Jesse was planning on flying to the town of Petersburg to start the trip, but pointed out that it was possible to drive to Bellingham Washington and take the Alaska Ferry. As soon as I heard this I wanted to go by ferry. Going by ferry would allow me to take my own kayak, and getting to Alaska by boat sounded a lot nicer than flying. I knew that they allow people to roll their kayaks onto the ferry and sleep on the deck. This sounded like the way to shuttle your kayak to Alaska. Taking the ferry did add two days to the trip each way, plus the two days each way to drive to Bellingham. Not everyone could get that many more days off from work, so only four of us drove up with our own kayaks. The other four people flew up and rented kayaks from the local outfitter. Us drivers had to leave on June 15th to catch a ferry on the 17th.
My good friend Roger Lamb has moved to Bellingham Washington and lives three blocks from the ferry terminal! We arranged to meet him when we arrived, crash in his place for the evening, and leave our cars with him while we were gone. Roger has had a run-in with the security people at the ferry terminal. He paddled his kayak under the bow of the ferry once while it was in dock and had “homeland security” cops call him over and give him a talking to. As usual this security is a joke, a lot of money spent hassling people, making travel difficult for honest people, but not actually making anybody safer. The “security” added to the difficulty of loading cars on a ferry and it took longer than scheduled. Sure, terrorists are going to go out of their way to try to sink a little ferry boat. There were cops everywhere and a special team of explosive sniffing dogs to check out the cars and the backpacks of the people walking onto the ferry. Actually it was fun to watch these animals since they obviously enjoyed their job!
Because Joe Petolino was called out of line to show his ID at the baggage check, they forgot to sniff his backpack. Two of us sat with the kayaks and felt slighted that they forgot to come over and sniff our boats! For fear of not getting a good place to sleep in the Solarium Deck, we arrived hours early and had our kayaks sitting behind the security kiosk. Despite badgering the woman in the kiosk with questions, getting luggage tags from her and generally making pests of ourselves, she forgot we were there. After watching cars load for hours Don Fleming finally asked her when they were going to let kayaks and bicycles on board. She acted like we had appeared out of thin air and told us we could board anytime we wanted.
They had a rack to store kayaks in which was built with the bars almost too far apart for kayaks to fit between. I pointed out to a deck hand that the rack was missing some pins and kept falling apart, and he just shrugged. But then I found the missing pins lying about and fixed it myself. The deckhands insisted that we put our kayaks in these silly racks, but they had piled boxes and pet carriers up on both sides of it where the kayaks needed to hang out. They didn’t fit until we moved some cargo out of the way.
We set up our sleeping bags in the Solarium on lawn chairs. There were heating elements in the ceiling and they were on in the middle of the hot sunny day. We were hot and sweaty from loading our kayaks and didn’t appreciate the heaters then. In the evening half of the heaters were turned off which we thought was a great idea because we could sleep on the cool side of the solarium. But then in the middle of the night the heaters all came on again and I woke up drenched in sweat in my sleeping bag. We talked to the purser and he said that all night long people came complaining that the heaters were too hot or too cold and they were just reacting to what we wanted. We joked that these ferry people were obviously doing all this, the security, the cars, the kayak racks, the heaters for the first time ever and we should cut them some slack until they figure out how to do it.
We slept on the ferry for two nights and arrived late in the day on the 19th at Petersburg Alaska. We had a reservation at a B&B next to the ferry terminal. The outfitters who rented kayaks to Jesse and the other fliers had agreed to haul our kayaks away from the terminal, store them for the night, pick us up in the morning and drive us with our kayaks to the put-in. I ended up separated from most of my gear and clothes for the evening and wished that I had simply rolled my own kayak to the B&B.