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Most people would drive a 27-foot Grady-White to the local ramp. This Florida couple takes theirs across the continent to one of the coolest boating locations on earth.
By Nancy and Bill Shaddix
as told to Rachel Dickinson — Fall
2004
This is the fourth time we’ve been to Alaska with our own boat. People might think we’re a couple of crazy Floridians, but we do it this way because we enjoy using our own equipment. Plus, we find there’s more time to visit when we’re driving rather than flying. We actually put about 30,000 miles on our truck each year.
There are some long driving days—a couple of 600-mile ones—but we have a great deal of confidence in our Ford Excursion. It’s not enough to have a vehicle capable of towing a 7,500-pound boat; you have to make sure it has a long wheelbase that will afford you extra stability. You need to know how well the vehicle is going to perform when towing all that weight through the Canadian Rockies. Our Grady-White 270 has an 8-foot, 6-inch beam. Any wider and we would have had to apply for permits from each state in order to transport her.
Two other boats joined us along the way. We spent eight
days crossing the country—ten would have been better—and looked
for hotels with restaurants because once our rigs were parked, we didn’t
want to move them. When accommodations were scarce, we slept in the boat
cabin while parked in a campground.
After a spectacular drive through the Canadian Rockies, we reached Prince Rupert, British Columbia, where we’d reserved storage space for our vehicle for the seven weeks we planned to cruise Alaska’s Inside Passage. Our home became our Grady, which has a sleeping berth and a small, enclosed head. We removed the refrigerator to create more stowage areas and now use ice chests to keep food cold. All of the cooking, eating, living, and bathing is done in the aft portion of the boat, which can be enclosed with canvas. It can get a bit nippy, but we’ve figured out that heating the water on the portable stove in the enclosed space will keep it nice and toasty. We always sleep aboard, but we take most meals on shore to get a taste of the local food.
>> Next page >> Part 2: The pristine landscape and relative solitude always make us feel like we’re in God’s great cathedral. Page
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