Things You Should Know About Expedition Cruising

I’ve spent the last five months working as an expedition guide for a small-ship cruising company in Southeast Alaska.   Here are some tips I’m passing on to prospective passengers on expedition-style cruises.   These are NOT the big Holland America sorts of cruise ships.  

What is an Expedition Cruise?

Expedition cruising is less about port stops, and more about visiting places that aren’t listed in the travel guides.   Remote bays, tiny islands, and un-named salmon streams are all potential destinations.   There are no on board gift shops, no evening entertainments, no water slides or squash courts.   Instead, there is a group of people all united in their quest to seek out the most of wild Alaska that can be possibly crammed into seven days.   Instead there are Zodiacs, kayaks, paddle-boards, and snorkel gear.  If your cruise company’s brochure spends more pages talking about its launch system for their on-board fleet of kayaks than its gambling options or evening entertainment, you might be on an expedition cruise.  
The difference between big-boat cruising and small-ship cruising is the difference between looking at Alaska and actually experiencing it.   Expedition-style cruising is very nature-oriented - small groups, wildlife and scenery-focused itineraries, and options to hike or kayak or explore in zodiacs right from the ship itself.   Companies like Lindblad, The Boat Company, Alaska Dream Cruises, UnCruise, and the now-defunct Cruise West are examples of this sort of cruising.

A Few Things You Should Know About Expedition Boats

So you’re considering a small-ship cruise for your next vacation.   Here are a things to consider as you prepare for your vacation.

1. Cabins are Small

For all but the most expensive cabins, cramped living quarters are a reality of life on boats.   However, there are things you can do to maximize space in your cabin.   First of all, do what your embarkation documents suggest and bring collapsible luggage.   Something like a gym bag or soft-sided roller bag, that can easily be crammed in a corner under your bed once you’ve unpacked, is ideal.   Also, consider what clothes you're most likely to use on board.   Warm layers, sweaters, rain jackets, hiking pants, brimmed hats, gloves, and woolen socks should rate highly on the list of stuff to make room for.   Go ahead and pack a sweatshirt or something comfortable to slip into after a day of adventuring, but definitely plan on most of your clothes being outdoors oriented.   Skirts, jewelry, and fancier outfits may not be worth the space they will take up in your cabin, let alone your suitcase.

Another thing you can do to maximize space in your cabin is to look at the various bed arrangements available in the cabin you’re booking.   On my boat, many cabins can be configured either with two twin beds, or one queen (made by shoving the two twin beds together).   In the queen configuration, one of the people in the bed is right against the wall, and has to climb over their partner to get in or out.   Some couples are OK with this, others aren’t.   Many passengers find that a room set up with two twin beds is a better use of the space, as both people have access to the aisle between the beds, as well as the bedside table.

If you are much over six foot three, it is also worth inquiring about the ceiling height.   Not kidding, unfortunately.   On my boat, there were always one or two guys per week who walked around the dining room with their head cocked at a weird angle because they were too tall to stand up under our boat’s ridiculously low ceilings…

Finally, if you choose to book the least expensive class of cabin on the boat, remember that those cabins are less expensive for a reason.   You might be closer to engine noises, galley noises, generators, or the occasional whiff of exhaust fumes.   Your room might be smaller, or your ceiling lower.   Weird air ducts might be snaking across your ceiling, or gurgling water pipes running down your walls.   Remember, these cabins cost less for a reason.  

Just remember, your cabin is really only the place you go where you sleep.   Regardless of what you pay for the cabin, everybody on the boat is still eating the same food, seeing the same whales, and exploring the same wilderness…  

2. Boats are Noisy

Ships, especially small ones, are inherently noisy places.   There are engines.   There are generators, cranes, anchor winches, bow thrusters, pulleys, water pumps, and fans.   Most cabins (with a possible exception of the most expensive ones) are often in some way exposed to vessel noise.   This isn’t just during the day.   If the boat is cruising overnight, the engines will be running.   On some itineraries, the boat will cruise to reach an overnight anchorage (dropping the anchor around 11pm, say), and hang out there with the engines off for a few hours.    Then, at four or five in the morning, the boat will take off to the day’s operating area, with all the noise (starting the engines, lifting the anchor, firing up the bow thruster) inherent in that process.  

