So you think you know where you are headed? - Rated 
This is a beautiful, and sombre story, told by one the finest writers of English prose. If you have no interest in travel writing, could not care less for fulsome travel brochure descriptions of scenery or city, find patronising anecdotes of quaint and quirky locals and their customs annoying then this is the type of travel writing that you may want to read.
Mr Raban sets off from Seattle with the intention of sailing his yatch single handed to Juneau in Alkaska by a route known as the Inside Passage. A serpentine journey round islands,and reefs. There are tricky, dangerous tidal races, half submerged logs,and sudden violent squalls to be avoided. It is a daunting journey for a middle aged man, who readily admits to being a timid, and nervous sailor. He is out of his depth, and he knows it. Hence the description of the actual sailing is one of constant watchfulness, and anxiety. Hazards real and fanciful keep him in a state of permanent neurosis, constantly looking for a sheltered anchorage where he can ride out the storm or calm his nerves.
Mr Raban has taken a keen interest in the history of the native Americans who live on the west coast of America, and his opinions of their culture and development are scholarly, and humane. He is amused by the contemporary view of the Indians as proto-enviromentalists at one with nature, when they patently were not. Also he has taken a keen interest in the activities of the first European explorers and settlers of the region and makes constant references to the voyage of Captain Vancouver along the same route as his own in 1797.
But the real interest and drama lie not in the voyage or the history but with the author. As the voyage progresses Mr Raban emerges as the real story, not merely it's narrator. What we find is a man beset by worry and fretfulness, excited by his adventure but self reproachful for leaving his infant daughter and wife behind. The journey is brought to a jarring halt by the news of his father's illness, then death, and finally by a dreadful personal disaster that lands like a blow upon a bruise which sends him listing forlonly back to Seattle.
This is a story with a simple message, told against a seascape. You can chose your destination, plot your course, and steer as cautiously as you can, but it may do you no good. Unpredictable, and willful forces beset your voyage and you can never be sure where you will make landfall, or worse you may simply disappear beneath the foam.
Mr Raban writes simple,lucid and subtle storytelling at its very best. If you read this book I think you will come from it feeling as if you too have been on a long voyage, and returned to a place you thought you knew well, but are now less sure.
Wonderful account - Rated
of Jonathan's passage on his own boat between Seattle and Alaska. I love the way he interweaves his voyage with maritime history and his own personal reminisces. Sadly, he makes this trip at a time when his marriage is breaking up, and the accounts from this understated Englishman living in Seattle are all the more poignant for that. A classic.
A journey of the soul - Rated
Raban takes the reader along with him on his 35-foot sailboat - described as his 'narrative vehicle' - as he single-handedly traverses the entire 1,000 miles of the Inside Passage from Seattle, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska. On the voyage, Raban reflects on the history and character of the territory he is sailing through, the art of navigation and what the journey will ultimately mean for him as he describes the breakup of his marriage in the final two chapters. As Raban himself says:
"I knew from the beginning it was going to be a book about turbulence. I wanted to use that Indian sense of navigation of a boat as metaphor for the navigation of a soul through life. I then had granted to me two pieces of extreme turbulence in my own life which I could not have possibly predicted. I found plenty of turbulence to write about, the equivalent of two major hurricanes coming a month apart."
As the author makes his preperations for the voyage in the Fitting Out chapter, he mentions he is following in the salmon gill-netters' route, 'not to fish ... but to lay some ghosts to rest and come to terms, somehow, with the peculiar attraction that draws people to put themselves afloat on the deep, dark, indifferent, cold, and frightening sea. .. For the term of a fishing season, I meant to meditate on the sea, at sea.' He is also following in the footsteps of the short, rotund, balding, bug-eyed and highly temperamental Captain Vancouver whose ships, the Discovery and Chatham, sailed the Inside Passage on a surveying expedition of 1791-5, later described in Captain Van's four-volumed account the Voyage.
As he sails along his route, Raban also devotes a large part of his story to the canoe-Indians and their relationship with the sea - the Kathlamet, Kwakiutl, Salishan, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian - interspersing his narrative with stories gleaned from Franz Boas' monumental collection of their tales. To a certain extent, the story is about the loss of their language, traditions and culture after the arrival of the white man, and the 'prettification' of the wild landscape for the benefit of the large cruise ship and their hordes of 'lice-like' passsengers who swarm over every port of call.
Interwoven into the travelogue are accounts of the two personal crises which grip Raban on his voyage. The first is the terminal illness of his father, Peter, described in the Rites of Passage section. Raban returns to England, like a foreign visitor, for a rather uncomfortable reunion with his family and, above all, his father with whom it seems he has had a troubled relationship. He attempts to reach out to him in his illness but it is difficult for them both to bridge the emotional divide that seperates them. Raban gives his reader a highly personal - although at the same time dispassionate - account of the period leading up to his father's death and his father's response to it: 'Sometimes I saw the fear in his eyes, but it would be gone in a flash; he was boxing it away from public view, as a good priest must.'
