Additional notes pages are intended to provide information of less interest to the general reader than the story of the trip, but which might be useful to anyone planning another trip in the same area. This provides context for any comments about weather and sea conditions or tides in the trip write-up.

Main articles Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3

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Kayak hire and outfitting

It is not practical to travel from Europe to Alaska with all the kit you’d need for a paddling trip, so a local outfitter is essential. Pete used Levi Hogan of Turnagain Kayak, Hope, Alaska who hired us British style sea kayaks (two P&H Cetus, An NDK Explorer, A Valley Aquanaut and a North Shore Polar), Werner paddles and Kokatat PFDs. We also rented Bear vaults and bear spray, and bought our fuel through Levi. Levi has accommodation at Hope’s Hideaway (which we used for three nights), and ran our shuttle trips both to/from Whittier and Anchorage Airport. You will need to convince Levi that you are at least BCU Four star (sea) or equivalent to hire kit. As Pete has five star and all the group were experienced paddlers this was not an issue for us, but if all your group have a “no bits of paper” attitude, this might take a bit more effort.

Water Taxi

It’s perfectly possible to run a trip paddling out of Whittier and back again, though this involves paddling both ways in Passage Canal which is most of a day’s paddling and not very wildernessy. We chose to paddle out of Whittier, but get picked up further out. It’s equally possible to take a charter boat outward and then paddle back to Whittier, and if you don’t have tight deadlines at the end of the trip, this might allow a bit more flexibility – with our arrangement in 2016 we were a bit restricted by the need to be sure of getting back to our pick-up point for a specific time, whatever the weather. In 2016, we used Epic Charters.

Maps and Charts

The most useful overview map is the National Geographic Trails Illustrated Map 761, Prince William Sound – West. This is based on USGS mapping at 1:63360, but is scaled down to 3/5 of the original size. Most of the mapping in this area is dated in the early 1950’s, but NatGeo have added more recent information including some from marine charts, and have indicated a number of kayak landing places where camping is possible. Only four of our eight camps used these locations, but they are useful in indicating somewhere where you are pretty sure of being able to get ashore. You can get these maps in the UK from specialist map shops (mine came from Stanfords a few years back).
Charts can be seen with the NOAA Online Viewer. Somewhere there’s a graphical way to choose charts. Once you’ve navigated to the relevant chart, it is possible to write a script to download all the biggest scale tiles for a given chart and block them up into a single graphic. The charts show features like the submerged moraines at the corner of Harriman Fiord and where Barry Arm runs out into Port Wells which are not shown on the topo maps, but otherwise are not terribly useful for kayakers except perhaps to indicate routes taken by bigger shipping (although cruise ships are probably the biggest, and these stray far from the traffic lanes).
Far more useful is to download the original USGS maps from store.usgs.gov. This is based on a zoomable slippy map (and you have to scroll away from the lower 48 to reach Alaska), but in this case you scroll and zoom to the area of interest, then click to mark a point. You can now click on that marker to get a list of available maps, which include 1:250000 maps covering large areas (useful for an overview), 1:63360 maps of smaller areas (almost universal coverage) and in some areas, 1:24000 or more recently 1:25000 maps. The latter have UTM grids which makes them easier to use with GPS, but are only available in limited locations (none useful for this trip, for example). Where the larger scale maps are available, they are typically much more recent, and therefore more likely to be closer to present-day glacier locations, for example. In this area it is worth noting that there were considerable land height changes (thus changing the location of the coasts) in the 1964 earthquake, which post-dates the 1:63360 maps. The map downloads come as zip files, which contain geo-pdf files. Using a tool like pdfimages to extract the graphics, these turn out to be tiled maps, and again, it is fairly straightforward to write a script which will block up these tiles to make a single PNG of the whole map, so you can then patch together adjacent maps and produce custom maps covering sensible paddling areas. These have been produced from scans of paper maps, so are not quite perfect and come at odd resolutions. With a bit of measurement on the scale bars and some calculation, I found it easy enough to rescale these maps and print out specific areas at the more familiar 1:50000 scale, and laminate these A3 printouts for use on the trip. Unfortunately, although there are ticks on the neatline, these maps don’t have a kilometre UTM grid. Generating one by hand would be possible, but laborious. The original geo-pdf files contain enough metadata that this probably could be automated if you know a bit more about the structure.
Be aware that magnetic north is a long way from true north in this area – something like 25° east.

Tides

There are a variety of tide prediction sites, mostly orientated towards people fishing. However, I use the open-source xtide software, which comes with data to make predictions for a number of locations in Prince William Sound, also available through the Mobile geographics website. For this trip I printed out tide tables for two weeks for Whittier and Perry Island (never more than five minutes different). However, there are no tide stations in locations far up fiords like College and Harriman, and the charts carry no tidal diamonds or any other indication of tidal streams. There is a Pilot, which is a free download, but has very little information on tidal currents or tide times relative to major tidal stations, as you’d expect in the UK Pilots. In Harriman fiord, high and low tide seemed to be about when we expected, but the tidal stream in Barry Arm did not behave quite as we were predicting, so perhaps a bit more research is needed here.

Food

The US has supermarkets, and indeed, Outdoor stores (we used REI and Walmart in Anchorage), but a bit of advance menu planning and assurance that you will have a sufficiency or portable food is always an advantage. On this trip, we bought freeze-dried meals from Expedition Foods, which they shipped for us from the UK in advance, c/o Levi in Alaska. This worked very well, and saved a lot of last-minute shopping on arrival (which has tended to produce an inadequacy of calorie intake for us in the past). Like all freeze-dried, they are designed down to an acceptable-to-everyone taste which means bland. Standard meals are 800 Calories, which is a bit minimal. They do a selection of 1000 Calorie meals, but your choice is then quite limited. These come as “regular meal for two” or “Extreme energy” meals for one. I could comfortably have eaten two of these in an evening. In addition, it is essentially impossible to import beef-based food into the US, thus further restricting your choices. I ended up with seven “Chicken Korma with rice” for the ten days and only three other types. I had some Thai Green Curry which I expected to be hot, but weren’t – about two extra birds-eye chillies per meal would have been about right. In both cases, addition of a very large slug of chilli sauce brought them up to a tasteable level… I had planned on having a freeze-dried meal evenings and lunchtime, and cooking pancakes for breakfast, but this didn’t work that well, so I ended up with spaghetti carbonara, macaroni cheese, and at least two or three of the curries for breakfasts. Locally bought beef jerky and pepperoni sausage made up some of the shortfall, along with the components for GORP (Raisins, Peanuts and M&Ms) mostly eaten separately. For moderately long days in the outdoors, look at c 4000 Calories/day. If you are expecting cold and/or wet conditions (which we were, but after day 3 didn’t get), or using the long daylight to do high mileages, 5000 is not unreasonable. Most people can’t eat much more than this, even if they are using more calories. I guess I was up at 3500-4000 Calories/day, we didn’t have particularly long days, and I only lost a couple of kilos.

The team stuffing Calories in the rain at Ziegler Cove