Inside Passage is only a dream away

There are two Seattle suburbs.

Most of us live in the one where the local icon is an SUV driver talking on a cellphone.

The other Seattle suburb is called Alaska. It's farther out, but they shop at REI in Anchorage, eat the same Costco muffins and there are no doubt some people who commute between here and there. I once met a guy who flew down for a Springsteen concert.

And just as you can go boating through the Montlake Cut, you can boat between Puget Sound and Alaska. Fishermen have done it for generations. For pleasure boaters, it's the ultimate commute, as slow as Interstate 5 on a bad afternoon but winding through the largely protected wilderness corridor of the Inside Passage.

Of course, you can't take my word for it. For me, this is still a fantasy well above making all the traffic lights across town and a few notches higher than the fish and chips at the Pacific Inn Pub.

But there are lots of others who have done it in lots of different boats. The first step of a journey is to ask other people about it. If only as an exercise in dreamsmanship, I talked a few of them up. They offered glimpses of a remote wild paradise that, oddly, is part of our own watery backyard.

"I gave myself a gift," said Dale McKinnon of Bellingham. "It was a magnificent gift."

A few years ago, McKinnon built a 17-foot Oarling, a dory-style rowboat designed by Olympia boat builder Sam Devlin, himself a regular Alaska cruiser. McKinnon had the boat on display in the Devlin exhibit at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival when Devlin's foreman said, "When are you going to row the Inside Passage?"

With Devlin's help, McKinnon started building a larger, sleeker craft, which she named Bella. The turmoil of 9/11 inspired her to use an Alaska trip as a way of "finding a way back to a sense of community and a sense of purpose" and planned a 2004 trip from Ketchikan to Bellingham as a fundraiser for Northwest Youth Services.

The Passage was "stunningly beautiful," she said. "If you take Yosemite and stretched it out to 700 miles long, that's the Inside Passage."

Massive peaks plunged into the water. She went as many as five days without seeing another person. Yet she discovered a social life built around the VHF marine radio, with First Nation families calling ahead to connect her with other families on her route.

When she rounded Cape Caution, where Capt. George Vancouver ran aground more than two centuries earlier, she knew that history had recorded only one other woman rowing alone past that point. The other was Betty Lowman Carey, who rowed the cedar dugout canoe Bijaboji from Guemes Island to Ketchikan in 1937.

McKinnon's trip took eight weeks, one-way. That's longer than the round-trip taken by Terry Stoeser of Seattle — with the benefit of sail and engine — although his trip was 10 years in the dreaming and six months in the planning.

"We cruised in Canada for 25 to 30 years, but the draw of going north into the ice was appealing," said Stoeser, 59, who skippers a Nauticat pilothouse ketch, Trofast. "I'm never going to go around the Horn, but this is something I wanted to do before it's over."

He reached Sitka, sailed in the Pacific outside Baranof Island, visited with the keeper of the Five Fingers Lighthouse and had a humpback whale pull a heart-stopping leap alongside the boat.

"It made this huge bafoom — a percussion — then a huge rainbow," he said. "You know how they jump up and land on their back. That was probably the scariest thing that happened to us the whole trip."

LaDonna Bubak and Rob Tryon had as many as 30 whales come by so close they could smell their breath.

"It was not pleasant," Bubak said.

They spent four months in their cutter-rigged yawl, Silent Sun, a Pacific Seacraft 37, including the month spent going north. They feasted on halibut, four species of salmon and ling cod. "Every time we put a line in the water, we were able to catch something," said Bubak.

They had been warned that, for all Canada's beauty, Alaska would be even better. They found this hard to believe as they passed 3,000-foot mountains in British Columbia thick with old growth.

"How could it possibly be any better than this?" Bubak recalled thinking. "And we got to Alaska and there are 6,000-foot mountains with glaciers a mile wide — not a mile long — releasing right into the ocean."

Other boaters keep hearing those stories. And that's when they start dreaming.

The Boating column appears twice monthly in Northwest Weekend. Freelance writer Eric Sorensen, a former Seattle Times staff reporter, keeps two boats in his Kenmore garage and helps sail and maintain Mistral, a 31-foot Seaborn-Blanchard sloop, at Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats. Contact him at svwhim@yahoo.com.