From the deck of the Heron, Julie Hursey and Jackie watched as a pod of orca toyed with a harbor seal in the distance. The seal spotted the boat and swam toward it in a desperate attempt to reach cover under it.  It was a body length away when, without warning, an orca exploded out of the depths and devoured the hapless creature in a single bite. 

Julie watched as Jackie hesitated, then turned to look at her, her face struck with horror and wonder. A young city girl from California, Jackie was exploring the Inside Passage with her family onboard Julie and Scott’s boat.  “I don’t think I like Free Willy anymore,” she said.

While that experience of nature in the raw may have been the highlight of Jackie’s trip, Julie stresses that, although breathtaking, such extraordinary moments do not encapsulate all the reasons she and her husband love Southeast Alaska.  “You have to live here a long time to accumulate those experiences,” she says. Living in Alaska “is like a long-term relationship.  It’s not about the peak moments; it’s the hours you spend that knit you together.”

Julie and Scott have put in those hours.  As co-owners of Alaska Passages, a charter business that offers custom trips out of Petersburg on the Heron, the couple has spent years exploring the remote coves and inlets of Admiralty Island, Frederick Sound, and Port Houghton.  With groups of five or six people, often families, they kayak, fish, listen to whales, photograph bears, bald eagles, and sea lions, and hike under the moss-clad limbs of the rainforest’s ancient spruce.
 
Guests routinely leave the Hurseys’ boat with a heightened awareness of the Tongass National Forest and its relative lack of protection.  “A lot of the people that I take out have an idea that a national forest is a national park,” Scott says, noting that national parks are protected from resource extraction, while national forests are not.  “They’re surprised that any logging goes on at all.”  Scott and Julie also highlight the natural history and wildlife of Southeast Alaska and make a special effort to get their younger clients excited about nature.  "We try to focus on families and on educating kids,” he says.  “We try to get them out into the Tongass and onto the beach so we can show them tide pools and get them on some hikes.”
 
Many of the Hurseys’ clients discover that the wilderness of the Inside Passage evokes emotions that do not often surface elsewhere.  For one man, it was the howl of a wolf near a remote salt lagoon in Port Houghton.  For another woman, it was a pod of orcas swimming off the bow of the Heron—a sight that made her burst into tears.  Julie believes these reactions are related to “the experience of being alone – of going to a beach where there are no footprints, of hearing a wolf when you’re sitting on the beach and knowing no one else is around for miles, of watching a huge iceberg fall off the side of a glacier.  Even the quality of light as it changes across the landscape gives me a real sense of peace.”

When the Hurseys crave solitude, they often motor into Port Houghton.  “It’s a long bay that starts out as fairly gentle country,” Scott says, “but as you get farther back in, the mountains get bigger and bigger.”  He and Julie take groups there to shelter from inclement weather, to fish, and to watch whales.  If they are lucky, they’ll see a pod of five or six humpback whales bubblenet feeding.  One whale dives under a school of herring and blows a ring of bubbles around the fish.  As the bubbles rise, the herring become confused and cluster.  The fish will not swim through the “net” of bubbles, enabling the whales to chase them to the surface and, mouths agape, scoop up hundreds of panicked herring.  “The whales talk to each other to get the thing set up,” says Scott, who often listens to them underwater on the Heron’s hydrophone.

There are times when Scott and Julie slip into Port Houghton alone.  On spring days, the meadows erupt with shooting stars, buttercups, and chocolate lilies, and the forest is cloaked in a fog of yellow spruce pollen.  “It’s wonderful seeing the forest renew itself,” says Julie, “and feeling at home in such a wild and beautiful place.”