Wednesday, Sept 4,

Calling today “Scenic Cruising the Inside Passage” was a bit of an oversell by Holland America. But time and tide…

We left Vancouver after 3 PM to get to Seymour Narrows by half past midnight. I was on deck until sunset.

Seymour Narrows are a tricky part of the Inside Passage between Vancouver Island and smaller islands off the mainland.  Tide currents run to fifteen knots with a lot of turbulence, so you need to pass at slack tide.  It used to be worse.  Ripple Rock was a twin peaked underwater mountain that, at low tide was just nine feet below the surface of the narrows.  Captain George Vancouver called it “One of the vilest Stretches of water in the world.”  More than fifty ships and boats foundered on the rock.  In 1958 the Canadian government blew it up.  It took two years for miners to tunnel under the surface of the narrows and up into the rock.  They packed it with explosives and, at the time, created the largest non-nuclear peacetime explosion in the world. 

CBC televised across Canada and screening of the program was a regular feature on Alaska State Ferries from Bellingham, Washington to Ketchikan before the ships passed the narrows.   In the closest town, Campbell River, they opened windows or taped them up before the explosion to prevent flying shattered glass. 

Blowing up the rock was controversial because highway engineers wanted to use it as the base to support a bridge between Vancouver Island and the mainland.  The mariners won out over the highway boys.  The blast was successful.

But it did not completely end problems in these waters.  In 1984 the cruise liner MV Stardancer hit a rock and limped to Campbell River.  She tied up, everyone got off, and then she sank at the dock, pulling the dock down with her, causing the pulp mill that owned the dock to have to lay off workers and close for several months.  The ship was a total loss. 

We passed Campbell River and the narrows after midnight.  I was asleep.  I did stay up to watch sunset, which was before we hit much of the truly pretty stretch,

and I was up before 5 AM to catch the sunrise as we cruised out from behind Vancouver Island into Queen Charlotte Sound.

I was disappointed to see the Pilot Boat at about 6 AM because that meant that we were not going to continue up the Inside Passage but rather go outside Haida Gwaii (Formally the Queen Charlottes).  Our day of advertised Inside passage scenic cruising ended with sunrise.   

We bypassed the best part, the inside passage from Queen Charotte Sound to Hekate Strait.  It’s one of my favorite stretches passing the villages of Bella Bella, Bella Coola, and several picturesque lighthouses.  We missed the passage through Grenville Channel, one of the most beautiful waterways along the coast.  I haven’t done this in years, and we did not do it today. (I found that for the past several years most cruise ships have bypassed this stretch, but if they were going bypass it why say we had scenic cruising today?)

But missing Grenville meant that I had no conflict between being on deck watching and attending the four lectures today.  It was our first sea day.  Usually, we start off with sea days and take in lectures before we arrive at our first port.  These lectures were on observation of the natural world when you are out in Alaska, the Iditarod, Glaciers and Alaska Trivia.

For most of the afternoon we coasted Haida Gwaii outer shore.  Although it was at a distance, we got some idea of the rugged mountains, and I noticed a lot of recent landslides.  Southeast Alaska has been plagued by fatal slides in the last decade in Sitka, Haines, Wrangell and Ketchikan, and while, blessedly not fatal, a slide that damaged the dock in Skagway and sent several ships Sitka’s way.  Increasing numbers of slides may be associated with climate change.

Between lectures I found a news story online that I wanted to share with my kids.  Our Dutch ship was more than three miles from Haida Gwaii in International Waters using Sky Link, an American company.  When I tried to share the story on Facebook, I got a message that sharing news stories on Facebook was forbidden in Canada. But wait, I am not in Canada!

I shared the story using Google.  So now a story produced by a small American news outlet will help fund Canadian media. (see my last post).  Having run a small news operation in Alaska I hope they give the money to some small Canadian outlet and not Conrad Black.   Better, of course, if it went to the hard-working journalist who actually produced the story.

Tomorrow Sitka!