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.  

Angevin Hunting Lodge, or, Mare versus the Wasps

This fall I’ve found myself in the Midwest, taking a break from the cold of Alaska, working as a hospitality person for a place I’m going to refer to as Angevin Hunting Lodge.   I got here around the end of September, where the high temperatures were peaking in the 80s and 90s.   Most days it was even warm first thing in the morning, and it has rained exactly two days in the three weeks I’ve been here.   The climate has definitely been a welcome change from dealing with rain and cold most of the summer in Alaska - I’ve seen warmer temperatures here in the past three weeks than I have in the past five years.  

The staff house is near a small riparian corridor where a seasonally intermittent creek flows for part of the year.   Right now, its home to a series of scummy looking ponds with marshy areas in between, loosely bounded by creek banks.   It seems like the only place on the property that’s wet enough to allow trees to grow, and it seems to be a huge wildlife magnet.  I’ve seen white-tailed deer down there, as well as foxes, rabbits, wild turkeys, pheasants and a grab bag of smaller birds, including red-tailed hawks and harriers.   There's also a beaver dam, which accounts for some of the ponds, and I've seen recent evidence of their handiwork on several freshly gnawed trees, but haven't seen the beavers yet myself.   The rest of the property is a mix of open grassland and planted crops - mostly corn and beans, and also full of birds, and Old-Testament Plague numbers of insects, mostly flies and grasshoppers.   Since Angevin is a hunting lodge, I haven’t been able to explore much of the rest of the property for fear of being mistaken for a game animal, but going by the creek bottom has become part of my daily walk to and from work.  

There is very little artificial light here, and most nights are clear.   The most prominent landmarks after dark are the cell phone towers, which are all topped with a bright red light, and they can be seem from miles and miles away.   I actually got up in the morning to see the lunar eclipse a few days ago, which is the first time I’ve been able to see something like that since college - clear, dark skies not generally being a feature of Alaskan summers.   Often I use my headlamp when I’m walking back to the staff house after evening shifts, and I’ve seen a lot of cool wildlife on those walks.   Mostly I just see a speck of eye-shine that blinks and disappears in pretty short order.   I’ve been inadvertently headlamping a lot of deer this way.   Also, rabbits are never scarier than when six of them are running pell-mell towards you out of nowhere because they’re disoriented by your light.

I’ve also taken to jogging around some of the farm tracks in the immediate area - whenever I can time it so that I am doing so  around guest dinner - a pretty safe bet that no one is still going to be out hunting at that hour.   I discovered that if I get off of the most heavily used farm tracks, parts of the property are covered with sand burrs.   The burrs around here are not screwing around - these are serious darned burrs.   The first time I got covered, I made the mistake of trying to pick them off with my fingers.   They hurt; and I got a few spikes that broke of inside my finger for the trouble.   I pulled the rest of them off with tweezers when I got back to the house.   I’ve taken to carrying the tweezers with me when I run now, so that I can deal with them as needed while I’m out.  

It’s also very windy here - gusty enough that the wind could legitimately knock you over if you weren’t paying attention.   One warning you get is that you can hear the wind in the grass get louder a few seconds before a big gust moves in.   The terrain in some ways reminds me of the ocean - big, gentle rolling hills, like someone had taken a sea full of big, glassy, forty-foot waves and frozen it, and then planted grass.  

I was here for a week at Angevin before the guests arrived, and the first few days at work was a lot of deep cleaning, getting things ready for the guests to arrive.   There is a huge fireplace in the main room that is absolutely covered with taxidermied animals and mounted heads - deer, elk, bears, coyote, pheasants.   Most of them look pretty impressive - except for one animal that I think must be a badger, that’s been set with a snarling, distinctly un-badger-like look on its face.   Like whoever was mounting it really wanted to be working on a bear instead.   There’s also one deer that was mounted with its ears in a weird pose - sticking straight out from each side, with an open-mouthed look that I more associate with long-eared dogs sticking their heads out of moving car windows.   Otherwise, they look pretty classy.   And covered with cobwebs.   So I spent an hour with a dusting cloth on a pole, swatting away at the antlers and ears.   Some of them were pretty high up, and I have absolutely no idea how they’re attached to the wall, except that they seemed to be swinging around a lot while I was working.   I kept picturing in my mind the headline if one of the elk heads fell off the wall and gored me as I was cleaning it - Trophy Animal’s Last Revenge?  

