Sitka: Can you hear me now?

By boat, Sitka is pretty darn far out there – for us anyway.

To reach Sitka without exposing ourselves to big open ocean, there are a series of narrow and breath-taking passages that wind through, past, and by places like Murder Cove, Peril Strait, Poison Cove, Sergius Narrows, and The Eye Opener (a lone rock, mid straits)…foreboding place names for sure. Navigational charts, current/tide planning, and mariner savvy a must but what a reward for the efforts! The approach to Sitka is a visual feast and the town itself worthy of the journey. 

Natural beauty we expected. What was unexpected was (good) discovering two especially delicious dining options and (bad) scrambling to shore up the tenuous wireless internet realities out in Sitka. We anticipated being in the deep wilds in transit to Sitka, without access to our usual connectivity addictions, but trusted Sitka would offer a chance to plug back in. Turns out, only kinda.

First for the good. And I mean really good. On a fine Tuesday evening, we booked a reservation at a place recommended to us by several friends and locals: Ludvig’s Bistro.

I was grateful to be heading off the main street for supper and out of the range of the cruise-ship tourist spots. Later I learned how lucky we were to even have scored a same-day reservation at all. The dining space at Ludvig’s is intimate and, during the course of our early dinner, several groups of would-be diners were turned away (well, technically turned upstairs – to the quaint, reservation-free pub above the dining space). Our meal was melt-in-your-mouth amazing. After a round of tapas and uncorking a nice bottle of Spanish Rioja Reserva, I savored delicate local-mushroom-sauced Misty Isles beef tenderloin from Vashon Island (spitting distance from our home ironically), nestled among sweet bites of root veg. Matt had the freshest of fish in an herbal, to-die-for sauce. The color and ambiance of this cozy dining space seemed to somehow enhance the taste of our meals even more. We finished with a traditional creme brulee to cap a perfect evening.

The following day, Matt discovered a sweet lunch spot, Beak, with a prevailing octopus theme and a Pickathon feel.

The barley soup hit the mark for satisfying comfort food. Reindeer-based dishes pepper the menu and the halibut burger was light and fresh. A unique aspect to this creative cafe is their no tip policy. And they’re serious about that. It’s not a test of your character or baseline generosity, like No Tips but wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more-say-no-more, go ahead anyway for those who recognize high-quality food and skillful, genuine service. Beak is matter of fact about service already built into the menu prices – all very reasonable for such deliciousness. We weren’t in Sitka very long yet were drawn back to Beak and Lugvig’s more than once.

Now for the bad. There is something amiss with the wireless waves in Sitka. We had some foreshadowing about this from fellow cruisers just a week or two in advance of our arrival to Eliason Harbor: the internet is as slow as molasses out in Sitka, we were told. I shrugged it off. I had no clue what the internet capacities were for these other boats but I felt pretty sassy about the reliability of our multilevel options aboard Awesome based on our remote harbor experiences thus far (see our Cellular Experience page). Plus, Sitka is another SE Alaskan town that ebbs and floods with cruise ship passengers, so it was easy to assume that any internet constrictions were likely correlated with the few hours that thousands of tourists thronged the downtown core. I wasn’t worried…turns out, our fellow cruisers were right. Unlike other anchorages where a weak internal signal looks like a couple bars of intermittent 4G, here my Apple iPhone X on AT&T and Matt’s Samsung Android-Something-or-Other phone on T-Mobile each indicated a solid, steady 5 bars of LTE as soon as we entered the harbor, but this was a sham.

Five bars and LTE had always been a golden cruising situation before now – a sure sign of being just as securely connected as standing under the Space Needle in downtown Seattle or washing down tacos with a Mack n Jacks at Top of Tacoma. Not this time. Even with unlimited data, nowhere near a throttle limit, our signals could barely manage a single photo upload, only a MB or two in size, attempted on multiple different occasions throughout the weekend and beginning of the work week. I spent more time watching slider bars, spinning wheels, and hour glasses on my screen than composing. With important client calls closing in later in the week, I booked a hotel room at the Totem Square Hotel, a short walk from the boat, for the office-like quiet and the high-speed landline internet (infinitely better than wireless in the area). I’m glad I did, as it cured my internet woes immediately. And as a super double bonus, we each took a long, hot shower without having to monitor a water tank level or manage a sump pump. Win-win for this round. But next time, if planning a cruise to Sitka through the perilous wilds without cell signal, I better plan to just stay off the grid and enjoy the disconnect.