Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

    This is the year to quit. This is the season to kick the habit. No patches, no pills, no support groups. Just say no.
   To baseball, that is. It’s time to kick it, and the hometown team – God bless their mediocre souls -- is making it easy.
    Face it, being a fan has always been an utter waste of time and energy. Even if you rarely made it to Safeco Field (and I was a twice-a-year guy), you were planting yourself in front of the tube, poring over box scores, resenting A-Rod’s defection. All this for a roster of guys who are not very interesting people who live somewhere else, who played for another team last year and will probably play for yet another next year, and who make more money in a year than I’ll make in my career – all because they theoretically can hit or toss a baseball better than the next guy.
   I’ve always understood this made no sense, but I got sucked in. For a long time, it was a bonding experience with my son. Now he’s been on his own for a decade, and I realize I turned him into an addict as well. Then came those few good years, with Edgar and Buhner and Moyer – guys who actually lived here and had personalities as well as being good ballplayers. It was fun.
    So much for history. The thrill of the grass has long since been displaced by steroids, seven-digit salaries, dwi arrests and transient ballplayers. These days, I look at the box scores and, regardless of the score, I barely recognize the names. Only one of their starting pitchers came up through their organization. It’s a team of free agents. And, whatever their stats say, they’re a miserable, forgettable bunch of ballplayers, probably the worst in the Mariners’ grim history, certainly the worst when measured against what they’re being paid.
   So this is the year to switch. Baseball Anonymous. Do not take me out to the ballpark. Buy me some carrot and celery sticks. This is the summer to read novels, take up gardening, or sailing or kayaking. Go volunteer for a political candidate. Adopt a homeless family. …
   Anything but baseball. Yup, my name is Ross, and I’m a recovering baseball fan. And I’m over it. 
                                                               {Published on Crosscut.com, May 2008)

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   For most folks hereabouts, spring translates to some combination of flower gardens and sun. They revel in their tulips and rhodies and poppies. And that’s fair enough. But for f us saltwater souls, it’s all about the glitter. We look forward to that first warm, moonless night, when Puget Sound is flat and dark so we can launch a kayak, escape the city’s incandescent glow, and enjoy an all-organic light show.
   It’s a splendid display. Each paddle stroke ignites thousands of tiny explosions of bioluminescent light, reminding us that Puget Sound, for all its ecological woes, still sizzles with life. Puget Sound may be better known for bigger and more charismatic critters – leaping king salmon and frolicking orcas. But the real star power out there belongs to those ever-lovin’, dazzling dinoflagellates.
   Dino-who? OK, they’re microscopic, far too small to be seen by the naked eye. But what they lack in size and grandeur they make up for in numbers – thousands to the cup-full of Puget Sound seawater. And sparkle, because these are the invisible “bugs” which, on warm summer nights, flash an LED-like green across the surface of the sound.
   They’re best-known to kayakers, who ride closer the surface, the better to enjoy one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular displays. But other boaters see the sparkle in their bow wave, or when porpoise swim past, leaving a trail of glitter reminiscent of Tinkerbell in Neverland.
   It happens every year, when the sound awakens from its winter slumber. As the days become longer and warmer, sunlight triggers what scientists sometimes call the “spring bloom.” Countless trillions of microscopic plankton which have overwintered in semi-hibernation in the depths rise in the water column, and begin to feed, or to photosynthesize, and to reproduce like crazy.    By early summer, they dominate the ecosystem, clouding the water, triggering a feeding frenzy that sustains virtually everything that lives out there.
   The largest of these organisms are about the size of these periods...... The vast majority are much smaller.   The explosion is triggered by diatoms, wondrous, single-celled algae enclosed in an exquisite shell of silicon. Fed by sunlight, the diatoms begin to reproduce, one diatom becoming a million within a month. While an individual diatom is quite invisible, their massive blooms can be seen from the air or, in some cases, from space.
   The diatoms, in turn, provide food for zooplankton. There are euphausiids and copepods, which are essentially tiny shrimp, and trillions of chaetognaths, needlelike critters that can actually grow big enough to see with the naked eye. The same bloom includes countless newly-hatched fish and crabs and octopus and other sealife that spend their first weeks and months drifting with the plankton, feeding and being fed upon.
   In a rich ecosystem like Puget Sound, the result is a vast soup. Scoop a cup of water from the sound and it looks like, OK, water. But take a drop of that water and slide it under a low-powered microscope, and that droplet is transformed into a throbbing menagerie of copepods and chaetognaths and diatoms and everything in between. Watch long enough, and you’ll find the bigger guys feeding on the little guys.
