Don and Reanne Douglass

Cruising along, boldly

After cruising 170,000 miles, exploring 6,000 harbors and writing 1 million words, Don Douglass, 73, and his wife and bow-watch Reanne Hemingway-Douglass, 72, can't wait to cast off again. The couple has written six popular cruising guidebooks covering the coast from San Diego to Glacier Bay, Alaska, and has a seventh in the works that will continue on to Kodiak.

"The Alaskan coast is less populated now than in several thousand years" because fishing and logging have declined and natives have left villages, Don says. "We feel like modern-day explorers."

The couple has boldly gone where few dare, anchoring in three times as many bays as government pilot books cover, and probing parts around the Queen Charlotte Islands that have never been charted. By the time you read this they are on their way to Alaska again aboard their Nordhavn 40 trawler "Baidarka," but we caught up with them at home, tucked on four woodsy acres next to Fidalgo Island's biggest waterfall.

Their early sailing experience as a couple was in 1974 when they set off to round the world. Their boat pitchpoled, or flipped end over end, off Cape Horn, and Reanne wrote a book called "Cape Horn: One Man's Dream, One Woman's Nightmare."

After returning to their outdoor-equipment business and a house 7,000 feet up in the California Sierras, they began kayaking the Northwest. After one wild and wet trip, they rode the ferry back to Anacortes, crossed town, and bought their first trawler, a Nordic Tug. With that they began the meticulous research necessary for Northwest guidebooks, founding their own publishing company.

"We work from dawn until dusk," says Reanne, who has helped give names to hundreds of remote coves, including "Reanne's Terror." "Don is an explorer. He would have been Peter Puget."

The two favor anchoring over marinas, and simple over complex. "The excitement and enjoyment in cruising is inversely proportional to the length of your boat," Don says. "A smaller boat is close to nature."

How do you turn avocation into vocation? Don quotes his old business professor, Peter Drucker. "Find a passion and do it right. If you do it right, do it for money. And if you do it for money, do it for lots of money."

"We're still working on stage three," Reanne says with a laugh.