Just remember, you don’t come to Alaska in the summer because you want to get lots of good sleep (the jet lag and the constant daylight make that a difficult goal).   Between hiking, the kayaking, the great food, and the wine list, most people don’t have a problem falling asleep at night.   Just know ahead of time that your cabin won’t be as quiet as your favorite hotel.   (But I’ll bet your favorite hotel doesn’t have whales eyeballing you through the lobby windows, either…)


3. Motion Sickness Probably Won’t Be A Problem

Smaller vessels are more affected by ocean conditions than larger cruise ships.   That being said, sea sickness is generally not a problem for our passengers.   The waters of the Inside Passage are usually very calm, and the ships themselves have an interest in staying in waters that are mild enough to let passengers get out in zodiacs and kayaks and play.  

However, certain cruising routes ( as well as certain times of the year) can be more exposed to open ocean conditions.   If in doubt, talk to the company - or look at the route map.   Is there always land between the route and the open ocean?   Are there places where the route goes into places where there isn’t land between the boat and the open Pacific Ocean (such as the Dixon Entrance)?   Those are places where the boat may be subject to a little more motion.   Rougher sea conditions are also more common very early and very late in the season - a cruise with an exposed route in April or September will probably be much bumpier than a cruise along a protected route in July.  

If seasickness is something you are concerned about, I would recommend picking up a few remedies before getting on the plane.   Ginger candy is a good option (I am a big fan of Ginger Altoids), and some passengers have good success with wrist bands and pressure points.   A number of over-the-counter medications also combat motion sickness, though the medication needs to be taken before you start feeling ill in order to be effective.    If you are worried about possible bad weather while on board, just ask one of the boat crew.   They will likely be able to tell you whether you should consider taking the medication.      Another very simple solution to motion sickness is to just lie down if you start feeling unwell.   Sea sickness is caused by your brain perceiving a conflict between what your eyes are seeing (I’m not moving), and what your inner ear is reporting (I’m totally moving).    By lying down and closing your eyes, you’re giving your brain less conflicting information.  
In summary, the Inside Passage is protected enough that you shouldn’t let fear of motion sickness (or past bad experiences with motion sickness) bar you from getting on a boat.  

So You Want To Work in Alaska?

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            So, for whatever reason, you’ve decided that you want to spend a summer working in Alaska.   Maybe it’s for the adventure, for the wildlife, or for the fact that a job up here fits in really well with your school’s academic calendar.   Good for you.   Working up here can be both a one-off summer adventure, or a first step into full-time job, or a brand-new career completely different from anything you ever thought you'd realistically be doing with your life.   (If that sounds like an enticement, great.   If that sounds like a warning, that’s because it is.)   Alaska is an amazing place, although if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already figured that out.   And the summer is the best time of the year (some people would say the only good time of year) to visit the state.   Now here’s the reality check –the jobs up here are about as competitive as anywhere else these days.   Probably even more competitive since the Lower 48 reality-TV film industry has discovered the state, and has set to work chronicling everything from the fishing industry to the highway patrol to the efforts of Alaska-grown amateur gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, and survivalists.

            The folks who come up to Alaska to work tend to fall into one of two broad categories – the wilderness people, and the wildlife people.

            Wilderness people get an REI dividend check that is larger than some people’s weekly pay. You have a home ski mountain, and have climbed all of the major 5.10 routes in a three state area.   Most of your clothing wicks.   You need a roof rack or small trailer to  fit all of their outdoor gear in their car.   You leave your house at 4AM on a Saturday in order to start your backpacking trip as soon as the sun comes up.   You can talk knowledgably about varying models of camp stoves, and have strong opinions about the advisability of bringing down sleeping bags into the backcountry.    

            The other large contingent of Alaskan seasonal workers are the wildlife people.   If your first reaction when you see an animal is to make high-pitched cooing sounds, you are probably a wildlife person.   Other signs of a potential wildlife person include ownership of high-grade camera equipment, a library containing an inordinate number of natural history books, and framed pictures of penguins hanging on your wall.   If you have ever purchased a field guide to a region you have no immediate intention of visiting, just to learn more about the indigenous animals, you are a wildlife person.   You’ll be in good company up here – many Alaskan tourists, to one degree or another, are wildlife people – and the bigger, cuter, and furrier the wildlife is, the better.

