I was working in the Calaveras County Planning Department putting my Master’s in Geography as well as a Bachelor’s in Biology to good use but I decided I would like to try seasonal work. The first interesting offer was the US Forest Service for the Shipboard Naturalists on the Alaska ferries. I had never even heard of them but I was offered the job and it sounded like fun and I did it for three summers.

By the third summer it was clear that the dishwasher was making quite a lot more than I was and so I went to lifeboat school and got my seaman’s papers and joined the Inland Boatmen’s Union.

Well, working on the ferry was fun. It was tough, but it was fun. I really enjoyed doing the nature program for the Forest Service and I realized that the Ferry service needed to provide more information about the system and how to make the most of it. So many riders were just getting on at one end and going through to the other end and missing so many of the things they would have enjoyed if they’d stopped over. So, at the end of the second summer, I told the director of the ferry system that he and the division of tourisim ought to put out a little manual on how to make the most of the system. But the two agencies weren’t really talking to each other much in those days. That’s why I went home and wrote it. The first publisher who attempted to publish it went broke and so I got my manuscript back from the impound warehouse. The second publisher didn’t know how to market it, so I took up marketing it myself and that’s how Windham Bay Press started.

Around 400,000 people a year and 100,000 vehicles ride it. And this can include everything from the little league baseball games, trailer load of dogs and goats and horses going up to the Southeast Fair, frozen halibut and salmon from the cold storage plants up and down Southeast Alaska, whatever needs moving. Even the package mail goes on the ferries and a lot of the fresh groceries. In fact, in Alaska the ferries are considered part of the national highway system.

In the winter, the majority of them by far are locals, yet I noticed there were quite a few folks who would get on, particularly at Christmas, and ride the ferry for a week up to the end and back again, just enjoying the scenery and the quiet cruise and the un-crowded ship. In the summer, there is a high percentage of tourists. It’s the way that creative tourists can design their own trips. A lot of people bring their RVs, you get whole canoe expeditions or just a couple with a pair of kayaks getting on. You can launch a kayak within fifty yards of every dock in the system. And so people will get on with their kayaks and ride to some port and get off and paddle to the next port or just paddle a tour around the islands in that area and get back on the ferry. To give you an idea of how convoluted the coastline is, there’s one island, Prince of Wales Island, that has over a thousand miles of coastline.

The first thing is knowing what your reader needs to know and that I got the handle on working for the Forest Service based on the questions people asked and the things that seemed to confuse them. And in some cases, I use the actual words that seem to get through to people who are a little bit tired and on the go. Initially my object was that the book should be very easy to use on the go, and that hasn’t changed a whole lot. You should be able to get off when the ferry dropped you in Petersburg at one in the morning and find what you needed. So I worked with readable size print and tried to write as simply as possible and figure that people don’t want to carry an encyclopedia. I feel very responsible for every pound they’ve got to carry on their trip. By the way, did you know that all Alaska ferries are named for glaciers?

Yes! All the glaciers have names and it’s traditional for Alaska ferries to be named for glaciers with one exception. The Bartlett was named for a politician who was important in the early statehood of Alaska, but all the rest of the ferries are named for glaciers.

Around 90,000. The first one was published in 1978 and I basically I come out every year with an update.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com are major customers. I answer a lot of questions on AOL.

It’s a pretty little bay with nobody there to sue you for using the name, south of Juneau about 60 miles. Not getting sued was a consideration. There was somebody with a giveaway fish wrapper advertiser in my early days called Inside Passage and this guy came to me and offered to get an injunction to make me burn the whole printing. I might have called it something like Southeast Alaska but nobody down here knows where Southeast Alaska is nor do they care, but now Inside Passage, everybody knows that.

Windham Bay Press also puts out a couple of other books. We do the Costa Rica Traveler because I went to Costa Rica on vacation in 1982. At that point, I didn’t have enough seniority to work on the ferries in the winter. I had been working in coastal management in the winter. So I had time off and that was one of the reasons for working for the ferries, because I could get the time off, as much as I could afford to live without pay. So I went down there on vacation and I had a copy of the Alaska book with me. People looked at that and said, "We need something like that for here," because there weren’t any guide books for Costa Rica then, none at all.