Locals and outside "experts" give different views on the best time to visit Southeast Alaska. The consensus seems to be that May and June are best, as they are typically drier than later in the summer. July and August tend to be wet – certainly the case this year. So, we’re headed back down the Inside Passage in fog and rain. And we’ve got a lot of company.

Part of what we enjoy about cruising is the challenge of maneuvering the boat in crowded places, whether in a harbor, or in a channel with traffic. Take the radar image above. We’ve got a cruise ship coming up behind us, a tug with double tow ahead, several fishing boats, and a pair of yachts. Everyone except for the tug and tow is running south.

In the image above, the radar is on 4-mile range, the screen is centered so we can see what is behind us as well as ahead, and ARPA vectors are set to relative, to indicate how our course plays with that of the traffic.

We don’t mind sharing our waterways with the odd ship.

But when there is a tug with tow opposing a big ship, we know that we are not very high on the list of risk factors that either captain is considering.

We’ve talked in the past about the difference between relative and true vectors with ARPA. Here the radar is set to true, so that we can see where the tug with tow and cruise ship are actually heading.

We’ve passed the tug and he is now abeam of the cruise ship behind us. The relative ARPA vector projecting from the front of each target now show the cruise ship passing behind us. This is an indication he has turned to starboard to create some space between himself and the tug/tow.

A few minutes later, and the cruise ship is just off our port aft quarter. Notice how his relative ARPA vector now shows his projected path ahead of us. He has turned back to port and is centered in the channel. We’ve been moving over to the starboard (west) side of the channel to give the big guy extra space.

The picture on the radar looks tight, but each range ring equals a quarter of a nautical mile, so we’ve actually got pretty good separation. At sea we’d want a couple of miles of space between us.

A steady diet of protected smooth water passages becomes boring after a while. But for this day, as we make tracks toward the center of the western edge of the Pacific High, we’ll accept it.

When there is high pressure sitting nearby, the closer you get to the equator side, the nicer the weather is going to be. The pole side of the high deflects low pressure systems to the east. This summer, the Pacific High has been sitting off the coast of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, situated a bit further north than is the "norm". Southeast Alaska has paid the price in terms of unpleasant weather. But now, just a couple of hundred miles south of Prince of Wales Island, already the clouds are higher and more broken. There’s even a hint of blue.

A few hours later and another 30 miles south, and it is becoming almost balmy.

And then, to cap off the afternoon, a group of humpbacks have decided to visit.

In case you are as much into tail as are we, here are some close ups of their horizontal stabilizers.

Now, all we need is a nice anchorage for the evening… (To be continued.)