Spirit of Endeavour - Cruise West
Vessel: Spirit of Endeavour
Cruise Line: Cruise West
Star Rating: 2 Stars
Tonnage: 95 GRT
Max Passenger Capacity: 107
Entered Service: 1983/1996
Description: Spirit of Endeavour is the flagship of the Cruise West fleet and is particularly suited to in-depth glacier spotting and up close cruising along the coastline of Alaska. Best suited to couples and single travellers who enjoy nature and wildlife in a close-up setting.
The Explorer Lounge is the only public room inside the ship as the ship is fairly small with a capacity of up to 107 passengers.
There are four grades of cabins, all small compared to most cruise ships, however, they are reasonably comfortable. Four cabins on the main deck have a porthole while most cabins have a large picture window, clothes closet, television and VCR. Each cabin features a small private bathroom.
Dress code is casual, even for mealtimes. The Resolution Dining Room is modestly decorated and offers an open-seating policy. Cuisine is simple with an American slant. Plenty of tasty seafood dishes are a highlight as ingredients are mostly locally sourced.
There is no formal entertainment, spa, or fitness facilities so passengers need to find their own onboard amusements.
There is an 'open bridge' policy, meaning you can visit the wheelhouse whenever you wish.
An Alaska Inside Passage cruise - Ketchikan to Juneau or visa versa, 9-days/8-nights, starts from $5122 per person twin share, on Spirit of Endeavour, May 19, 2005 (Category A) or Spirit of 98, May 18, 2005 (Category A).
Contact Talpacific: 1300 554 747 or visit www.talpacific.com.
Spirit of Endeavour
Discover a world abundant with natural beauty, incredible wildlife and floating glaciers - from the comfort of a Cruise West ship.
"When the tide is out, the table is set". Shelby tells us this is an expression used by the local Tlingit Indian people, as we watch a black bear making her way along the shoreline.
It's late afternoon and we're aboard Cruise West's Spirit of Endeavour sailing up Tracy Arm, one of the fjords, which make up Alaska's Inside Passage. Ahead are two active tidewater glaciers. The ship scrunches through icebergs and "bergy bits", which have "calved-off" the glaciers and are floating downstream. Harbour seals recline on these ice floes, whilst keeping an eye out for fish.
Shelby Smith, and her colleague Kimberly Scott, are the ship's Exploration Leaders, who take turn to keep watch, scanning the shoreline and water for signs of life. Like most of the passengers, their day is spent with a pair of binoculars around their necks; unlike us, they never seem to miss a living creature. Throughout the day, we hear sotto voce alerts "sea otters at 11 o'clock", "black bear at six".
As we drift slowly, we see what the Tlingit saying means, as the bear dips a paw into a shallow stream and retrieves a salmon. It's dinner time.
Dinner time, too, for Spirit of Endeavour's passengers is one of the day's highlights. At just before 7.00pm, a young, hip African-American, wearing a grey chef's outfit, appears in the lounge and greets us with, "Hi y'all - ahm Irv, from Noorleans, ahm your chef and I cook with lurve".
He then runs through the evening's menu - five courses, which always include a clever soup (such as roast carrot with onion relish), an imaginative salad (perhaps a lettuce mix with caramelised pecans, raspberry vinaigrette and a goat cheese crouton), a pasta (maybe Fettucine Primavera - spinach and tomato fettucine tossed in a traditional Alfredo sauce, with fresh vegetables), followed by dishes like Dungeness crab, halibut and filet mignon. Vegetarians, too, are well cared for if the vegetable stew in a savoury boule was anything to go by. Each day's menu also offers a selection of breads and beautifully baked pastries.
At the end of his presentation, Irv says "Let's eat" and guests troop down to the dining room. In keeping with the ship's informal style, dining is open-sitting, allowing passengers to ring the changes; a wonderful way to get to know fellow cruisers. On this trip they're a sparky crowd of (mostly) retired teachers, academics, artists, lawyers and doctors, with a sprinkling of younger (forty-something) couples.
Our table companions help us through the small, but challenging choice of Californian and Washington wines, which include 10 available by the glass.
There's no dress code, so when packing, concentrate on necessities such as windproof jackets and lightweight warm sweaters. The trick is to dress in layers, as August temperatures typically range from 10 egrees Celsius (colder when at the face of a glacier) to 25 degrees. You'll be glad of another layer when standing at the ship's bow, gazing up at the face of Grand Pacific Glacier at the head of Glacier Bay.
