The last great wilderness coast

Alaska has more coastline than every other American state combined, and almost nobody living on it. That ratio is the whole argument. Run the Inside Passage for a fortnight and you can anchor every night in a bay that has a name, a salmon stream and nothing else, and count more bears than yachts along the way.

The shape of an expedition here

Southeast Alaska is expedition cruising with the sharp edges managed. The Inside Passage threads between islands, so most days you are in protected water even when the Gulf outside is misbehaving. An ice class hull is not required, but glacier fronts shed bergy bits constantly, and captains who know these waters treat the last miles of any glacial fjord as slow, deliberate work. What you do need is paperwork done early. Glacier Bay National Park caps the number of private vessels allowed inside each day through summer, and permits are applied for months ahead. The bear viewing sites at Pack Creek and Anan Creek run their own permit systems in peak season. A yacht with a helicopter earns it here, lifting you from the anchorage to a glacier landing or a ridge line lake in twenty minutes.

The waters and anchorages that matter

Glacier Bay is the marquee run, a fjord system that was still under ice when George Vancouver charted the entrance in 1794 and has since opened sixty five miles to the faces of the Margerie and Johns Hopkins glaciers. Endicott Arm ends at Dawes Glacier, calving into water dotted with harbour seals hauled out on the floes, and neighbouring Tracy Arm ends at the Sawyer glaciers. For the quiet nights, Warm Springs Bay on Baranof Island puts natural hot pools beside a waterfall a short tender ride from the anchorage, and Red Bluff Bay is the sort of place crews photograph for their own albums. Misty Fiords, best seen by floatplane, is Yosemite with the ocean let in.

Admiralty Island has more brown bears than people. That is the ratio you came for.

The wildlife ledger

Frederick Sound holds one of the densest summer gatherings of humpback whales on Earth, and with luck you will watch them bubble net feeding, a dozen animals surfacing open mouthed inside a ring of their own making. Orcas work the same straits. Admiralty Island, known to the Tlingit as Kootznoowoo, fortress of the bears, carries roughly one brown bear per square mile. Sea otters raft in the kelp, bald eagles are as common as gulls, and in late summer every stream turns silver with salmon, which is the engine driving all of it.

The galley writes itself

Provisioning in Alaska is less about sourcing than restraint. The crew drop prawn pots and crab rings in the evening and pull Dungeness crab and spot prawns with the morning coffee. Wild king and sockeye salmon come off day yachts in Sitka and Juneau, halibut comes over the rail on your own line, and the chef's job becomes doing as little to any of it as possible. Wine and anything exotic fly in through Juneau without fuss.

When to come

The season runs May to September. May is the sleeper, snow low on the peaks, whales newly arrived, the small charter fleet still thin. June brings eighteen hour days. July and August are peak salmon, which means peak bears at the stream mouths, and the best odds of settled weather, though this is rainforest and it rains, which is precisely what keeps it green and empty. By September the humpbacks are feeding hard before migration and the storms return with intent. If Alaska is on your list, start a conversation about an expedition charter a year out. The permits reward the organised.