   Given the opportunity, and perhaps a reason, some of those guys will sparkle. Hundreds of organisms, from the fireflies back east to deep-water fish, have the ability to glow in the dark or, in scientific terms, “bioluminesce.” It’s a chemical reaction that takes place either as a continuous glow or an instantaneous flash.
   Dr. Claudia Mills, a biologist at the University of Washington marine labs in Friday Harbor, studies some 60 to 70 Northwest species of jellyfish, about half of which are bioluminescent. When she paddles at night, she’ll occasionally glimpse the warm glow of a jelly.
   But most of what we see at the surface are those everlovin’ dinoflagellates, she says.
Dinoflagellates are actually a diverse family of single-celled organisms, all microscopic, that drift with the rest of the plankton. Each consists of two transluscent cones, joined at the base, with a whip-like appendage that causes it to spin, like a top, according to Richard Strickland, the University of Washington biologist who literally wrote the book – “The Fertile Fjord” – on Puget Sound plankton.
   Dinoflagellates don’t qualify as either plants, nor animals, but as algae. They photosynthesize like plants, converting the sun’s energy to food. But they also use those tiny flagella to propel themselves vertically in the water column. During the winter, they’re less active and less abundant. But as the days lengthen, they multiply and move closer to the surface, soaking up energy by day and, when stimulated, glowing by night.
   By midsummer, it’s showtime.  In most cases, they only glitter at night, employing a circadian rhythm so they don’t waste energy during daylight. Reversing the cycle in a laboratory might take a week or more.
   Scientists understand how the process works, Mills says. But why do they glitter? Some years ago, I toured the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, and spent a couple of hours with a researcher who was trying to answer that question. “We understand the chemistry pretty well,” she said. “But we’re still trying to figure out the function.”
   They’re still working on that, says Mills. The prevailing theory is that the luminescence is defensive, serving as a natural burglar alarm or “startle response.” When threatened by larger predators, the dinos flash green, which may attract even larger predators that hopefully will eat their predators, sparing the dino.
   Then again, maybe they’re just showing off, treating the rest of us to a glimpse of Mother Nature’s springtime brilliance.

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   Last week it was the Seattle Times’ turn to crank out the obligatory series on the ecological demise of Puget Sound. Several of their finest reporters and artists donned their rubber boots and waded into the challenge, delivering new tales of woe from the shores of Washington’s inland sea.
   It was good, smart, important journalism. Alas, each year it gets more difficult to find new ways to say: Gee folks, Puget Sound ain’t getting any better. I know, because I’ve been there. Over my 30 years at the Times, I worked on several Save-the-Sound series, most recently with some of the same reporters who delivered last week. I continue to write about it because the sound remains the primary reason I choose to live here.
   Still, one gets discouraged. Consider the comments of selected experts in the concluding installment in the Times series. David Dicks, director the Puget Sound Partnership: “We have a lot of studies, a lot of information… but we have to knit it together into a strategy….” Or Kathy Fletcher, director of People for Puget Sound: “We are in a race against time…We need to grab the urgency of the problem and deal with the fact that there is a lot of disbelief that we are going to make a difference…”
   These are genuine expressions of concern that also underscore the problem -- a complete lack of specifics, with utterly no agreement about what’s wrong and what we need to do about it. What is it about Puget Sound that seems to defy solutions?
   The list of suspects begins with us, the people who live here and lack the political will to fix it -- or so goes the argument. But wait a second! Public opinion surveys suggest that people understand that the sound is in trouble, that it will cost money to fix it, and they are willing to pay. And we have payed. Over the past three decades or more, state and local taxpayers have coughed up billions of dollars for salmon restoration, pollution controls, sewage treatment plants, research, and more. 
    A precedent was set in the 1960s, when government cleaned up Lake Washington, which had been turned into a cesspool by countless sewage outfalls around its perimeter. The solution was Metro, which started as a regional sewer agency empowered to build a sewer system around the lake and ship the crap elsewhere – to Puget Sound.
   In the mid-1980s, when I worked on my first Puget Sound crusade, local government decided to spend a billion dollars to build a modern sewage treatment plant at West Point, on the Magnolia waterfront. The feds had said we didn’t have to, because the sound is so deep and its currents so powerful that sewage is efficiently diluted. But local pols decided to build it anyway, and homeowners paid for it. Now the merged King County Metro plans to build another treatment plant – at roughly three times the cost. And ratepayers are going along with the program.
