North Sandy Bay cove is probably the best protected anchorage in Glacier Bay, with high rocky mountains on its east side and small attractive wooded islands to the south and west.

The safest entry is from the north although there is a narrower channel into the anchorage just to the south of Puffin Island. The official NOAA and Navionics charts do not contain sufficient soundings to allow this channel to be navigated with any confidence by deep draught vessels or yachts. However the crowd sourced Navionics sonar charts show a bar at either end of the channel with a charted depth of between 1.5 and 2.0m and we did see motor cruisers using the channel at half tide.

The pilot suggests the holding is fair to good in mud/sand although when anchoring in the SE corner of the cove we only found  poor holding over bare rock. The SW corner looked like it might offer better holding as the adjacent beaches were sandy/muddy but we couldn’t verify this as it was occupied by other boats at the time of our visit.