OnBlueUnderCanvas

Sailing the Inside Passage to Alaska Through Fjords and Glaciers

The first time the charts of the Inside Passage came across my desk, I was anchored in a quiet bay on Tasmania's south coast, halfway through a Hobart refit. The coastline around me was familiar granite and gum forest, but the charts on the screen showed a different kind of wilderness: a thousand nautical miles of protected saltwater threading between the Alaskan panhandle and the open Pacific. I folded the charts into the dry bag, already thinking about how this journey would compare to the sheltered passages I had grown up sailing in places like Sydney Harbour and Pittwater.

There is something quietly humbling about approaching a coastline by sea, and Alaska's southeastern reaches are some of the most humbling waters on the planet. The Inside Passage is not a single channel but a maze of waterways, sounds, and deep fjords carved by retreating ice. Towns like Juneau, Sitka, and Petersburg cling to narrow strips of flat land, and the forests climb straight from the tideline into mist. The route has long been travelled by ferries, fishing boats, and cruise ships, but sailing it under your own canvas turns it from a sightseeing route into something closer to an apprenticeship.

For sailors who learned their trade at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron or the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, the Inside Passage offers a familiar challenge dressed in unfamiliar scenery. The sailing itself is often gentle, protected from open ocean swells by a chain of islands, but the navigation is dense, the weather shifts quickly, and the stakes are real when fog rolls in. Add calving glaciers, humpback whales, and brown bears foraging along the shore, and the journey becomes a constant negotiation between focus and wonder.

I joined a 42-foot cutter out of Anacortes in late spring with a small crew, two of whom had spent seasons working on superyachts in the Whitsundays. We were a long way from the warm reefs of Queensland, but the rhythms of watch-keeping felt strangely familiar. The difference was the backdrop: every horizon was a new painting, and every cup of tea on deck came with a view no chart could quite prepare you for.

Timing the Voyage from the Southern Hemisphere

Sailing Alaska requires a particular kind of patience for crews coming from Australia. Our summer runs counter to Alaska's sailing season, so the planning starts months in advance. Most charter operations begin in May and wind down by September, when daylight shrinks and the first heavy weather settles over the Gulf of Alaska. Booking from a Sydney or Melbourne kitchen in the depth of an Australian winter feels strange, but it is exactly the rhythm that works.

Flights from Sydney to Seattle typically route through Los Angeles or San Francisco, with the nonstop Qantas service to Dallas offering another convenient springboard. From Seattle, an overnight bus or a short hop north brings you to charter bases around Anacortes or Bellingham. I budgeted around two thousand Australian dollars for the airfare alone, on top of the charter fee, and another thousand for provisioning and park fees. Watching the conversion wobble between AUD and USD became a small hobby of its own.

Seasonal timing matters for more than weather. Wildlife viewing is shaped by the calendar: humpbacks arrive in larger numbers through July, salmon runs peak in August, and brown bears gather at river mouths as the fish move upstream. Photographers chasing long summer days will appreciate that the sun barely sets in late June, with Skagway logging more than eighteen hours of daylight. Australian sailors accustomed to early winter darkness find that endless twilight a quietly intoxicating gift.

Choosing the Right Boat for Coastal Alaska

Charter fleets in the Pacific Northwest tend to favour robust cruising boats with shallow drafts and protected keels, a sensible answer to waters full of hidden shoals, floating logs, and rocky shorelines. The boats we chartered were heavier than the light displacement racers common in Sydney Harbour, with standing rigging sized for stronger breeze and wood-stoved interiors that could handle damp. A bowsprit and a sturdy anchor roller felt like essentials after the first night of sudden katabatic winds spilling out of the fjords.

Sail handling is shaped by the long days and short passages. There is no need to push the boat hard, especially when tides run like rivers through narrow passages like Wrangell Narrows. Many sailors rig a downwind plan early and let the boat ghost along at four or five knots, conserving fuel for the inevitable calms. Heavy weather sails are useful but rarely needed; more important is good ground tackle and a watertight cockpit locker, since rain is a near-daily companion.

If you bring your own boat north from Australia, the logistics are significant. The common route is to ship via the Panama Canal or to sail the South Pacific, refuelling at the Marquesas or Hawaii before making the long reach to the Pacific Northwest. I met a couple in Port Townsend who had left Pittwater two seasons earlier, tracing a route that included a stopover at the Wooden Boat Centre in Franklin and several seasons of paid work to fund the next leg. Their boat was salt-worn, well-loved, and exactly the right vessel for the cold-water miles ahead.

Wildlife Along the Waterway

One of the great pleasures of sailing this coast is how close the wildlife comes to the boat. Humpbacks feed in rich pockets near the entrances to fjords, and we lost count of the spouts that drifted past the bow on a single afternoon. The trick is to slow the boat, kill the engine, and let the scene settle. A whale surfacing twenty metres off the rail sounds different from one three hundred metres away, and engine noise carries underwater long after we thought it had faded.