The rest of the time was spent vacuuming, mopping, and rubbing wood polish on every piece of wood-furniture in the place.   And waging an on-again, off-again war of attrition against the local insect population.

The first week I got here, I was sweeping between 80-100 dead flies out of the staff house every single day.   Thankfully the population of insects seems to have diminished with the cooler temperatures, but I estimate that I personally have vacuumed, swept, dusted,  mopped, or squashed into oblivion between 1500-2000 dead flies in the past month.   At least they don’t bite, which is an advantage they have against the mosquitoes.   There seem to be way more dead flies in the house than live ones, and the overall population of live flies never seems to diminish.   In addition to being sort of creepy, this raises all sorts of questions about their replacement rate.   Is 80-100 the number of flies that are entering the house daily?   Are they breeding inside?   Where were today’s crop of dead flies yesterday?   Were they already inside buzzing around?  If so, why didn’t I notice some huge fly horde migrating through the house?   Why do they always want to die on the windowsill in the kitchen?

I’m beginning to understand why people in the Middle Ages thought that flies were born via spontaneously arising from rotting meat.  I really don’t see another explanation.

Going through the guest rooms a few days before the first clients were arriving, I found a small army of wasps in one of the downstairs rooms.   They were all hanging out in between the window and the window blind, so I didn’t actually see them until I’d left the room and saw them all crawling around.   Can 12 wasps count as an army?   Maybe a brigade.   Or a division?   Certainly 12 wasps can comprise a wasp SEAL team.   The were enough in there that I worry their presence is going to be a persistent issue until we identify and block up their exit.   Girl who’s faced down bears afraid of a two inch flying insect?   Oh yes.

The day before the guests arrived, I went through all of the guest rooms with another housekeeper and did some last-minute cleaning - including taking on all the wasps.   It would not have been possible if the weather was any hotter - it was cool the night before and the wasps were not moving too fast.   They were all congregated around the windows and doors.   They kept falling out of the window frames as I moved the curtains around and I just hoovered them up as fast as I could.   At the end of the day, we had two vacuums filled with angry, pissed-off, wide-awake live wasps.   The dust bag on one of the vacuums was see-through, so we got a rather disturbing view of what they were all doing in there, which was mostly crawling all over the place looking angry.   World’s Most Disturbing Terrarium.   It was very red in tooth and claw in there, and we had no idea how to empty out the vacuum bags without precipitating a mass escape.   Eventually, we left the vacuums sitting in the walk-in fridge for a few hours, figuring that if the cold didn’t kill them outright, it would at least slow them down enough that we could deal with them before they attached en masse.  

When we got the vacuums out, the wasps were motionless, which was good because we ended up accidentally dumping out the entire contents of one of the vacuums on the floor of the downstairs hallway while trying to figure out how to empty out the Little Vacuum Bag of Horrors.   (It was a Dyson - they’re great vacuums, but they are super confusing to operate sometimes.)   We ended up using the second vacuum to suck everything back up, and then emptied it out, again.

The wasps are also a feature of life in the staff house.   There are at least fewer of them in there, but the vacuum we have doesn’t have enough suction to suck them out of the air like the Dyson at Angevin Lodge, so I’ve mostly left them alone.   The wasps have for their part returned the favor - except, apparently, when I cook orange food for lunch.  I’ve heard about bees being attracted to the color blue, and I know that the color red can set off seagulls like you were waving a cape at a bull, but I’ve never heard of wasps having anything similar.

