For the past several years, Laura Dormela, a professional photographer from Portland, Oregon, has led a Slowboat flotilla of cruising boats up the Inside Passage from the San Juan Islands just above Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. She and her husband, Kevin Morris, the editor of an electronics journal, cruise on their 2006 Nordic Tug 44 named Airship.
This summer, after the flotilla disbanded, they kept cruising. Recently they were in Tracy Arm, about 45 miles miles south of Juneau, with a breathtaking glacier (I was there many years ago with my friend Eric Schweikardt). Then they went a bit farther south to Ford’s Terror, a steep and narrow fjord that juts off Endicott Arm, where snow-capped mountains dominate a wilderness with deep valleys and sparkling waterfalls.
The Ford’s Terror name comes from the experience of a sailor named Ford who rowed a dinghy into the narrow entrance to the fjord at slack tide in 1889. But then the tide started to rise, trapping him for a “terrifying” six hours in a ripping surge.
Here’s the Slowboat blog, and pictures:
We left Tracy Arm Cove this morning on the late side (for us – 10am-ish) to get to the entrance to Ford’s Terror by 1:30pm (high slack in Juneau). It’s been a few years since we took Kevin’s brother to Ford’s Terror, and he’s psyched to see it again.
The flood current was rippin’ as we crossed the Tracy Arm Bar…maybe 4-5 knots against us. It was very squirrely in spots, and this shot of the red buoy will give you an idea:
Right outside the entrance to Ford’s Terror, there was a single humpback just hanging at the surface with some smaller icebergs. Fun! I don’t think we’ve seen a humpback back in this far before!
Read more: https://slowboat.com/2023/08/airship-fords-terror/
