Midnight, July 9th. For three hours the incoming tidal currents have been hurling icebergs at our anchored 34-foot cruiser. Armed only with a now-bent telescoping boat hook, we have been fending off the larger bergs, some almost as long as our boat. The bergs bear down on us with some force, carried along by two-knot currents.

The night's darkness has surrounded us for the past hour. We peer out of our semi-steamed cabin windows trying to spot the approaching white blobs. As one or more seem to be heading our way, the action moves to the foredeck, where one of us holds a quad-beam spotlight, the other, braced against the freeboard, tries to register a telling push on the berg at the precise moment when it is almost upon us, but has not yet hit our fragile fiberglass hull. The trick is to go with the berg's momentum, merely altering its course slightly, hoping not to hear another frightening bump and grind, as it moves along the length of our boat. Hoping, too, that the next berg will not prove to be too large and too intent upon crushing our bow.

There are no other boats within miles of us and radio contact is impossible because of the fjord's topography at our location. Without warning and almost instantaneously, a low-bank of fog moves in upon us, rendering our spotlight almost useless.

We move our watch to the deck, standing in the drenching rain, trying to make out the enemy missiles through the mist. The night is silent, except for the roar of a waterfall cascading down the sheer rock wall about 50 yards off our port bow, and a second more distant roar from the unseen rapids to our starboard. We flick on our spotlight to see if the fog is lifting, or moving, to permit us a better view. Without our noticing, the rain has turned to snow, the flakes reflecting in our light's beam.

How did we come to be in this adventure? Exactly where were we and why did we take on these unlikely boating odds?

Our location is Ford's Terror, Alaska, an inlet off Endicott Arm, approximately 11 cruising hours out of Juneau, and part of our month's cruise to circumnavigate Admiralty Island. A few days before, we had picked The Terror as one of our "must see" places on our Alaska cruise.

On the morning of the day that our adventure began, we lay at anchor in an unnamed bight, inside the entrance to Holkam Bay, at the mouth of Tracy Arm. A friendly charter boat captain, with whom we talked on the radio, suggested that we make our way through the ice flow in Endicott Arm and enter the outer waters leading to The Terror during the afternoon of the day before our planned passage through the rapids. He had seen a sailboat anchored in this spot, across from the rapids, and, although he had not tried it himself, assumed that it would be a likely spot for us to spend the night.

From that location, he suggested, we could observe the behavior of the rapids and time our entry for the exact moment of high-water-slack, which occurs about 10-25 minutes after high-water-slack at Juneau. With that in mind, we delicately picked our way through some three miles of floating icebergs in Endicott Arm. At the time we turned off into this "inlet" leading to Ford's Terror, there were virtually no icebergs in the inlet. We neared the proposed anchorage site and noted a shoal to port, and heavy, thick kelp waving in the water below us. We took depth soundings and set the anchor in the only place possible, between the shoal and the steep rock wall.

It was with the incoming tide that we later noticed the icebergs moving toward us. Ford's Terror was named for H.R. Ford, who, in 1889, entered the sheer-cliffed chasm in a rowboat to go duck hunting. Upon his return trip down the waterway, he arrived at the narrows without suspecting that they might not be as calm as they were when he entered. His battle with the surging rapids, whirlpools, grinding icebergs, and the raging torrents left him so frightened that his crew appropriately named the fjord. Actually, currents reach 15 knots, with a large overfall at spring tides becuase of the very shallow and narrow constriction.

But getting back to our adventure, which took place 95 years after Mr. Ford's "terror", the fog began to move about in our niche. Perhaps because of the shape of the narrow gorge, the wind would whip the fog about us, sometimes lifting several feet above us or moving to one side of our boat or the other. We waited expectantly for the tide change. "At the least", we surmised, "the new bergs would stop assaulting us. How would the ebb currents flow in the niche?", we wondered. "What would be the effect of the current from the waterfall in the ebb tide, and of the reversal of the rapids? Where would our boat swing? How would the bergs, now staging at the head of the niche, pass by us on their return to Endicott Arm?"

During the next three hours we stood watch in the cabin and on the bow. The bergs paraded past us, mostly to port or starboard, but a few needing fending off, as they came at us head-on. Occasionally one would side-swipe our hull, with a grinding thud. Probably little damage was done, but it sounded terrible in the cabin, in the middle of the night.