I heated up a bowl of tomato soup a few days ago, together with a side of baby carrots and a glass of orange juice.   I put the plate down on the kitchen table.   Immediately, a wasp comes zipping out of the crack at the top of the windowsill, and starts circling my food, apparently enraptured by all these orange things.   I swatted at him a few times, which did nothing to get him to leave.   Eventually, I just grabbed the plate and ran outside, hoping he would content himself with the orange juice and let me eat my food.   At least outside its generally windy enough that the bugs have to lie low.

The staff house is interesting in other ways as well.   For instance, there are two mounted heads in my room - a deer head and a set of caribou antlers.   I almost moved rooms to begin with because I found the deer head was creepy - especially waking up with him looking at me - but I’ve sort of gotten used to it.   I’m still tempted to use the mounts as towel ‘racks’ every time I come back from the shower…

Floating Zombie River Otters

            The same day that the river otter researchers were due to come to the Iceberg lodge to give a presentation on their research, we found a dead river otter floating in the lagoon.   It was floating intestines up; we went over  to it because at first I thought we were looking at the back of a seal’s head.   Turns out, not so much.   River otters are a little like big, streamlined brown ferrets; they are so adorable that they even look moderately cute when floating head-down in salt water.   My clients in the canoe were clucking and making how sad noises.   So, we looked at the dead otter, and I made the mistake of telling my clients that this was the third dead otter we’d found in the lagoon in a month, and that, coincidentally, a team of river otter researchers from the University of Wisconsin would be coming over to give a presentation on their research in just a few hours.   Immediately, a few people in the boat asked if we ought to bring the dead otter back to the lodge, so that the researchers could do an otter autopsy and try to find out why the otter had died.   I wasn’t totally sure if the otter team’s research goals included playing CSI: Aialik Bay – as my clients very obviously wanted to do - but I figured they would probably be interested in the otter.   I asked if everyone was OK with having a dead otter sitting in the back of the canoe for the rest of the tour.   Surprisingly, everyone was.   

            So we turned the canoe around, and after a few minutes of searching, resighted the otter.   Now that I knew that I had to pick the thing out of the water, it suddenly looked a lot less cute and pathetic, and a lot more dead.   But the coat seemed to be in good shape, and it seemed to be pretty much intact and un-decayed.   At least, as undecayed as a zombie floating dead river otter can look.   I maneuvered us as close to the otter as I could, which was complicated by the fact that all of the clients on the boat were looking over their shoulders to try and watch their guide do something gross in the name of science.    I reached into the water, trying not to picture what would happen if the otter suddenly woke up and sank its zombie teeth into my hand.   

            I grabbed the zombie otter by the tail and pulled.   The first thing I noticed was that a waterlogged river otter is actually quite heavy.   The second thing I noticed was the vibration as the tail vertebrae dislocated from the spine.   The third thing I noticed was that this otter was definitely a male.   I pulled, and the otter slid up the side of the canoe, its big rat-like feet dangling over the gunnel.   The otter felt even heavier.   Then the otter’s pelt started to split open along the back like someone undoing a zipper.   The smell hit us like the world’s worst port-a-pottie, and I immediately dropped the otter back into the lagoon.   The smell, unfortunately, stayed around (albeit in a much diluted form) for the rest of the canoe tour, probably because I had managed to liberally spritz my clothing with otter juice in the process of hauling him into my canoe.   I used the boat pump (normally used to pump rain water out of the canoes) to pump a few quarts of lagoon water into the boat to try and dilute the smell, which sort of worked.   The clients coped admirably – fishing him out was their idea, after all – and we finished the rest of the tour without incident.   I left one of the other guides to put my boat away, and immediately went to shower and wash my clothes.   

            The researchers were, indeed, interested that we’d found so many dead otters in such a short span of time, although they said that from what they’d seen of the otters, they all seemed to be pretty healthy.   They did not, however, seem terribly interested in haring off into the lagoon to relocate the dead otter after hearing my clients’ description of its condition.   

