Author: christine

Its super easy to fly one-way to the start and end of our trips on the M/V David B with Alaska Airlines, and here’s why:

We offer a lot of our 7-day Alaska trips that start in one small Alaska town, and end in another. This causes a number of our potential passengers to be worried about booking, and to choose only our trips that start and end in the same town. It’s actually really simple, partly because of how the reservations system works at Alaska Airlines (the only major airline that flies to all of our ports).

An example is trip #166 next June. It starts in Juneau, AK and ends in Petersburg, AK. If you were trying to do this (fly to one city, then fly home from another) in the lower 48 it would be expensive and complicated and the past it might add several hundred dollars or more to the cost of the ticket. On Alaska Airlines it is simple, straightforward, and reasonably priced. There’s a “one-way” button right at the top of the Book Your Trip section and even a MultiCity link that allows you to put together an itinerary that includes several flights to work around a cruise segment on the David B.

Other airlines seem to have recently introduced both one-way and multi-city buttons to their reservation systems, but it’s been available as a service on AS (Alaska Airlines) for a long time, because that’s how people in Alaska have been getting around since the start. It’s also pretty amazing that there is non-stop, 737 jet service to our smallest ports, direct from Seattle. If you’re planning on coming with us in Alaska this summer, don’t worry about booking your one way flights, it’ll be easy.

“You must be fabulously wealthy,” a guy I just met told me, when he heard what I do for a living. I of course, said “no,” which is true, but maybe that’s not totally correct.

Running boats, especially an old wooden boat, just doesn’t make that much money. We have huge expenses for the maintenance and upkeep, even though we do most of the work ourselves and pay almost nothing in outside labor. I’m not in this business because of the money, I’m in it for what else it gives me, and in some ways that does make me fabulously wealthy.

My “wealth” comes from drifting with humpback whales in Fredrick Sound, Alaska with the engine shut down and the boat perfectly quiet. Spending hours sitting and watching them surface and dive as they feed, with no other boats anywhere nearby, is really amazing. It also comes from my memory of the afternoon we anchored in an un-named cove in Gambier Bay, Alaska. We watched porpoises swim around the cove, and around the boat, before we went ashore for a hike on a rocky beach covered with shells. The only sounds, other than our boots crunching on the shells, were the salmon jumping and the eagles and ravens calling from the tall trees around the cove. Later that evening there was an amazing sunset.

These silent moments aren’t the only memories that add to my riches. The day we lovingly call “Bad Friday” with it’s steep 12 to 14 foot seas, driving rain and 40 knot winds, the worst we’d ever seen from the David B, also adds to my store of memories. I’d rather not repeat that 8 hour ride of plunging the bow in the waves then being lifted on the next, but it was truly beautiful out there, especially as the sun broke through the super black clouds, lighting up the blowing spray. My experience of that day is permanently etched in my mind, “wealth” that can’t be taken away.

We take a lot of pictures to help us remember these precious moments, but what really matters to me is the memory. Those pictures might get lost, damaged, stolen or erased, but the memory is still going to be there. I can’t do what I do without guests paying for the upkeep, the insurance, the provisions, the fuel and a million other little things, the least of which is a salary for me, but that’s really not about “wealth” is it?

It might be a little hokey to say, but I really think our trips on the David B make our passengers (and me) fabulously wealthy. Maybe I should have answered “yes.”

Christine and I just returned from Greece, where we were the captain and cook on a sailing yacht for a couple of weeks, and the trip made me realize just how good we have it on the David B. There were a lot of small things the yacht didn’t have that really make our usual trips comfortable, and while I wouldn’t trade our time in Greece for anything, I came away with a new appreciation of how well the David B is suited for our guests and our schedule.

The first issue was power. In this day and age, people need a lot of electrical power. Everything we all have now requires a charge. Cell phones, laptops, iPads, iPods, and sleep apnea machines all require charging or plugging in. Even most cameras and video recorders have rechargeable batteries that need some time at the wall plug. Our yacht in Greece, the Keros, didn’t have a good system for all those electrical needs, but the David B does. It has 110V AC (household style) power throughout our vessel, with a convenient outlet located in each passenger stateroom and several in the galley. They are close to the sink in each cabin so an electric shavers or even a hairdryer is ok, and near enough to the bed that it would also work for a sleep apnea breathing machine. Charging up all those electronic devices is really easy too.

I also had to spend a lot of time thinking about our water consumption. The Keros only carried 600 L (about 157 US gallons) compared to the David B’s 415 gallons. It wasn’t a huge issue, because there was water at about half the islands we went to, but it was always on my mind. On the David B, we make our own water using reverse-osmosis. We take sea water and turn it into wonderful tasting, cool, pure water and we always have lots. It tastes better than the water at most of the ports we go to. We also have an on-demand water heater, which means you can take a shower at any time of day or night and the water’s always nice and hot.

The biggest passenger comfort that seemed hard to find in Greece, however, were calm anchorages. There just aren’t that many really good, protected anchorages in the Cyclades compared to the Inside Passage. There are a few, but we really didn’t want to limit ourselves to the islands with great protection, so quite a few nights we rolled around in a swell, or surged noisily against our dock lines while tied to the dock. The places we got to see, because we were willing to forgo calm and quiet for location, were fabulously beautiful. It just wasn’t like the calm spots we anchor on the David B.

Greece is beautiful, and cruising under sail was amazing. I loved taking people to places that none of us had ever seen (or even heard of) before. We felt like true explorers on our own version of The Odyssey. The wind blew against us at every turn (we think it had to do with angering the gods somehow) but we sailed to spots you could never go by any other means. We stopped at deserted island beaches and islands so small they only had a single monastery on them. We went to larger towns and small, and even met some of the locals, and their hundreds of cats. The white washed buildings with blue doors and shutters were just as I pictured they’d be, the locals much friendlier. We’re already planning another trip, and we’d love to take you with us, but on this trip I really realized just how well the David B is suited for what we do.