June 2 - 10 -- Alaska, Part One -- The Cruise

Our first day was in Vancouver, Canada, a big modern city with lots of its old buildings spared from urban renewal -- so far. We visited The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club in Stanley Park, with the city behind and the cruiseships a white blur at the left side background.

And we visited Granville Island which is an artisanal shopping mecca, surrounded by marinas. We somehow skipped Vancouver's maritime museum but we saw lots of boats.

The next eight days, seven nights were aboard the Crystal Symphony. This was our tenth cruise and a much more luxurious experience than we have ever had in the past. (Two in the Eastern Caribbean, one Western Caribbean, and one each in the Sea of  Cortez, L.A. - Acapulco, New York - St. John's Newfoundland, Athens - Istanbul, a river boat on the Danube and Amsterdam - St. Petersberg.)

This was a much smaller ship than most, a max of 922 passengers (we sailed with less) as contrasted to up to 3500.  A sense of spaciousness was everywhere and no lines. Our cabin had a big picture window but no balcony -- it's Alaska after all. We found we liked the main dining room (come when you want and no lines) better than the four specialty restaurants: Japanese, Chinese, Brazilian and Italian, but they were very good too. So much redundancy to delight passengers! Plus the Lido Deck buffet and another small coffee bar with lots of food. One afternoon, they pulled together a few of their 20 entertainers to serenade us with Mozart during which a huge Viennese table was kept full by the wait staff, dressed in period clothing. It killed off appetites for dinner but we ate anyway -- late. One hundred of the 550 crew are involved in cooking and baking.  It was my Birthday so they said to have the "Special Breakfast".

I did not order this stuff but kept coming including caviar in this course and steak and eggs in the next! When we got back to new York after two weeks away I found that I had gained nine pounds, though most of it is off already. They had specialty wines at $100 per bottle but all other beverages were included as were the tips. I found that I was drinking two glasses of excellent, to my taste, wines with most lunches and dinners, as well as having deserts, which I usually skip. As you walk around or sit in any of the spacious seating areas, entertainment venues or lobbies, waiters come around offering whatever you want. Everything about this experience was first rate.

Two examples. I tried to sign up with the concierge for a tour of the bridge. "I'm sorry sir, since 9/11 we are not allowed to to them any longer." I expressed disappointment; "I'm a sailor and interested in such things". Two days later: "Please don't tell anyone but it is arranged for four this afternoon." Lene is in the Captain's chair wearing Conrad's hat. Crystal has a saying: "Once you have been Crystalized, you will never ride another line." They are right!

Symphony was built in Finland in 1995 and extensively renovated recently. Length 781', beam 99' and draft 25'. Diesel electric power turn the conventional shafts that drive the boat. Speed is controlled not to increasing the rpm but by varying the pitch of the props. Max speed is 21 knots but she cruises at 15, or slower when the distance/time/speed formula permits. She has a full set of paper charts and it must be immense because she cruises around the world, but the two large display chart plotters in the bridge were what they used. There are always two officers on deck while underway in addition to a lookout and the Captain, when he chooses to appear. The first officer announces his decisions as to all course and speed changes but they are not executed until the second officer concurs. Two heads are better than one is the reason.

The other special experience was Friday night religious services. They followed shortly after a Mass, led by a priest who was very friendly to us, comes from  Westchester and is invited for a sail on ILENE. The ship not only announced the venue in the daily newspaper (in the motion picture theater) but provided prayer books, two electric sabbath candles, yarmulkas, good red and white wine, two ship-baked braided challah breads and a plate of gefilte fish with hard boiled eggs and horse raddish!

One of the best features of the trip was getting to know Chris and Tom, who we shared many moments with. They are Aussies and while we may not go "down under" to visit them, they travel a lot and we will see them in New York.

The entertainment was excellent and imaginative and we played trivial pursuit during the three at sea days, taking one first place and two seconds. I worked out in the gym most days and partook of the sauna, though the steam room was shut down due to a broken part.

Our route: We departed from Vancouver on a glorious sunny afternoon and, after stops in

Ketchican, Juneau and Skagway, and three days at sea, disembarked at Whittier for the start of our land adventure. See Alaska, Part Two, to be published soon. Our route was via the Inside Passage, a channel created by a lot of off shore islands. These are not a barrier reef and not continuous but rather a series of islands off shore. The passage is sometimes quite wide, perhaps ten miles, and narrows to a fraction of a mile in other spots. The only gthing I would do diffwrently if I was running Crystal Cruises would be to post both small and large scale charts showing where the ship was and had been.We took tours from Ketchican (a totem pole park, paddling an Indian canoe and visiting a salmon hatchery)

And visited the Mendenhall Glacier, which is right next to a waterfall so you have both a frozen and a liquid river side by side. Yes it rained that day.

In Skagway, (which translates to Windy Place -- and it is) we took a free tour with the National Parks Service ranger, followed by a hike uphill to woodland fresh water Lake Dewey. Here is a view of Symphony, dwarfed behind the larger Holland American boat.
The shore experiences, however, were not the most impressive part of this cruise. Two of the "at sea" days involved getting the very large boat inland through huge fjords with high waterfalls

and glaciers that came down to the sea (as compared to the Rocky mountain glaciers, which end on land).





s/v ILENE's binoculars got us a closer view of the glacial faces.

 Some of the icebergs were black from earth and rocks that covered them, those solids will fall to the bottom as the ice melts. One such black spot moved! A seal, sunning on it who lifted his or her head to give a wary eye to the behemoth nearby. The landscapes are so big that the sense of scale is distorted.

I was amazed that they brought Symphony in through waters filled with small iceberg to within three miles of the glacier faces.













Look at the tiny whitish dot to the right side of the narrow entrance through which we entered.

Not such a tiny dot afterall, but a Disney boat larger than ours.