   We can always blame the other guys, the cigar-chomping special interests who call the shots in Olympia. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem, either. The state has cut back commercial and sports fishing, despite the lobbyists’ protests. Pulp mills and other waterfront industries have been shut down, and those that remain are under tougher scrutiny.
   So maybe the problem is, as Fletcher puts it, the “fragmentation of decision making.” While Puget Sound is governed mostly by the state, it’s also affected by at least eight counties, scores of cities, hundreds of special utility districts and more. And we’ve learned that it is part of a larger “Salish Sea” that includes the San Juan Islands, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Canadian waters.

  The greatest obstacle is not political,  but rather the biological complexity of the sound, and the scientific uncertainty that comes with it. It is not just an ecosystem, but a web of overlapping ecosystems that invite oversimplification and defy understanding. For all our best efforts, Puget Sound remains something of a black box. We assess its health by taking water samples and counting fish pulled up on hooks or nets. Sparkling blue at the surface, it turns pitch dark less than 100 feet down. And just offshore from downtown Seattle, the depths reach 900 feet. We have very little understanding of what lives there, or how the ecosystem works.
   A generation ago, people were energized in part by accounts of gray whales washing up dead on Northwest beaches. Those images helped fuel the efforts to upgrade sewage treatment plants. Only later did we learn that the whales’ deaths probably had nothing to do with pollution, and that gray whale populations were healthy and increasing.
    More recently, scientists have paid more attention to what’s happening on and near the shores of the sound – shopping malls and suburban developments that pave over wetlands believed to be crucial to the saltwater ecology. But those linkages are not well understood.
All these uncertainties contribute to a breakdown between science and politics. Marine biologists and oceanographers are comfortable with uncertainty; they understand that the scientific process is endless, that whatever they learn merely becomes a hypothesis for the next round of investigation.
   This does not work well for governors or legislators who need to decide how to spend the next billion dollars on Puget Sound restoration.
    And it drives the rest of us nuts. We yearn for understandable causes and effects, heroes and villains. We want science to provide us the evidence we need to ban that next shopping mall, to shut down fishing altogether, to build better sewage treatment plants, or preserve wetlands.
And the darned scientists simply won’t provide that convenient road map. On the contrary, with each new breakthrough, each new level of understanding, Puget Sound appears more complex and the solutions less obvious.

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    The Copper River snakes across the Alaskan wilderness, cuts through the glacier-clad Wrangell Mountains, tumbles down to tidewater just east of Cordova, and ultimately flows into the seafood department at your local supermarket.
    Or so the spring marketing blitz would have us believe. That, along with the idea that it makes sense to pay 50 bucks or more for a slab of sockeye, or “red” salmon — and twice that for a king. But I don’t believe that either.
    Still, lots of perfectly reasonable people do. Witness the folks lining up at the local supermarkets buy a Copper River red for the weekend barbecue.  My favorite fishmonger, down at the local QFC, can barely keep up with the demand for sockeyes, on sale at $10 a pound. “These are absolutely el primo,” she says breathlessly.
     They know their pitch: The Copper River reds and kings are the year’s first major wild salmon fishery, arriving weeks or months ahead of most. And these fish store up extra fat – good fat, loaded with Omega 3 fatty acids, whatever those are – to fuel their long migrations upriver to their spawning grounds. Hence the annual feeding frenzy. 
    But not everybody buys in. Rick Ottman, the seasoned Port Townsend-based fisherman who sells his own Cape Cleare salmon, sighs when he’s asked what he thinks of the Copper Rivers. “It all depends,” he says. “It depends on what they’re eating. It depends where they are caught, and how they are caught and how they are handled. And you can’t see all that at the supermarket.”
    And so it goes every year in late May, when the ads hit the newspapers, trumpeting the arrival of the first Copper River kings and reds.
    All this for a fish that, not all that long ago, died in a gillnet and sloshed around in used crankcase oil for a few days before being stuffed into a tin can and shipped off to England to be processed into fish cakes and fried in batter.
    Whatever else you say about them, Copper River salmon are a case study of how far the Northwest salmon business has come in a couple of decades.
    The Copper is just one of Alaska’s long wilderness rivers that serve as perfect habitat for the fabled wild Pacific salmon. It emerges from the mountains just east of Cordova, the funky coastal fishing village which has been living off salmon for generations.
