Photo: Whale Pass Community Library.

As we threaded our way through a field of small islands, each topped with spruce and fringed with bright green marsh grass, I looked for signs of the nearby town of Whale Pass. Nothing: no house, no skiff, no person to be seen. Was the town really there, I wondered?

We had left Meyers Chuck on the east side of Clarence Strait that morning, heading for the town of Whale Pass. “There are only two towns in SE Alaska that we haven’t been to,” Steve had reminded me as he laid out the charts the night before. “Whale Pass is one, we might as well go there. It’s only about thirty miles. And we can visit the second, Edna Bay, on the west side of Prince of Wales, on our way south.”

The thirty miles distance had stretched to more than fifty miles traveled as we tacked against a northwest wind. We turned into Kashevarof Passage and then into the winding island-studded Whale Passage itself. We turned a corner and a sprinkling of houses finally became visible along the shore. We passed a row of small cottages and a building with a sign, “Ruffit General Store,” and came to the end of the inlet. The small public dock was full, so we anchored off, noting that the 3.6 fathom water depth gave us just barely enough when the tide went down that night.

From our anchorage we could see a boat launching ramp, a parking lot, a warehouse, an outhouse and a small red building -- but not much else. No houses were nearby although a few could be seen up in the hills. Steve looked through the binoculars and pointed to the red building, “It’s the community library. The door is open. I can see the books.”

We didn’t go ashore that evening; it was late and I wanted to get started making dinner. But the next morning, we took the dinghy to the dock. All was quiet -- the library closed. The warehouse, we discovered, was a volunteer fire department. From the grass and weeds growing in front of it, it has been awhile since the trucks had moved. Attached to the fire house was a small lean to with a conference table that we could see through the window.

We walked along the road towards the head of the inlet, passing a row of parked trucks, boat trailers and boats, all surrounded by grass. I stopped in front of a C-Dory powerboat. Its moss-encrusted cabin and hull told me it hadn’t been used in years. C-Dories are expensive boats. I wondered what had happened to the owner. Steve read the date on the license plate of a truck: 1973. The registration of one of the boats read 1995.

Turning back, we took a side road that followed the waterfront road inland. We passed what looked like a schoolhouse but like the boats and trucks it was surrounded by weeds.

The Prince of Wales Island 2011 Visitors Guide notes that the area has been the site of logging camps since 1964. The last camp moved out in the 1980s and the area has been permanently settled through state land disposal sales. Whale Pass is unincorporated but does have a community association.

Back at the dock, a man and dog were getting out of a car. The man stopped to talk. He lived in a cabin up the way, “just a small one,” he told us. And he was on his way to catch a couple of silver salmon. They had just started running in the nearby stream.

We returned to Osprey and motored out the Passage, heading north. Whale Pass wasn’t a real town, but it was a place where people came to fish and live in the wilderness.

“Do you still want to visit Edna Bay on the way south?” I asked Steve.

“If we’re going by, we might as well, “he answered. “But we don’t have to go out of our way.”