Wednesday, August 5, 2009

The Pace of Cruising the Inside Passage

We’ve now been traveling 3 full days. When we reach our anchorage tonight at Port Neville we’ll have cruised a total of 27 hours at an average speed of 8 knots (9.2 mph), which means we’ve covered approximately 250 miles of our estimated 650 mile journey. Greg says after today we’ll be able to take it at a more leisurely pace. If we want to give ourselves an extra days’ margin, just in case, we’ll need to cruise 7 hours a day to cover the average 66 miles per day remaining. This suggests that a 10-day cruise between Port Angeles and Ketchikan is really pretty much the minimum. It’s easy to imagine spending a month each way exploring all the inlets. This isn’t to say by any means that it isn’t worth doing on the 10-day plan, but it’s hard to imagine doing it on one of the big cruise ships that makes the whole trip to Juneau, twice the distance as to Ketchikan, in only 7 days.

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