     It’s best known for its kings and sockeye, which live very different life cycles but which return each spring to the broad, intricate river delta known as the Copper River Flats.
     Fifteen years ago, I crewed with a grizzled fisherman named Tom Copeland, who had been fishing the flats since he was a teenager. On the night before the season opening, we climbed aboard his small fiberglass bowpicker and headed for the flats, bucking into an ugly rainstorm driven by 20-knot winds. Two miserable hours later, we anchored in the lee of one of the grassy sandbars that make up the river delta.
      We fished for several days, spreading that shallow gillnet across one of those braided channels, drifting downstream, retrieving the net, collecting those gorgeous, silvery sockeyes and the occasional king, stowing them on shaved ice, then repeating the process. My fingers ached from picking through nylon gillnet, and from yanking the gills so the fish would quickly bleed to death.
     As we drifted, Tom filled the time with stories of fishermen lost in the treacherous currents, of wild storms screaming off the Gulf of Alaska, of boats that sank from the weight of their sockeye catch, and of perennial price wars between fishermen and canneries.
     For most of a century, the canneries monopolized Alaska salmon. Remote fishing grounds, poor transportation and a red-meat-eating American public left few choices for Alaska fishermen. Whatever they caught, from humpies to kings, went into cans – mostly for export to Europe.
    Down on the flats, those gourmet fish were gillnetted by the thousands, then tossed into the bilge along with the crankcase oil, and eventually sold to a Cordova cannery for a few cents a pound.
    In the 1980s, that began to change. The Japanese invested heavily in Alaska fisheries, and they had no desire to eat wild salmon from a tin can. So, from Ketchikan to the Bering Sea, fishermen learned to treat salmon the way it deserved to be treated. They installed chilled storage tanks, separate from the bilges. They cleaned and bled their fish on board. They learned how to air-freight fresh or frozen fish. These days, a Copper River red can be netted at 6 a.m. on the Flats, and served in Seattle the same evening.
    Seattle marketing guru Jon Rowley took it a step further. He figured out how to use advertising and good public relations to create demand for a good product.
   And the Copper Rivers were ripe for marketing. Alaska has other early salmon fisheries – such as False Pass in the Aleutians. But Rowley figured nobody’s going to shell out $20 a pound for a “False Pass fillet.”
    And thus was born the Copper River Mystique.    But are they the world’s best salmon?
     “The fish is fabulous, and the folklore is even more fabulous,” says Ken Davies at Key City Fish in Port Townsend. “You put a Copper River red alongside a Quinault red, or a Fraser River red, and you won’t know the difference.”
    The Copper River migration is no longer or more challenging than migrations up the Yukon, the Fraser, or our own Columbia River. 
     Some businesses say it's just too  spendy.   The seafood manager at my local Safeway is holding off a few weeks until the prices drop a little. “I’d have to sell the kings for $23 a pound, and that’s too much,” he says.
     That’s my strategy too. I’m ready for my first Alaska salmon, never mind which river. But I can wait a few weeks. Don’t give me a fish. And don’t teach me to fish. Just sell me one at a price that doesn’t require me to dip into the grandkids’ college fund.

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      We have seen the future of Seattle mass transit, and it looks suspiciously like the past. It is shiny and red and goes clackity-clack between South Lake Union and Westlake. It travels at a maximum speed of 20 mph and costs about $40 million per mile to build.
      Seattle, it seems, has gone downright gah-gah over choo-choos. Whatever the price in dollars and aggravation, the city is determined to take the A-Train. We haven’t yet completed that $2.7 billion-dollar rail line to Sea-Tac, but Sound Transit is desperately seeking more billions to extend that line to Northgate. We have the new South Lake Union Streetcar. And this week, planners unveiled their sketchy visions for streetcar lines in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and the University District.  If the rail buffs have their way, we’ll soon be looking at and living in a cityscape reminiscent of another century -- the 19th.
    The operative map for Seattle’s transit vision is about a century old. You can go back to 1910, when Gramma and Grampa got around town just fine on a system of about 70 miles of streetcar tracks, including the legendary Interurban trolley that rumbled all the way to Everett and Tacoma. It was a fine system, and we probably should have kept it.
     But we didn’t. The tide turned in about 1911, when the city hired a smart fellow (read “consultant”) named Virgil Bogue to come out and draw up a bold new plan for Seattle. Bogue looked around, hired a crew of draftsmen, and produced an inch-thick document calling for an elaborate, New York-style transit system, with subways and elevated trains and a tunnel under Lake Washington.
