Our explore feature allows you to explore the coast by overview - one cruise day at a time - or in detail, showing you the many, many places along the way that a small boat cruiser might explore. Alaska, Seattle, and Vancouver departures are all for cruise route explorations. A big cruise ship makes the trip from Seattle or Vancouver to Ketchikan in about 36 hours. For boats like these below, that would only travel daylight hours because of hitting logs in the water at night, that same trip would usually take a week, and that was if you got good weather all the way. One windy fall, that trip me and the two other boats I was traveling with almost a month!

Would You Go To Alaska In These?

The sheltered winding waterways of the Inside Passage allowed even the smallest craft to travel north in relative safety - kayakers and intrepid folks in rowboats have even taken this trip. Big cruise ships take the widest and often less interesting channels up the British Columbia coast to Alaska. But small craft like these take the most sheltered winding channels . The boat on the top is the Maggie Murphy, cobbled together by two young men with a passion for Alaska in 1947. It wasn't very fancy... or safe:

"First of all, the pilothouse proved to be utterly uninhabitable. It had about two inches less headroom than was needed to permit either of us to stand erect while steering; the engine was right underfoot, belching fumes and heat that rose up to smother the helmsman; futhermore there was no danger that either fumes or heat would escape because the windows had been nailed and puttied in place, sealing the pilothouse as tight as a mummy's crypt." - John Joseph Ryan, The Maggie Murphy

Before the days of electronic navigation - in particular GPS and radar, it wasn't uncommon at all for ships to go ashore along the myriad winding waterways of the Inside Passage. This is the venerable Mariposa, on the beach of Lama Passage, Mile 394, around 1915. No one was hurt and pretty soon another steamer came along and picked up the passengers and took them to Alaska. At the time the Mariposa was one of the finest steamers on the Seattle-Alaska run. Sadly a couple of years later, while Captain Johnny O'Brian was in his cabin, and a pilot was steering, strong currents took her off course and onto a rock, now named for her, actually right in front of where I built my cabin, at Point Baker. All aboard got off OK, but the Mariposa and her 25,000 cases of canned salmon were gone. Seattle Museum of History and Industry photo

Headed North The Old Way