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Alaska Up Close
 

Alaska is a place that overwhelms the senses. Emerald-blue glaciers glow in the northern light. Waterfalls tumble down black cliffs into seas alive with seals and otters. Eagles wheel above fishing boats, and whales rise through glassy water with a sound that echoes for miles. To encounter it all, you need to leave behind the casinos and crowded decks of the cruise liners and travel where they cannot go.

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That’s where the Home Shore carries you. Once a working seiner, the 62-foot wooden vessel has been refitted by Captain Jim Kyle and his son Ben for small-group travel—just six guests at a time. On her decks, Alaska feels close, immediate, and deeply personal.

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Your journey begins in Sitka, where spruce-scented air mingles with the tang of salt and diesel from the fishing fleet. Unlike ports built for tourists, Sitka remains independent, tied to the rhythms of tides and boats. From here, the Home Shore sails north into a maze of fjords, passages, and quiet anchorages. Each day brings new revelations:

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• On the Water – The horizon stretches wide—snow peaks fading into mist, sunlight playing on the sea. Meals are as memorable as the views: salmon grilled on deck, vegetables sautéed in the galley, pies warm from the oven. Evenings end with stories in the cozy salon or stargazing under skies untouched by city lights.
   

• Glaciers and Ice Fields – In Tracy Arm, the Home Shore threads carefully through a scattered field of ice, each chunk glowing blue from centuries of compression. The stillness is immense until the glacier cracks and calves—thousands of tons of ice collapsing into the sea with a roar like thunder. From a kayak, even a modest iceberg looms like a frozen cathedral, reflecting light in shades of sapphire and jade.
   

• On Shore – The skiff carries you to places unreachable by larger vessels. At White Sulphur Hot Springs, a mossy trail leads to steaming pools perched above pounding surf, where you soak with a view of snowcapped peaks. Elsewhere, an abandoned mining camp stands silent in the forest—cabins leaning into moss, rusting machinery half-swallowed by the earth, reminders of lives once drawn north by promise and hardship.
   

• Wildlife Encounters – Whales rise so close you hear the hollow rush of their breath. They slap their tails to corral fish, then surge upward, mouths open to engulf their prey. Harbor seals lounge on ice floes, sea otters roll and groom in kelp beds, and bald eagles perch like sentries on bleached driftwood shores.
   

And then there are the small coastal towns. Pelican, built on pilings above tidal flats, connects its homes and shops by a weathered boardwalk. Here, the community lives by the salmon catch, the tide, and the will to carve out a life where wilderness begins at the doorstep.
 

What makes this voyage different is freedom. Cruise liners keep to timetables; the Home Shore follows opportunity. A sudden break in the clouds, a pod of whales, a fiery midnight sunset—the captain adjusts course so guests can linger, watch, and absorb. Every day becomes its own discovery, shaped by Alaska itself.
 

To travel aboard the Home Shore is to experience Alaska not as a backdrop but as a living presence—wild, vast, intimate, and unforgettable. It is an adventure of landscapes and light, of quiet coves and roaring glaciers, of people and places that stay with you long after the voyage ends.

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