     Put to a popular vote, the Bogue Plan lost by nearly 2-1. That was the beginning of the end. By the 1930s, the city was ripping up tracks and replacing streetcars with buses. The Interurban made its last run in 1939, just as engineers were completing the first floating bridge across the lake. By the beginning of the War, the transition was complete; Seattle had banked its future on the automobile.
    Rail buffs blame a nationwide conspiracy by General Motors to sell more buses. But rail transit was always geographically challenged in Seattle. All those picturesque hills and lakes serve as significant obstacles to streetcars that don’t climb hills, and don’t float.
    In any event, things haven’t worked out well. In the late 60s and early 70s, voters rejected plans for new freeways and for a proposed rapid transit system. So the city had to grow and prosper without any major expansion of its transportation system. For some time, the preferred strategy was buses, or more precisely “bus rapid transit,” which uses express buses in exclusive transit-only lanes, including the downtown bus tunnel.
      By the 1990s, the city was gridlocked. Drivers rolled down their car windows, shook their collective fists and bellowed something like “Do something. Do anything. But fix this mess!”
      And that’s more or less what’s happening. Government is doing something and anything -- digging holes, pouring concrete, laying rails, buying railcars – in a desperate attempt to rebuild what it dismantled 70 years ago. It’s system development by committee, or by many committees. Sound Transit builds light rail and operates those commuter trains to Tacoma and Everett. King County Metro builds and runs the new streetcar, along with the existing bus system. The state is adding HOV and transit lanes to the freeways. For a while, we had yet another agency building a monorail, until it collapsed on itself.
       Which is what skeptics expect to happen with some or all of those other railroad-builders. Critics of rail trail transit scored a huge victory last fall when voters rejected Sound Transit’s bid for billions more tax dollars. Yet the streetcar fad suggests that somebody out there is still determined to ride those rails.
      Rail critics point to a different conspiracy.. Randal O’Toole is an Oregon economist and self-styled libertarian who argues that Seattle is about to join dozens of cities that have got little or no benefits from the billions spent on light rail. Trolleys and streetcars are 19th century technology that is too slow, too dangerous and too expensive, he says. “Light rail is simply one more way to take money from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers and put it in the pockets of wealthy businesses.”
     Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives, a citizen group opposed to light rail, argues that Seattle had built one of the world’s best bus systems, and could adapt HOV lanes and traffic lights to move express buses more efficiently than light rail.
     But for every O’Toole there is a Todd Litman, a Victoria, BC, consultant who travels the world advising cities from Dubai to Valparaiso to San Jose how to build rail transit systems. And Litman is pro-streetcar. “Seattle originally developed around streetcars and railways,” Litman says. “It doesn’t make sense to argue that it can’t work again.”
     Litman learned his way around transportation issues as a volunteer bicycle advocate in Olympia, and eventually studied transit issues at Evergreen State College. He frequently finds himself at odds with the likes of O’Toole.
     Ultimately, the choice between rail transit and bus transit is made by passengers, he says. “There is a bias out there. People will pay more for a Mercedes than for a Chevy. There is nothing wrong with people wanting something more prestigious, and they view light rail and streetcars as more comfortable and more prestigious.”
    But is a little prestige really worth $40 million per mile?
     John Niles, a transportation consultant and critic of light rail, is a little kinder toward streetcars. They're not cost effective, he says, “but the scale of the error is so much smaller than with light rail.”
    Streetcars have a few things going for them, he says. South Lake Union businesses are picking up part of the costs of the new line, and hopefully that would be the case with other lines, he says. They may attract some tourists.    “As transportation, they don’t make much sense,” he says. “But they’re nice. They’re an amenity. They’re street candy.”

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   Alaska beckons. Down at the Boat Haven, you hear its siren song, whispering through the shrouds of the schooners and seiners: It’s time to head North.
   You wander the boatyard, absorbing the sights and smells of sawdust and fresh varnish and $200-a-gallon copper bottom paint. People are aching to get back on the water, stock up the galley, fire up that diesel and point the bow north by northwest.
  So it has been for well over a century – that deep, maritime bond between Port Townsend and isolated fishing ports from Ketchikan to Dutch Harbor. As far back as John Muir and Jack London, adventure-hungry Americans have stepped aboard steamers or fishing boats or private yachts to explore the Inside Passage.
