flying in tomorrow. Dana has type 1 diabetes, he has to shoot insulin 4 times a day or he goes into shock and dies. Alexander has something called PKU, which means he can’t eat protein. Basically protein turns into poison and eats his brain. If he ate a normal diet for two weeks he would become permanently mentally handicapped and eventually turn into a vegetable. Nikki has to inject B 12 as that’s the only way her body can absorb it. B12 is very important for memory, and of course she forgets to do it. I have a minor form of turrets called ticks, which have been bad this year. We all have our issues.

There really isn’t much of a fall season in the Arctic. There are no trees to lose their leaves, but more importantly it gets too cold too quick. We had ice on our boat this morning and before I could row Dana over to land so he could catch a taxi to the airport I had to scrape ice off the dingy. Although it was a cold night we did have one surprise, we got to watch the Northern Lights dance above our vessel.

It’s time to leave the Arctic. However beautiful the Aurora Borealis is, winter is coming in a hurry. We have to sail at least 900 miles to get to Canada, crossing the Labrador Sea. Every week that passes the weather in the Labrador gets worse. It looks like we may have a good window to start the voyage south around Sept 17th. Hopefully the passage itself will be uneventful. 900 miles south is the small town of Cartwright in southern Labrador. I hope to make it even further, maybe St Johns before we have to stop. If we are real lucky we will be able to sail all the way back to the US without stopping, but that’s unlikely. Chances are we will have to stop for fuel or to duck from a storm somewhere along the way. It’s time to begin phase 2; our journey home.

Yesterday Alexander told me he was leaving the expedition and flying home. All of us has some fear of crossing the Labrador Sea inside us, you would have to be crazy not to. But you must learn to control fear or fear will control you. Unfortunately Alexander has let his fear grow roots and consume him. I wouldn’t have been so upset about the situation had he told me he was flying back two weeks ago when he first started thinking about it but instead he told me 24 hours before we were leaving on the largest ocean passage of the expedition, sailing from Greenland to Canada. I have no time to fly in another camera man. I had to spend several hours today running all over Aasiaat trying to buy an expensive camera and audio equipment so I can finish filming the expedition. Even worse we are down one crew member. I’d much rather have a crew of four than three for the crossing, but I couldn’t talk Alex into staying. We have a good weather window, I can’t wait here another 2 weeks trying to find someone and fly them in. I don’t have the money either. So we will leave tomorrow morning and Alex will fly out later this week. It feels strange to have Dana and Alex leave and have a new crew member, Mike. Phase 2 will have a new crew dynamic.

We will all be very happy when the Labrador Sea is behind us and the crossing is over.

Fortitudine Vincinimus

–Matt Rutherford

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