Inland Passage in Tuxedo or Jeans? It’s a Tossup

In recent years, Alaska’s Inside Passage, 1,142 miles of forest-lined waterway sheltered from the Pacific Ocean by more than 1,000 pine- and spruce-covered islands and rimmed by 50 major glaciers, has become one of the world’s busiest cruising lanes.

North from Alaska’s rainiest city, Ketchikan, and south from the glacier-ringed state capital of Juneau, the sleek ships purr, carrying more than 200,000 passengers a year.

Holland America, Princess, Royal Viking, Regency and Costa all ply these waters, as do those three-masted, computer-controlled sailing vessels that recall the clipper ships which once carried furs and gold from Alaska.

Lately, these large ships have been joined by a growing fleet of adventure-exploration craft--large, comfortable yachts designed to take a small number of passengers as close as possible to Alaska’s and dramatic scenery and wildlife.

Which is the best way to go? We’ve tried both the luxury route and the blue-jeans-and-foul-weather-gear trip and have yet to decide.

You can’t get much more luxurious than Holland America’s 704-foot, 34,000-ton Noordam, with its nine carpeted decks lined by 605 modern, elegantly designed staterooms, each with closed-circuit TV, four comfortable lounges and seven bars, several posh restaurants, a spa, gymnasium, sauna, beauty parlor, hospital, movie theater, library, game room, shopping arcade and casino. All the amenities, in fact, of a good-sized town .

We boarded the Noordam in Vancouver, watching others among the 1,214 sportily attired passengers, with their Gucci and Vuitton hand luggage, being escorted to their cabins by friendly crew members.

In our stateroom, we found the strongest argument for choosing the elegant way of seeing the Inside Passage--ample storage space. Once unpacked, our vacation wardrobe was conveniently ready for the entire week’s schedule of shipboard events: casual cruisewear for the days at sea; foul weather gear and woolies for the occasional shore expedition, and glittering eveningwear for the captain’s dinner and discoing into the small hours.

It was comforting to know that we would not have to touch our suitcases again until the trip was over.

There was no such joy aboard the Sheltered Seas, the 99-ton, 90-foot yacht that takes its 100 passengers on a five-day, port-to-port meander along the shoreline of the Tongass National Forest flanking the Inside Passage.

The Sheltered Seas is all deck and passenger lounges, completely without staterooms. Passengers go ashore each night to sleep at hotels in such spots as Petersburg, where the central exhibit in the town museum is a record 126-pound salmon.

On the Sheltered Seas, it’s pack/unpack almost every day. But passengers also enjoy the chance to sample some Alaskan ports too small for the large liners to enter.

The crews of the two vessels vary enormously, too. Like all of Holland America’s liners, the blue-hulled, white-topped Noordam is staffed by a legion of smiling, soft-spoken Indonesians and Filipinos. They seem to work around the clock--tidying, refilling the cabin ice buckets, putting chocolates on the pillows, laying out sleepwear.

It’s a lot different on the Sheltered Seas. There, the crew comes from academia, not Indonesia. Most are in their early 20s, going to sea for a season before settling down to their careers. Bright and enthusiastic, they bring a lot of joy to the job.

Cruise director Stephani Lourie betrays her Acting 101 background by performing at every opportunity, gliding down the boat’s aisle in her life jacket during the safety drill as if she were a ramp model, mimicking the bark of hungry seals, leaping into the air in an imitation of how whales breach. Her one-woman show rivals the professional acts we saw in the Noordam’s nightclub each evening.

The Noordam’s bridge is immaculately high-tech and very disciplined. Groups of fascinated passengers are shown the area by appointment. On the Sheltered Seas, passengers walk in and out of the wheelhouse at will.

The ship’s waitresses sometimes take the helm under the skipper’s watchful eye. There’s a long bench aft of the wheel where passengers can, and do, sit for hours at a time, backseat driving.

How the two vessels traverse the Inside Passage is literally the difference between night and day. The Noordam spends a part of almost every day in port, either at a dock or anchored offshore, its comfortable, covered tenders ferrying passengers between the town dock and the ship.

At each port, there are popular, professionally guided excursions--helicopter rides over glaciers, floatplane flights into the interior, salmon fishing--all provided at the passenger’s expense.

When she is at sea during daylight hours, the Noordam purrs along at a steady 18 knots, so you have to be quick to the rail when the loudspeaker reports an eagle’s nest to port or a white-tailed deer on the shoreline to starboard.

Aboard the Sheltered Seas, all cruising is done in daylight, which in the summer reaches a maximum of 18 hours and 18 minutes. It’s only at day’s end that she ties up. Wildlife sightings can drop the vessel’s speed to zero, or even put the engines into reverse.

Skip Heeter, the veteran ex-Coast Guardsman who captains the yacht, will put the prow of his vessel right next to the shoreline if it will help his passengers, clustered on the foredeck, to get a better photo of the brown bear they’ve surprised while fishing for its morning meal of a flopping salmon.

“If I can’t get you to within 10 feet of a bear, I’m having a bad day,” Heeter claims.

One of Alaska’s several thousand bald eagles, its wings spread to a full seven feet, perches atop an iceberg and becomes a photo opportunity that encourages Heeter to circle the floe several times.

Humpback whales cavorting in the channel bring the Sheltered Seas to a full stop so passengers can watch the spouts erupt from the ocean surface and “ooh” and “aah” as the giant tails flip skyward when the whales begin to dive.

The Noordam, meanwhile, glides into Glacier Bay, where we line the rails and point telephoto lenses at the blue glacier ice “calving” into the pearly gray sea. The Sheltered Seas takes a more intimate approach, nosing so close to the LeConte Glacier that the waves from the falling ice rock the boat and threaten to dump into the sea the hundreds of seals lying on floes all around the vessel.

There’s also a world of difference in the food and drink that emerges from the galleys of the two vessels. Aboard the Noordam, passenger belt buckles almost always move out a notch or two during what is inevitably a pleasurable week of gourmet excess.

We could have eaten almost nonstop aboard the Noordam, from the jogger’s continental breakfast of steaming coffee and warm sweet rolls on deck just after dawn, to the massive midnight buffet laid on at the end of the nightclub show.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner all run to several courses, and the final evening banquet of the week is capped by waiters carrying in--what else?--flaming Baked Alaska.

If we had to name our favorite seaboard snack of the day, it would be the Noordam’s elegant afternoon tea in the Explorers Lounge, creamy petit-fours and steaming Darjeeling being served on bone china while a tuxedoed string quartet plays Brahms as the beautiful Alaskan shoreline slips by beyond the lounge’s picture windows.

The Sheltered Seas takes a more basic attitude towards food--keep it filling instead of fancy. Lots of fresh fruit, cereal and bagels in the morning, stir-fry or lasagna for lunch, baked salmon for the one dinner meal eaten aboard.

Other evening meals are usually consumed in shoreside restaurants, often with the local villagers putting on an impromptu Alaskan song-and-dance show.

There is no wine cellar aboard the Sheltered Seas; it’s mostly inexpensive table wine and cold beers, although its tiny three-seat bar does feature something called a Glacial Silt--a chilled concoction of creme de cocoa and peppermint schnapps.

Running out of ice or water is no problem for the crew of the Sheltered Seas. They edge the vessel up to an iceberg and hack out a few chunks to fill the ice locker. If necessary, fresh water comes aboard when the vessel nudges up to a thundering waterfall and two rain slicker-clad deckhands go forward to fill water canisters from the torrent of snowmelt.

Which ship is best for enjoying the Inside Passage?

There’s only one way to find out: try both.