05 May 2008, Skagway.

The run from Juneau to Skagway is one of going “around the houses” as the town is just to the North of Juneau, but we have to go around a mountain ridge to get there by sailing through the Lynn Canal. In the 1980’s Holland America did not go to Skagway at all but ran their own sightseeing boat, the Fairweather, from Juneau to Skagway. With the growth of the tourist industry in Skagway we started calling there after 1994.

Skagway derives its fame from the Klondike Gold rush of 1898 which transformed a sleepy valley with a single homestead into a bustling entry port for gold prospectors. Main attraction nowadays is the train that runs from Skagway up the interior all the way into Canada. However many other tours have since been developed including helicopter tours. In the summer Skagway is a town of commerce with the whole of Front Street devoted to shops. The normal town occupancy of 400 doubles to 800, with the influx of summertime shop attendants. Most of them are accommodated at a camping site at the end of the valley. As quite a few of them are students who have to return to university at the end of the summer, a lot of shops tend to close when the students have to leave. By mid September the main street is almost a ghost town with all the shop windows boarded up for the winter.

Apart from cruise ships occupying the dock, there is also an ore dock, and on a regular basis ore ships still come in to load ore, coming from the Canadian interior. It is brought down by train and then transported by conveyor belt over the dock to the ship. In high season that dock is also used for cruise ships as I have seen four cruise ships in port at the same time plus and Alaska state Ferry.

We were alone today, which is also the last time as the season fully kicks in next week. Then there will be 3 or 4 cruise ships each call. But today we enjoyed our solitude and docked at 6 am. in the morning. It was wind still and only a little drizzle present. That dried away later as well, so we had much less rain than yesterday in Juneau. We docked at the Rail road dock under the shelter of the mountain ride that forms the Eastern side of the Valley in which Skagway is located. I prefer this dock, as it is more sheltered from the North of Southerly winds that can blow through the valley or through Lynn Canal with considerable force.

On the rock face there a lot of ships graffiti can be seen, although in this case I would prefer to call it Ships Art. Ships names, company logo’s and Captain’s names are painted on each bit of flat surface there is. The highest one is from the Royal Viking Line, almost at the top of the Cliff and not accessible by foot or ladder. I wondered for a while how they managed to do it and then found out that they had hired a helicopter for the day.
My name is on the wall as well, dating back to 6 September 1994, when the Nieuw Amsterdam under the command of Captain P. Kievit made the first call to Skagway since the demise of the ill fated Prinsendam(1). The funny thing was, the Bo ‘sun had spent all day, painting the ships name, the captain’s name, my name and the ships logo on the rock and then went back on board as sailing time was nearing close. Suddenly out ran the ships plumber, called Ben Bamba and he quickly pasted his name under the sign as well.
Ship, Captain, CO and Plumber are all still immortalized on the rocks of Skagway.

Since then several Hal ships have been added to the list starting with the Prinsendam in 1975. The oldest sign I could find was from the Princess Alicia from 1928, a Canadian Pacific Railroad steamer that used to call on a regular service at Skagway in the summer. The latest one is from a celebrity ship which name it could not read, as the sign was too far forward of the bridge, but the paint looked very fresh.

After the last tour was back on board, we pulled out from the dock, sailing down scenic Lynn Canal on the way to our highlight of our cruise, Majestic Glacier Bay.