A Sound Experience Puget Cruises Offer Whales, Islands And Ghosts

There is an island where visitors can arrange to adopt a killer whale.

There are quiet waterways with dozens of bald eagles and harbor seals to count.

There are ghost stories to hear at an old mansion where a pipe organ thunders into the night.

There are Victorian seaports to explore and salty shops for browsing.

And the Pacific Northwest’s tallest mountain is only a snowball’s throw away.

These are among the highlights of a new cruise from Seattle that roams Puget Sound, Washington state’s island-specked inland sea.

The eight-day cruises are aboard the 54-passenger Spirit of Discovery. Seattle-based Alaska Sightseeing/ Cruise West is the operator.

Ten departures are scheduled this year - one in March, four in April, one in September, and four in October. Fares begin at $895 a person.

Spirit of Discovery sails from freshwater Lake Union, in the heart of Seattle, through a busy ship canal and lock system to reach Puget Sound saltwater.

And then the itinerary goes like this:

Day 1 - a salmon bake and Northwest Indian cultural performance at Blake Island, within sight of downtown Seattle.

Day 2 - leisurely cruising around the islands of southern Puget Sound, a popular hideaway for the boating crowd.

Day 3 - a side trip by motorcoach to 14,411-foot Mount Rainier, highest peak of the Cascade Range. Depending on the season, passengers may stroll meadows bright with wildflowers or fresh snow at a visitor center called Paradise.

Day 4 - a day of cruising, plus a motorcoach tour to Hurricane Ridge, a lookout high in Washington’s Olympic Mountains.

Day 5 - the San Juan Islands, the jade archipelago that Capt. George Vancouver described as “the most lovely country that can be imagined.”

That’s the lyric the English explorer wrote in his log when he journeyed here in 1792.

Passengers go ashore at Friday Harbor, a snug anchorage packed hull-to-hull with pleasure craft and commercial fishing vessels. Friday Harbor town is on San Juan Island, second largest (by about one square mile) of the San Juans group.

The San Juans comprise about 600 islands and islets (the tally varies with high and low tides), with 172 having names.

Difficult to believe, but the United States and Britain almost went to war near Friday Harbor in 1859 when an American settler shot and killed a pig belonging to England’s Hudson’s Bay Co. Both nations dispatched troops to the area, and the island remained under joint military occupation for a dozen years.

Friday Harbor’s Whale Museum (at 62 First Street North) is the place to ask about “adopting” a killer whale.

Puget Sound is home to almost 100 killer whales (they call them orcas here) that travel and play in three family groups called pods.

Funds from “adoptions” help pay for research and education to protect the whales.

For $25, you get an adoption certificate inscribed with your name, the orca’s name and photo and the whale’s biography. (Details: The Whale Museum, P.O. Box 945, Friday Harbor, WA 98250).

From Friday Harbor, Spirit of Discovery moves to Orcas Island, largest of the San Juans.

Destination for the evening: Rosario Resort, once the grand mansion of Robert Moran, an early day Seattle shipbuilder.

Moran retired in 1906, after his physician warned that he could perish from heart disease. He retreated to Rosario - and lived until 1943, when he died at age 86.

“It was a clear case of executive stress,” says Christopher Peacock, Rosario’s historian and musical host.

Peacock presides evenings in Rosario’s Music Room, waltzing between a 1900 Steinway grand piano and Moran’s 1913 Aeolian 2,000-pipes organ.

Historical note: Moran used to preside at the organ keyboard - up in the balcony, out of sight of guests - for concerts. But he never hit a note. It was a player organ.

Later owners of Rosario included a woman Peacock describes as “a heller.”

Overnight guests still tell of seeing her ghost - wearing a flaming-red nightgown.

“I’ve never met the ghost, and I don’t want to,” Peacock says.

Day 6 - Port Townsend, the might-have-been “New York of the West.”

Back in the 1880s and ‘90s, Port Townsend was a brawling port, the center of Puget Sound shipping. Saloons, brothels and assorted other nefarious enterprises crowded Water Street, the main drag. Proper families built fine Victorian homes on a bluff above the harbor.

Also up on the bluff, towering over the town, is the former Customs House, a huge, sandstone building dating to 1893. Now it is the post office for Port Townsend, WA 98368 (pop. 7,000).

Port Townsend once had dreams of connecting to a major railroad out of Portland. Speculators framed Water Street with fancy buildings built of brick. Boomers laid 25 miles of track toward Portland.

But in 1904 came a telegram from the railroad that said, in effect: “Sorry folks, we’ve decided to go to Seattle instead.”

Downtown construction projects halted so suddenly that carpenters’ tools still are found in the upper stories of unfinished buildings. Half the population departed in the next year or so.

But Port Townsend prospers.

Tourism is the main industry today. Most of the Victorians have been converted to bed-and-breakfast inns.

“We’re doing just fine,” says Joyce Webb, a local tour guide.

Day 7 - a double-feature day: Morning in LaConner, an artists’ colony in the tulip-growing Skagit Valley; afternoon in Coupeville, a picturesque port on Whidbey Island.

Be in the LaConner area during the first three weeks of April for the annual Tulip Festival. The tulip industry is so successful that valley growers are exporting bulbs to Holland.

Tiny Coupeville (pop. 1,500) dozes in sheltered Penn Cove, on the east side of Puget Sound’s Whidbey Island.

Capt. Thomas Coupe and other mariners settled the area in the 1850s. They came for tall timber to ship around the world and a deepwater harbor for their vessels.

Coupeville’s Front Street, with its seaward half propped on pilings over the bay, is a motion-picture set waiting for a film crew.

Katie Zimmerman at Tartans and Tweeds sells a T-shirt that defines this cozy, off-the-wall town: “Where in Heaven is Coupeville?”

Passengers go by motorcoach to Fort Casey, five miles south of Coupeville for a glimpse of Puget Sound’s military past. The long-closed fort was one of three early day coast artillery posts that guarded the entrance to Puget Sound.

Now Fort Casey is a state park. Old cannons still point across the sound. And there is a retired maritime sentinel there - Admiralty Head Lighthouse - that is open for touring.

Fort Casey’s guns never boomed in anger. But local farmers used to complain that practice firings caused their anxious cattle to suffer constipation.

Day 8 - Breakfast aboard Spirit of Discovery, and home to Seattle’s Lake Union.

Crew members are ready with transportation to hotels and the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

“It’s a smooth operation,” say Ted and Rosie Goff, passengers from Chula Vista, Calif.

“We prefer small ships,” Goff says. “The high life for us doesn’t include fancy shows and gambling. We prefer spotting orcas and listening to Indian love stories.”

MEMO: Additional information: Alaska Sightseeing/Cruise West, Fourth and Battery Building, Suite 700, Seattle, WA 98121. Phone 800-426-7702 or 206-441-8687.