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Petersburg

Petersburg is a pretty little town – old Nordic style timber buildings around a spectacular natural harbour under snowcapped peaks across the channel, and with nearly as many deer roaming the streets as cars – but I’m not sure the locals would like you calling it that. For them, it’s a practical town with a Nordic work ethic and a local fishing fleet and processing facilities making it the fourth biggest seafood producer in the USA. Main street has an Elk Lodge, a Sons of Norway Hall, and a local chapter of the Loyal Order of the Moose. As for tourism, the local museum (think stuffed fish and antique fishing lures) runs a film that tells you “where once Petersburg had an ambivalent attitude to tourists, it now recognises them as a necessary evil”. (!?)

We arrived on a sunny Monday morning, a public holiday and the last day of the annual King Salmon Derby, so went for a wander around the docks to check out the fleet and grabbed some fish and chips from the local ‘hot food, fish processing, cold storage’ store while watching some of the catches being brought in for their weigh-in.

Outside of the town, a network of roads fans out across Mitkof island to nowhere in particular, so we headed off to the 3 lake trail s on the far side of the island. It turns out that a ‘muskeg boardwalk’ is a euphemism for a long line of rotting planks laid end to end through a swamp – a lot of muddy fun. Each lake has a public use rowboat just sitting there (along with lifejackets for the kids), so we went for a late afternoon paddle chasing beaver. The evening was so fine that Angus, Evie and I decided to grab our packs and hike back to one of the lakes for an overnight camp – pitched our tent on the wooden dock and fished into the twilight (no bites except for the ravenous mosquitoes…).

Fiona and Digby spent a quiet night in the RV together till three folk wandered past (with a pair of rifles – for protection…) . Turned out they had lost their car-keys at the lake and were facing the 20mile hike back to town – so Fiona ferried them back to civilisation and spotted a moose and a porcupine on the way back (much to Angus’s disappointment when he heard about it the next morning).

With another night before we caught the ferry onwards, we headed down to the secluded South of the island on the suggestion of the friendly tourist information office (who had loaded us up with advice, maps, pamphlets, posters, stickers, on the island, local wildlife, even their lichen…) and struck gold. With the sun still shining, we found an isolated campsite on the beach with a broad view of the inside passage and the mountains, and a small island I reckon we could walk to at low tide. The beach is covered in mussel beds and enormous driftwood logs, with a couple of swings in the trees and a 30ft square of old fishing net strung up like the world’s biggest hammock. Angus and Evie spotted a couple of strange little animals amongst the driftwood, and on the evening lowtide we identified them – a family of Northern river otters feeding off the mussels. In the morning, the sea was so still I could hear dolphins breathing out in the channel.

With no other souls around, the island to explore, the beach to comb, the hammock begging for a midday snooze, and my fishing technique to perfect (damn otters…), it’s clearly time to ring the ferry office and change our plans.

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The Alaskan Marine Highway

The Alaskan Marine Highway Service is one of those things that really does make Alaska different. With dozens of villages, towns and cities that can only be reached by air or by sea, much of Alaska depends on the ferry system, and so subsidises it, in the same way that the rest of the US states depend on and pay for their roads. For cheapskates like us, this makes for a sensational opportunity – to drive your vehicle on and cruise through some of the most spectacular coastline on the planet – watching glaciers, icebergs, dolphins, even whales drifting past – for about the same price as you’d pay for a bus ticket.

Our plan was to trip all the way up the inside passage, from Prince Rupert in the South to Haines in the North, stopping off at the capital city Juneau, and a few small fishing villages, Wrangell and Petersberg, along the way.

As getting onto the ferry at Prince Rupert involves clearing US customs, we turned up a few hours early – at 6.30am, with the kids still half asleep and in their pyjamas, just to make sure everything went smoothly.

Of course it didn’t – joining the ferry queue, we found out that a bald eagle had flown into some power lines, so US customs were unable to process us until power was restored. Fellow travellers grumbled – “Alaskans!”

Apparently this happens fairly often, so it was surprising that they didn’t have a backup generator – and more surprising that the power guys turned up needing to hitch a ride across the channel to flick the switch. One of the ferry crewman grumbled – “Canadians!”

A boat idled in the harbour, and they asked the skipper for a ride – “sure, but be quick about it, I’m going fishing”, “ah, well, if you’re going fishing, we can wait…” Whichever side of the border you’re from, fishing comes first in this part of the world, so the ferry crew dropped a RIB lifeboat into the water and took them across instead.

When power was restored and we finally did get moving, we found ourselves being held to the very, very last to be loaded before getting underway at about 11am. Everyone else was heading to Ketchikan, one of the main towns on the route, and a major destination for the cruise-lines that bring 90% of the tourists to this part of the world, but we were bypassing it to head to Wrangell – alone.

Maybe everyone else knows something we don’t…

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