Sea otters drift on their backs in the kelp, often clutching a stone they use to crack shellfish. Eagles sit in the spruces lining the shore, big enough to see without binoculars. Black bears feed along the beach at low tide, and grizzlies haunt the salmon streams further north. Each encounter asks for slightly different etiquette: stay well clear of the bears, reduce speed around the whales, and keep a respectful distance from haul-outs where seals gather.

The birdlife alone justifies the voyage. Puffins return to their burrows in summer, murrelets flit low across the water, and bald eagles perch like sentinels on every exposed snag. As a photographer, I found the soft, overcast light typical of the region easier on the lens than the harsh midday glare I had been used to shooting on the Great Barrier Reef. The forests on shore felt close enough to touch, and on calm mornings the water turned into a perfect mirror, doubling every cliff and glacier face.

Glacier Country and the Sound of Calving Ice

The day we sailed into Glacier Bay felt like entering a cathedral. The water was still, the air smelled of cold rock, and the only sound was the soft slap of bow wave against the hull. Glaciers are slow, but they are not silent. You hear them before you see them: a low groan, then a crack, and finally a great rumbling splash as a wall of blue ice calves into the sea. Watching a face the size of a house drop into the water is a strange kind of education in time.

Johns Hopkins, Margerie, and Lamplugh glaciers each have their own personality. Some calve frequently, throwing off small bergs every few minutes; others hold their breath for hours before letting loose a single massive piece. The trick is to drift in slowly, keeping the boat just outside the run of any currents, and to watch the surface for rolling bubbles that signal a recently submerged chunk.

I had seen glaciers before in New Zealand's Southern Alps and in Patagonia, but Alaska's tidewater glaciers feel more immediate because the ocean reaches them. The colour is the giveaway: dense glacial ice looks almost electric blue, and freshly calved bergs can roll slowly for days before melting away. Standing on deck in a heavy jumper, watching the ice fall and listening to the echo roll back from the cliffs, was the closest I had come to understanding why the early explorers called this part of the world the Great Ice.

Coastal Communities and Indigenous Heritage

The towns along the Inside Passage are small, practical, and stitched tightly to the sea. Sitka feels like an old Russian outpost wearing a Pacific Northwest coat, with onion domes, fishing boats, and a museum that takes the history of the Tlingit people seriously. Wrangell has a museum housing the petroglyphs of nearby Petroglyph Beach, where stones carved centuries ago still emerge at low tide. Petersburg, sometimes called Little Norway, fills with salmon in summer and empties again as the season winds down.

Indigenous presence is contemporary life here rather than folklore. Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian communities have lived along this coast for thousands of years, and their names for places, animals, and weather still shape the charts. Visiting community-owned cultural centres, including the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, gave me a deeper sense of place than any guidebook could. The carvings, clan crests, and oral histories attached to every bay and headland made the coastline feel layered rather than empty.

Australian sailors accustomed to the welcome of remote communities like those on Tasmania's east coast will recognise the rhythm. You arrive small, you listen, you buy what you can locally, and you leave quietly. Provisioning in towns like Ketchikan or Haines is straightforward if you accept that the choice is more limited than a Coles run in suburban Sydney. Fresh salmon, smoked fish, and locally baked bread are easy to find; specialty items often arrive by barge and cost accordingly.

Capturing the Light on Camera and Film

Bringing a sailing photographer's eye to Alaska is a generous kind of spoiling. The light is soft, the subjects are enormous, and the scale refuses to fit into a single frame. I shot on a mix of digital and 35mm film, with a small zoom for deck work and a longer lens for wildlife. The trick is restraint. A wide shot of a fjord without a foreground element looks flat, so I tried to anchor each frame with something close: a coiled line, a winch, a pair of boots, the curve of a bow wave.

Mornings often started with a thin layer of fog clinging to the tree line. By mid-morning the clouds broke into a quilt, throwing shifting patterns of light and shadow across the water. Late evenings brought that long, horizontal glow that lasts well past ten o'clock, with the sky shifting through shades of pink and lavender that I had never seen from the helm before. Sunsets were slow, muted events rather than the brief fiery performances I had grown up photographing over Sydney Heads.

The hardest part was deciding when to put the camera down. Some moments were better held than captured: a pod of orcas surfacing in flat water, a glacier face calving at dusk, the slow procession of icebergs drifting past the cockpit in the small hours. Memory, in the end, was the better camera. The photographs came later, on quiet evenings at the chart table, when the weather turned foul and the crew gathered to trade stories from the day.

A Skipper's Notes for Australian Crews

Back on the dock in Anacortes, with the salt still crusted on the rigging and a long list of chart corrections to log, I found myself thinking about how a journey like this changes the way you see other waters. The coves of Pittwater and the granite shores of Tasmania will look familiar when I get home, but they will also look richer, layered with a different kind of cold and a different kind of silence. Sailing the Inside Passage teaches you that wilderness is not a faraway idea but a daily companion, and that the boat is the best seat in the house for learning how to live alongside it.