The second crisis is the breakdown of his marrige to Jean, a dance reviewer for The Seattle Times and twenty years younger than himself. Having read the book once before, I looked out more closely for the indicators of this the second time round. In Ketchikan, Raban makes a call to his wife and is bouyed up by the news that she has booked flight tickets to Juneau. In Meyers Creek, he starts to indulge in a happy mental shopping list of things he will buy for his wife and daugther, Julia - candied ginger (his father's favourite) for the seasick, Beanie Babies, matzohs, Travel Scrabble, M&Ms and herbal tea. Whilst sailing up the Gastineau Channel, the approach road to Juneau, he thinks five more days until their arrival.
However, he is troubled by Jean's sharp and irritable manner and finds her mood hard to fathom until she reveals, on an innocent outing to a playground near an old deserted goldmine, that she wants a seperation - 'To forge a new indentity,' in her own words. Thirty-six upspeakable hours later, Raban drives his wife (now the tungsten hard-eyed Ms Takimoto) and daughter to the airport before taking the boat back south to Seattle to complete his trip.
In the last section, Komogwa, the whole tone of the book changes as he tries to submerge his grief in his reading of Evelyn Waugh, William Cowper and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Waugh provides some consolation through the transformation his own disastrous first marriage into triumphant, grave comedy in A Handful of Dust. Raban also copies a quotation into his logbook; 'Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.' Loss is a strong theme in the narrative and Raban himself describes the themes of this beautifully crafted travelogue in his own inimitable, self-deprecating fashion:
"This book, like two or three others of mine, is really an attempt to write a kind of nonfiction novel. The grist of the material is factual - a narrative with people whose names you can look up in the phone book or who have historically verifiable existences - but it's fiction in the sense that it's heavily patterned and plotted; it's structured like a novel. There's a reason why it opens with a lummox on the first page, the fool on the dock. The whole book is about somebody who turns out to be a lummox, himself. It's the story of a traveling fool."
However, neither he nor his reader is fooled by the depth of his heartbreak as his solitary, highly courageous adventure finally ends at Marine Seattle and his moorings on Ewing Street in sight of his house on the hill, ready to face the troubled waters that lie ahead.
Alone at Sea - Rated 
A voyage into the myths, history and legends of the Northwest coast of Canada and Alaska, the reviews on the dust-jacket also promised that this was a voyage of self-discovery and a discourse on the nature of loss. Well, yes and no. There is no doubt that you'll leave this book with more than a passing acquaintance with the lives and times of both the American Indians and British explorers of earlier centuries, and you also leave it with more than a window into Raban's own life. Unfortunately, I found both subjects to be somewhat dull and uninspiring, like the scenery and sea that Raban passes through on his voyage.
This is a solitary account, and the biggest disappointment in the book is that Raban hardly meets anyone upon the trip. Things tended to brighten up slightly when he does, and I found myself skipping pages to passages where he actually interacts with fellow human beings of this time and place instead of past ones. The outstanding chapter of the book concentrates upon his return to England to deal with his father's death and funeral. Surrounded by family, friends and memories, Raban becomes a warmer, fuller person than he ever does upon his boat, where he relies heavily on other people's recollections and histories to pad out his own.
As Raban often admits, non-sailors can find endless accounts of eddies, tides, squalls and whirlpools somewhat less than gripping, but you don't encounter much else alone on a boat! As the trip progresses, the author becomes increasingly remote and somewhat alienated from the people inhabiting the coast, and the book is poorer for it. It seemed to me that company would do him good, and the book is certainly better when he finds it.
The isolation continues as Raban attempts to call home to his wife and daughter from disconnected telephone networks in depopulated and broken down village ports, or fails to have his call answered when he does get through. You can sense there's a storm rising as he nears his final destination, and the ending doesn't disappoint in this sense.
I finished the book with the notion that Jonathan Raban's next excursion needs to be a sail 'round the Greek Islands, dropping in frequently upon Club 18 - 30 drunken orgies. It would do him, and his readers, a power of good and put this rather morose meditation well behind him.
'Passage to Juneau, is a bleak but often humourous log. - Rated
Leaving Seattle on All Fool's Day 1993 Raban, a latecomer to sailing, sets out to explore the tortuous eccentricities of The Inside Passage north to Juneau in Alaska.He goes 'fishing for reflections.'As in the myths and legends of the Native Americans he studies and interprets Raban finds that when one leaves the apparent sureties of home and community strange and inxeplicable events can occur.Like the hero in some contemporary Greek tragedy signs and omens oppress him, illusion and self-delusion shadow him.Ghosts track him;the original tribes,the moody,bellicose English explorer Captain Vancouver with his recalcitrant crew,fur traders,gold diggers,timbermen, tourists.All leave their tracks but as time passes nature returns and silently covers their trails.Is this a pattern in the apparently all enveloping chaos?
Raban has a sardonic,renaissance mind but also the necessary authorial skills required to make this a stylistic and narrative tour de force.
Passage to Juneau is a personal log, a bleak but often humourous saga in which Raban charts and interprets his inner seascapes and attempts to pilot himself safely through the treacherous tides and shifting currents on which he sails.This is a masterpiece which goes on my shelf next to Peter Matthiessen's, 'The Snow Leopard', and Bruce Chatwin's,'In Patagonia'.
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