Days can be spent sailing in what 200 years ago was choked with ice. Captain George Vancouver, a contemporary of James Cook, sailed past a glacier that was 30 kilometres or more across and extended for more than 160 kilometres. A National Park ranger explains that the glacier has retreated over 105 kilometres since then and is retreating still. John Muir, a subsequent explorer, described it as the "snows of yesteryear compressed into glaciers". Take a floatplane over the massive Le Conte Glacier and marvel at the translucent blue of the ice peaks; the bluest ice is the most compressed, having the least oxygen.
Captain Jim Armstrong is a veteran of these waters, with a flexible schedule that allows him to reduce speed or cut the engines when a sighting justifies it. One afternoon, in Fredericks Sound, we are roused from our after-lunch slumbers, with "orcas at 9 o'clock". A pod of six killer whales is diving and breaching a few hundred metres from the ship. Another ship from the Cruise West fleet appears and turns around to follow the whales at the required distance of about 400 metres. In Glacier Bay, we sail past a small island on which a hundred or more sea lions are just "hanging out". They're all males so there's the occasional territorial aggression, though for most of the time they seem to just sit and grunt.
However, nothing prepares us for our first sight of humpback whales. At 8.00am, three days into our cruise, four of these 12-metre long mammals are hunting together. They each weigh anything up to 40 tons. Kimberly explains that it's called "aggregatio"; they're not related but simply combine resources to flush out their prey, by using noise, fin motions and bubbles to scare and corral schools of fish into tight balls to allow for more concentrated feeding. Breakfast is abandoned as passengers scramble for binoculars and cameras.
Spirit of Endeavour is one of eight Cruise West ships, carrying between 78 and 114 passengers. The southbound Inside Passage cruise sails 1400 kilometres from Juneau to Ketchikan in a week. Juneau, a charming town with a population of around 30,000 is Alaska's improbable capital (Anchorage has almost 10 times Juneau's population). Its steep streets climb up the lower slopes of the snow-capped Coast Mountains and its painted weatherboard houses are reminiscent of Wellington. Juneau's Marine Way is lined with ships of Holland America, Royal Caribbean and Princess Cruises. At first glance we don't spot our ship amongst the behemoths. Spirit of Endeavour, all 66 metres of her, is moored next to Sun Princess which, at 261 metres, is four times as long and carries 20 times as many passengers.
We walk across the street from the Goldbelt Hotel for the most casual of embarkations, which sets the tone for the whole week. Captain Jim and a couple of his officers greet us on the pier and in minutes, we're in our cabin. Like the ship, it's small, though Cruise West prefers "compact". But there is a big window, a small ensuite with a shower; good cupboard space and a desk.
Days of wildlife watching from the deck are balanced with port visits, and day two of our week's cruise sees us at Skagway, gateway to the 1898 Yukon gold rush. In its heyday, it was a wild frontier town of saloons, banks, money sharks and brothels (one tiny cabin carries the sign "The House of Negotiable Affection"). On this typical summer day, Skagway is host to around four thousand cruise passengers plus the more adventurous who are heading north on the Klondike Highway to the Yukon and Alaska. Two days later, Sitka, the capital of Russian America until 1867, came as a bit of a disappointment. A fire in 1966 destroyed much of the town including St.Michael's Cathedral, though the nineteenth century icons were saved and now hang in the rebuilt church.
After lunch, we drive twenty minutes out of Sitka to visit Volta, one of twenty Raptors-in-Residence at the Alaska Raptor Centre. A bald eagle, whose encounter with a power line left him grounded, Volta is the star of a 15-minute presentation on the centre's work of rehabilitating eagles, owls and other raptors, which sees around 200 birds returned to the wild each year.
In Ketchikan, it's low tide as we disembark Spirit of Endeavour for the last time. Creek Street, a row of brightly painted wooden houses, was Ketchikan's red light district during the Gold Rush. The offspring of the bordello's owners came to be known as 'brothel sprouts', and it's claimed their descendents own much of Ketchikan's prime real estate. Beside the pier, seabirds swoop to feed on stranded fish. The table is set and we wonder if the bears have eaten yet.
Written by Philip Thorniley - Issue 19, Autumn 2005