            So once you get up here, you’ll have plenty of company.    But first, you need to get a job, or at the very least, come up here with enough skills, experience, and determination to be able to find a job after you arrive.   To that end, here are a few suggestions for what not to put in your cover letter.   

            Don’t tell us about how you want to come up here to experience Nature.  Trust us, we already know.    If you are applying from Ohio to work as a housekeeper for the Middle-of-Nowhere Lodge, or at a gift shop at the Denali National Park entrance area, we already know that the only reason you’re interested in the job is because of its proximity to an iconic Alaskan National Park.    But you’d look like a better employment prospect if you keep this knowledge to yourself.   Because it’s pretty clear that no one comes to Alaska because of the appealing climate, or the cultural opportunities, or really, any reason other than better access to giant wilderness areas, and really cool wildlife.

            Second, don’t necessarily be so keen to talk about how you spend all your free time hiking or mountain biking or extreme zorbing or whatever it is you like to do outside.   Is it relevant to the job you’re applying for?   Are you coming to Alaska to be a zorb guide?   If not, perhaps leave that out.   If you have legitimate outdoor or sports credentials – a wilderness first aid course, or a summer working at a climbing wall, or you earned your Eagle Scout award by building a handicap-accessible nature trail for your local city park, and you can make these accomplishments vaguely relevant to the job you are applying for, then by all means mention them.   But don’t talk about how you want to come to Alaska to hike and fish and take pictures of wildlife from unsafe distances.   That’s why the tourists come to Alaska.   Instead, tell us what you can do that will facilitate the tourists having those experiences.    Once you get up here, you, too will have the opportunity to hike, fish, and piss off (excuse me, photograph) the local wildlife.   But before you can do all that, first you have to convince someone in Alaska to actually give you a job.   

            Also, it’s probably not a great idea to talk about how bad-ass of an outdoor person you are, unless it’s relevant to the job you’re applying for, and you have the experience or certifications to back it up.   Because the person who is reading your cover letter is very probably a long-term resident, or sourdough, Alaskan.   They shoot their own meat, go skijoring with their dogs at minus twenty degrees, and club salmon on the head with sticks.   This person has been in the state long enough to get a year-round position with the company that’s hiring you, and could very well be the manger or owner.   This person is probably more of an outdoor guru than you are, and probably has a number of highly skilled outdoor guides working for them already.   These are the folks who watch the Discovery Channel, and talk about how Bear Grylls is doing it all wrong.   Don’t try to out-outdoors them, because it probably won’t work.

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            So what are Alaskan employers looking for?   Generally the same things as employers everywhere – experience, reliability, and a good attitude.   That being said, here are a few suggestions for prospective Alaskan summer workers.   This is especially tailored to anyone who is looking to get a job as a guide or outdoor instructor.   (I’d like to point out that these are my own personal opinions, not those of any company I work for, nor am I involved in hiring decisions for any company I work for.   And if you ask me about how to get a summer job in Alaska, I will tell you what I tell everybody – look on coolworks.com.) 

           

            If you are interested in working as a guide, have you taken a wilderness first aid course?   If the outdoor recreation field has anything like an industry-standard basic qualification, the wilderness first responder, or WFR, is definitely it.   In some ways, it is more valuable to a prospective guide than a college degree.   (I’ve worked with guides that have masters’ degrees in wildlife management, and with others that dropped out of college in their second semester.)   Some veteran guides have a list of outdoor certifications as long as your arm, but generally for a guide starting out, the single most helpful credential you can have would be a WFR.   It’s a ten-day course, offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School as well as a number of other regional outdoor training or recreation companies.   Expect to pay around $700-800 for the course, and if you want to stay certified you’ll need to take a 3-day refresher course every two years.   

            Even for people who have no intention of ever working as a guide, or ever setting foot in the wilderness, I’d recommend taking this course simply for the life skills it imparts.   It’s sort of like the Red Cross first aid course as taught by MacGuyver.   Plus, even if you never mean to put yourself in a wilderness situation, a wilderness situation could show up nonetheless – such as a friend who came very close to delivering his wife’s baby in their living room when she went into labor during a blizzard that had shut down most of the roads in their county.   I am not the kind of person that tends to throw around the word ‘empowering’ very often, but in this instance I think the term applies.   