In our sleepy stupor, we started naming them as they passed by. There was The Island, a flat oval expanse, about 12 feet wide and 20 feet long, with a volcanic-looking mountain on one end.
It crackled as the ice on it fissioned in the changing temperatures. Another, the Parade Float was complete with extended platforms cantilevered above the water on either side, where we imagined a Rose Parade Princesses would ride, flanking the Rose Queen, who would be perched upon the tall pedestal which rose in the center of this 25-foot-long extravaganza. There were all sorts of bird shapes for the Audubon Society to identify and log in their diaries, ranging from overgrown sparrows to one about the size and shape of the San Diego Chicken. There were flowers, bears, weird looking people, submarines, several torpedoes, and one resembling a battleship so large that we could never have fended it off, if its captain (and surely a ship of that size would have a captain) had chosen to aim his vessel at us. At our close range, we could see that the ship kept its large guns pointed at us as it passed by. As for me, I stood at full dress salute, as best I could in my pajama shorts and heavy jacket. I thought it best not to take chances with a vessel that looked as if it might be carrying an Admiral or even the Commander-In-Chief of the enemy forces.

"Rejoice, they are leaving us", I said. "Thank God", responded my sleepy mate. "Hello there, here's one I haven't seen before", I exclaimed. "Who let you in the parade, old fellow? You're not on the program."

Just when we thought it was over, the ebb currents, combined with the flow from the rapids and the waterfall, reversed at our location, forming a kind of whirlpool action. The bergs, which had passed by us the second time on what we had hoped was their way out to Endicott Arm, started back toward us again. In fact, the currents were so strange and mixed that, for about an hour, the icebergs seemed to dance in the now
turbulent ebb flow, moving in a chorus line, along our starboard side to the niche's head, and back out along our port side and around our stern.

Our boat kept turning on the anchor, making a menacing arc of about 90-degrees, approaching the ice flow first on one side and then on the other. I found that I had to move quickly from bow to stern, port to starboard, to fend off first this berg, then that berg. I must have presented quite a sight. There I was out on the deck wearing my pajama shorts, socks, boat shoes, and boat jacket, and carrying the slippery aluminum boat hook. I must have resembled an absurd knight with his sword, fending off icebergs in the July rain mixed with snow. I likened myself to Don Quixote, on one of his adventures.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the water stopped lapping at us, and the bergs marched slowly off to the head of the bay. The snow turned to hard rain. The fog settled back down on the water so that we could see only a few feet in any direction. We turned on the radar in an attempt to catch blips of the moving white ghosts. There they were, but they were strangely still on the screen, assembling themselves, like floats following a parade.

"They've probably gone up there to plan their next attack," I speculated. But they did not return. I persuaded my mate to lie down while I took the watch. About an hour later, as dawn was arriving, the fog lifted and I could see that the currents had pushed the bergs onto the drying shoals at the head of the niche. They were stuck! Knowing, from our experience at entry into the inlet, that the new icebergs would not enter the inlet until after half flood tide, I joined my sleeping mate, thinking of the trapped, melting icebergs. "Serves them right," I thought. "After all, they did go to the head of the bay to plan their next attack. They forgot the adage that ice marks the reefs on a descending tide. They got caught in their own plot!" Obviously, I was so tired I was not thinking straight.

We slept until half-tide the next morning when we awoke to see the melting remains of the night's armada and the approaching new fleets of bergs already moving toward us from the head of the inlet. One looked to be about the size of a semi-truck. It was still breaking into smaller bergs, as it turned and moved slowly into our inlet. But we had had enough. We pulled anchor and enjoyed the ability to drift among the bergs with our full maneuvering capability, rather than having to wait helplessly at anchor.

At high slack water we moved easily through the narrows and into the spectacular inner reaches of Ford's Terror. We left the icebergs behind, as we cruised slowly along, impressed with the majesty of the sheer granite walls and the dozens of waterfalls cascading around us. The rain was misty now and the emerald green water lapped gently as our wake hit the rock walls.

After exploring the right arm leading to Brown Glacier, a receding glacier with no ice calving,
we anchored at the head of the northwest finger of Ford's Terror. Here, a large waterfall formed the backdrop near a meadow-like beach and shoal area. Because of the depths, it was necessary to take careful soundings and to anchor on the shelf just off the beach. The flow of the waterfall kept our bow pointed toward it and we had no anchoring
concerns at this location. The rain continued to fall as we relaxed and watched a black bear frolic in the thick grasses along the beach. Another waterfall threaded its way down the sheer wall. It was visible through our dinette window. We concluded that we had found that spot some call Heaven. We stayed two nights, resting from our iceberg ordeal and enjoying the peaceful serenity of this lovely, extremely isolated location, where even VHF radio is useless to contact the world outside. We saw no other boats or people until we returned to Endicott Arm.

A cruise to Ford's Terror is definitely recommended, but overnight anchorage in the niche short of the narrows is not. Our annual guidebook has complete directions for this voyage. For adventurers who do not have a boat, there are several tour boats that make this run from Juneau. It makes a wonderful trip with a side-tour up Tracy Arm and a stop-over in the small niche in Holkham Bay for fresh crab.