    For some of our neighbors, it’s an annual migration. Each fall, they deliver the last of their salmon or halibut and limp south for the winter. They hunker down for a few months, wondering if they want to do it again, until that spring day when they hear that call of the North like the howl of a gray wolf. So they haul their boats for a coat of fresh paint, new zincs, a reconditioned prop… and the cycle is renewed.
   I feel the same tug. I don’t own an Alaska boat, and it might be years between trips north, but I hear it all the same. My first trip was some 35 years ago, when a couple of pals and I took the Alaska ferry to Skagway, hiked the Chilkoot Pass and floated the Yukon River to Dawson City. Since then I’ve cruised the Inside Passage many times – via Alaska ferry, BC ferry, private yacht, commercial fishing boats and, yes, a big cruise ship.
   It never gets old. From Admiralty Inlet to Glacier Bay, there’s enough grand geography and character and adventure to fill a lifetime. And I’m always amazed to learn how many people have lived here for decades, yet never cruised the Inside Passage, never laid eyes on those 5,000-foot mountain ranges partially submerged in 1,000-foot deep seas, never watched a humpback whale breach the surface of a deep, green fjord.
   For all its remoteness, the Inside Passage is amazingly accessible. Most people, of course, see it from the deck of one of those gigantic cruise ships. For $1,000 and up, you can sit in a comfy, sip something pink, read some John Muir or Jack London, and watch the wilderness float by. I took a mini-cruise some years ago – along with some 2,000 other people, plus crew. When we steamed to the top of Desolation Sound, the clouds parted and treated us to one of the world’s most spectacular views. And I practically had it to myself, because most of my shipmates were down below, pumping quarters into slot machines.
  There are better ways to cruise the passage – lots of them, in fact. Last year, I travelled with an old friend at the helm of his 46-foot Monk. We took two weeks to make the passage to Ketchikan, counting sidetrips up places like Kingcome Inlet, BC. Several times, we relaxed in wilderness hot springs that we had to ourselves, caught enough crab to gorge ourselves.
    People make the trip in small craft, but most prefer a bigger boat – say, 30 to 40 feet or more. While most of the route is “protected,” it is also an uphill course, where most days are spent cruising into the teeth of the prevailing wind and seas. And there are three major crossings, where boats are exposed to the open ocean.
   The most popular option is the Alaska ferry, the Columbia, which remains one of the great cruising bargains. It’s essentially a small cruise ship, which leaves Bellingham at 6pm each Friday, year round, steaming the Passage to Southeast Alaska. The one-way passenger fare is $240 to Ketchikan, which takes two full days; $325 to Juneau or Sitka, which is another full day. Kids 6-11 sail for half price, under six for free. (The vehicle fare is much stiffer -- $740 to Juneau. But what would you do with a car up there, anyway?)
  The hitch, of course, is accommodations. There are a few cabins, but they’re pricey and they’re usually booked months in advance. So most travelers bring backpacking tents and inflatable mattresses, and set them up on the stern deck. I’ve always done it that way; the last time, I counted 80 tents, lashed to each other to keep them from blowing away in the slipstream.
There is a decent restaurant, a bar and a coffee shop on board. But no casino, no dancing girls. Entertainment is provided by the scenery, a good book, or the Alaskan in the next tent.
   Then there is the BC ferry, another small cruise ship that runs between Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and Prince Rupert, near the Alaska border. This route takes in some of the most spectacular stretches of the Inside Passage, with the added advantage of being able to transfer to other boats for travel into the BC fjords.
  The boat leaves Port Hardy at 7:30 am every other day and arrives Prince Rupert at close to midnight, so travelers need to book accommodations at both ends in advance. The one-way fare is $125, and kids sail for half fare. The drive to Port Hardy takes a very long day, or there are fast buses that run from Victoria.
   For Port Townsend folks, there may be yet another alternative. My most memorable cruise north was on an aging steel-hulled purse seiner run by a crusty Yugoslavian who agreed to let me tag along. Like most fishermen, he cruised straight through, day and night, without stopping, taking four days to reach Ketchikan. The skipper was short-handed; a couple of crew planned to catch up with him in Ketchikan. So, by the second day, the skipper had me standing a regular watch at the helm, steering this big, throaty seineboat through the night, guided by radar and the stars. 
   Each summer, a small fleet of commercial boats leaves Port Townsend and returns to the Alaska fishing grounds. Often they travel with few crew, or none at all. I’ve often wondered why they don’t sell berths to adventure-seeking passengers, who would rather see the Passage from the bridge of a purse seiner than from the windows of a floating casino.

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