Inside Passage
A New Season Begins
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Sea Otters in Queen Charlotte Sound
Earlier this summer when we were heading north to Ketchikan from Bellingham on our 12-day Inside Passage cruise, we has a pleasant surprise of finding several sea otters in a place we’d not seen them before. To read about it, head over to my blog at Yachting Magazine…
Tides, Currents and Rapids in the Inside Passage
Cruising in the Inside Passage should be on every boater’s Must-Do List. The rewards for making the trip to Alaska are interesting towns and villages to visit, amazing natural beauty and a wild and remote feel you can’t find elsewhere. The southern part of the Inside Passage from Seattle to Desolation Sound is chic with upscale island towns full of art galleries, small wineries and craft breweries. North of Desolation Sound the Inside Passage grows more remote and wild. It’s where you’re most likely to find solitude. All of it is over-the-top beautiful.
Cruising through Dent Rapids at slack water.
For the last several weeks I’ve covered many topics about cruising in the Inside Passage from electronics, to charts, to outfitting, to planning your trip. This week, I’m going to focus on the natural aspects of the trip, and how wind, tides and geography affect your voyage, as well as how to take some of the apprehension out of cruising in the Inside Passage.
The Inside Passage gets its dramatic geography from advances of the massive Cordilleran ice sheet that pushed its way south, all the way to Washington State in the late Pleistocene. Evidence of this long ago glaciation is written into the Steep-walled fjords where grooves in the rocks show the slow-motion scraping rock and ice. When you begin to study the charts of the Inside Passage you’ll notice that the long winding deep inlets that cut into mainland are the beds of the long ago glaciers and you can trace their retreat to the high coastal mountains where their remnants still remain. To continue reading about how tides and currents will effect your cruising in the Inside Passage click over to CruisingNW.com…
For more information on our Learn to Cruise the Inside Passage…
For a sample itinerary of our Learn to Cruise the Inside Passage trips…
Cruise the Inside Passage – Presentation April 10th
If you love the Inside Passage and are dreaming of cruising to Alaska? Join us for an evening of photographs, fun stories and tips? on cruising the Inside Passage at the Whatcom Maritime Association’s monthly meeting on April 10th — 7pm. 2633 S Harbor Loop Dr, Bellingham, Washington
It’s free and open to the public. Click on the link below for printable flyer:
Directions to Squalicum Yacht Club
Think of a Road Trip…
you went on, maybe back in your early twenties. Do you remember the view out the windows, the miles going by, the freedom of choosing where you were going to go and how you were going to get to your destination? You were there, in the moment, living. Did you have your tent along, or did you crash at friends’ houses. Was it sunny and beautiful and windows-rolled-down cruising or crazy snowing and are-we-going-to-get-there-alive thrilling? Remember that wonderful feeling of having the music cranked up?
The thing is, it’s fun to live those trips and almost as much fun to re-live those trips later. We have all these memories, and for me seldom an hour goes by without thinking about something from the past. It’s not like I’m dragging up all these memories of just road trips. It’s all kinds of stuff. It’s just that the memories of what I had for lunch yesterday , or what I told my accountant last week aren’t going to stick with me like that ones from the road trip.
When you’re on the David B, you’ll see things that you might never get to see again. Humpback whales feeding together in groups, glacier carved fjords, native totem pole ruins slowly decomposing into the earth, bears meandering on the beach. The list is endless, no day is the same, but the memories, that’s what’s really important. They’re yours to bring back anytime. Like that road trip.
Call us. It’s time you went cruising.
We hope to see you soon!
Captain Jeffrey and Christine
360-201-8184
PS. You won’t need your tent for this road trip!