Waters of Southeast Alaska

Around the year 1996, just after I began working my way through college at the age of 50, I signed on as shipboard culturalist with a small cruise ship. On the evening of the first day, we sailed southbound out of the downtown Juneau harbor, circled Douglas Island, and steamed north in Lynn Canal. We spent the next day in Haines and then on to Skagway. That evening, we sailed down Lynn Canal and into Icy Straits. We were joined by a USFS naturalist in Barlow Cove early the next morning, and then we spent the whole day in Glacier Bay. The next morning, we lingered at Pt. Adolphus, then steamed south on Chatham Strait, into Peril Cove, and spent the next day in Sitka. That evening, we sailed back up Neva and Olga Straits, into Peril Straits, past Poison Cove and Deadman's Reach, and continued sailing throughout the night to offload passengers in Juneau in the morning, take on stores, and board another load of passengers that night, to sail again northbound in Lynn Canal. In the following summers, I worked on four-passenger dayboats that went no farther than Point Retreat and on state ferries with ports of call as far as Bellingham. I never tired of it: If I knew I had only one year to live, I would spend my last summer on the waters of Southeast Alaska.