            One of the maintenance men, however, did go haring off into the lagoon after the otter, and returned with it floating in a five-gallon bucket.   (The trick to keeping the smell at bay is to keep them submerged at all times.   Going forward, if any guests want to bring back dead animals they find in the lagoon, I will lasso them with the canoe’s bowline and drag them behind the boat like a sea anchor.)   He plans to drop the otter into a crab pot for a few weeks, to let the crabs (and any other sea creatures with indiscriminate gustatory habits) strip the meat away from the carcass.   We’d be left with a jumble of bones which he could theoretically glue and wire back into shape, sort of like a very complicated tinkertoy project.   I would like the skull for the interpretive corner at the guide desk, which is already liberally covered with various parts and pieces of dead animals (seal and otter pelts, snail shells, urchin tests, bird feathers, and a bear skull).   Ultimately, the zombie otter stayed in the bucket for over two weeks, and every day it looked a little more like a giant floating mass of hair that someone had pulled out of a shower drain.   It disappeared from the bucket shortly before the maintenance man left to visit his wife.   I am hoping that M did not show up at home after being gone for two weeks with a decayed otter in tow…

            A few days later, I got the fright of my life when the canoe’s drain plug got knocked loose during a tour, instantly unleashing a torrent of salt water flooding into our boat.   Fortunately, we were in the mouth of Addison creek, which is a great place to have a canoe emergency because the water is only four feet deep.   Even though hearing the water rushing into the canoe was quite alarming, I also realized right off the bat that this was a situation everyone would be walking away from – since if the canoe sank out from under us, this is pretty much what we would do.   I shouted at my clients to paddle, got the boat to shore, hopped out in knee deep water and spent a few minutes wresting the drain plug back into place.   (When used correctly, the drain plugs have a lever that allows them to expand once they’ve been inserted into the draining hole.  In this case, someone had expanded the drain plug before inserting it, so the plug didn’t fit securely in the drain, and got jostled out.)   Once the flooding stopped, I unloaded everyone on the creek bank, and pumped the water out of the canoe.    We paddled back to the lodge, while I tried to pretend that I hadn’t just had the fright of my life.    

           

            Two things I have learned about canoeing this summer already: (a) check the snugness of the drain plugs, and (b) do not haul a dead otter into a canoe by his tail.  

The Ticketing Counter in January

            Today was my crash course in running the aquarium’s ticketing program. It will be a minor miracle if I can make it through the weekend without running into major problems doing basic ticketing operations – things like making change and taking down telephone reservations. I won’t even say how long I had been working at the aquarium before I could consistently remember what the admission price was. I mean, I never paid to get in, and neither did anyone I knew. A lot of folks who actually live here in Seward either work here, or are a member - or are related to someone who works here or is a member. That helps to explain why we have very few guests in the winter who actually pay admission.   

            This time of year, you can easily divide the people who come here into a few basic categories. The military people have the best hair, and the commercial fishermen have the most hair. The lost tourists walk around wearing enough clothing that you wonder if they had to pay an excess-baggage fee to get it all up here. And the native and resident Alaskans are strolling around town in Carharts and a flannel shirt, because right now Seward is 20 to 30 degrees warmer than most of the interior of the state. (Though that’s not saying a lot. It’s five above zero at the moment.)

            And yes, we do get the odd tourist here in the winter. Most of these poor souls seem to have been duped by a close relative into visiting during the off-season. (‘Here’s that great hiking trail I was telling you about. We could probably manage the first mile in snowshoes, at least until it crosses the avalanche chute… And there’s the bay where I saw those breaching humpback whales.   Of course, the whales will all be in Hawaii until May… But whatever we do, we’ll need to bring the headlamps because it’ll be dark by 3pm. Or maybe we could visit the aquarium. They have heat, and indoor plumbing!)

            We also get people who have come to Alaska (usually Anchorage), for business, and are visiting Seward as part of an earnest attempt to see something of ‘real’ Alaska other than ice fog and the stuffed polar bears in the airport lobby. To come up here in January, you have to think that these folks did something to piss off whoever is in charge of making the office travel arrangements.