I am about to order dinner when I see it. Looking up from the menu to gaze at the Pacific Ocean through the window next to my table, I spot the flash of a fin through the waves. Moments later, an orca breaches the water completely, flipping in the air to reveal its white underbelly before
crashing into the sea, leaving me wondering if I have imagined the whole thing.
The ever-changing backdrop to life on board is what makes an Alaskan cruise one of the world’s most dramatic sea voyages. We’re sailing the Inside Passage, a 500-mile coastal waterway with sceneries of glaciers that flow alongside snow-capped mountains, glossy lakes, ice-carved fjords snaking through steep valleys, and dense pine forests that stop at the water’s edge.
Indigenous communities, including the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people, have lived on the remote banks here for centuries, surrounded by the 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest temperate rainforest. The route’s deep waters mean cruise ships are able to sail astonishingly close to the coast, making sightings of bald eagles perched on top of 1,000-year-old pines and even bears foraging for food on the shoreline entirely possible.
There are plenty of places to watch the world go by onboard the 458-passenger Seabourn Quest, during its seven-night itinerary from Alaska’s capital Juneau to Vancouver. There are bubbling whirlpools, a glass-fronted observation deck serving afternoon tea and an outdoor poolside grill restaurant. I eat there on even the chilliest days under a patio heater, so as not to miss a moment.
Quest’s smaller size means it can navigate narrow fjords larger ships can’t access, docking in rarely visited fishing villages and isolated gold-rush-era towns. A small team of onboard expedition experts – identifiable in their cherry-red parkas – help bring each new destination to life. With backgrounds in geology, marine biology and ornithology, they are always on hand to help spot wildlife and to forge a deeper understanding of the passing landscape, pointing out porpoises, lighthouses and even copper-coloured streaks on rock faces that indicate the presence of gold.
We are whisked off the ship on kayaks or Zodiac boats to adventures on water. In Endicott Arm, we zip past curious harbour seals to get even closer to the jagged mile-wide Dawes Glacier that looms ahead, just in time to catch a deafening boom as it calves and a huge block of ice breaks off and falls into the sea. Two days later, in Misty Fjords, my Zodiac leaves the Quest and speeds into God’s Pocket, a protected cove surrounded by forested mountains and scattered with waterfalls so high it is impossible to see where they begin. We get so close to one, I am able to lean over and fill a water bottle from the cascade. Our Alaskan-born guide Ely Allred points out the spiky devil’s club trees, used by the Tlingit people to treat burns and regulate blood sugar, and vast eagles’ nests that are added to by each new generation of birds until they reach over six metres tall.
On our final day, we stop offshore at the remote British Columbian village of Alert Bay, which has just 500 residents, and I join a kayaking excursion along the coast of the nearby Pearse Islands, spotting a sea otter ducking out of the way and a mink scrambling onto the bank. When the current picks up, we climb back onto the Zodiac to return to the ship as a funnel of water shoots from the sea just near us. We watch, spellbound, as a pod of five orcas emerge, flipping and tumbling before they swim away side-by-side, unaware they have left us open-mouthed in their wake, once more captivated by this truly extraordinary place.
Ways and means
The 7-Day Alaska Fjords & Canadian Inside Passage cruise on ‘Seabourn Quest’, departing from Juneau on June 5, 2026 and finishing in Vancouver, costs from £3,484 per person, all inclusive, based on two sharing a Veranda suite: seabourn.com