            Aside from wilderness medical skills, the other two most important qualities we’re looking for are both hard to put in a resume – people skills, and good judgment, or what I’d like to call advanced common sense.    By and large, beginning guides don’t need to be wildlife experts, or botanists, or know the latin name for sphagnum moss.   However, beginning guides do need to be able to learn basic information about the local plants and animals, and also find a way to convey that information to guests in an engaging manner – all the while cracking jokes, being friendly, and putting clients at ease in what is for most people a very unfamiliar environment.   That’s where the people skills come in.

            Generally speaking, tourists to Alaska don’t need the Verna Pratt Field Guide to Alaskan Wildflowers thrown at them on their first day in the state.   Pointing out the really bright and colorful flowers, such as lupine, fireweed, and monkeyflower, will be enough to satisfy most non-plant people.   People who are seeing a bear in the wild for the first time do not actually care about the flowers growing next to the bear.    But the tourists both need and appreciate having someone with them in the field who acts as a host – sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm, lending someone bug spray when they forgot theirs back at their cabin, or asking how their pictures of that bear turned out when you see them at the bar that evening.

            People skills are also very relevant to group safety.   As a guide, you will at times be the sole person in charge of a group of people who may never have been in a backcountry area before this trip.   You need to be able to constantly assess both the clients and the environment around you for possible hazards.   You need to know not only your own abilities, but you need to be able to accurately assess the abilities and comfort level of your clients, some of whom you will have known for less than a day.    This requires both leadership skills as well as tactful group management – advanced people skills, so to speak.

            If you are reasonably outdoorsy person applying to work as a kayak guide, your company can and will teach you how to be a good sea kayaker.   They will teach you things like how to rescue clients that have flipped their kayak, or how to tow an exhausted paddler back to shore.   They will teach you skills.   They will teach you technical expertise.   The thing to keep in mind is that technical expertise is NOT the same thing as good judgment.   Good judgment is about when and how to use those skills – and more importantly, it is about being able to run your trips conservatively enough so that you DO NOT HAVE TO CALL UPON your awesome rescue skills.   That is something that’s harder to teach, if it can be taught at all.   Mostly I think it’s equal parts common sense and experience.   For most beginning guides, myself included, it’s a happy combination of common sense and plain luck that carries us (and our clients) through our first few months on the job.

            Even after you’ve gained some experience, not every trip you lead will go according to plan.  In fact, I can just about guarantee that something will go spectacularly wrong on at least one or two trips a season, and you will be the person who will, for better or worse, be dealing with it.   Your choices will decide whether the trip ends badly, or ends as a story that everybody has a good laugh about later that night at the bar.   

            One of the best ways to learn from trip catastrophes is to talk about them with other guides.   Be prepared to share mistakes or near-misses, or things that just didn’t go as well as they might have.   Be prepared to listen to other guides’ mistakes – we all have a few, trust me – and try to learn from them.   Your mistakes are going to teach you more than you could ever learn from anyone else – however, it will speed up your learning curve (and would probably be a lot better for your clients) if you tried to learn as much as you can from other guides’ mistakes as well.   

            For example, after leading canoe trips in Pedersen Lagoon for three years, I now know where all of the sandbars and barely-submerged rocks in the lagoon are.   I did not learn this from studying a map, or scouring the coastline with binoculars at a low tide.   Mostly, I learned where all the rocks are by smacking into them with my canoe.   Once you’ve hit a submerged rock with a canoe full of guests (and their usual reaction when the boat hits a submerged object is to peer at the water like they suspect that crocodiles are going to pluck them from the boat at any moment), you’ll remember the location of that particular rock for the rest of your natural life.   And you’ll swear that you’re never again going to do anything so stupid as get a canoe full of guests hung up on a sandbar, in full view of some guy with a tripod taking pictures from the dock.   Which will be true until you find another sandbar at the other side of the lagoon next week...

Still interested in working up here?   Then I wish you the best of luck.   (And if you're still looking for a job in Alaska, be sure to check out coolworks.com - they have a pretty comprehensive list of seasonal Alaskan employers...)