The NW Chicagof Coast between Lisianski Strait and the Khaz Peninsula offers some wonderful, secluded, wild cruising and splendid sheltered anchorages, along with a sheltered inland passage for some of the way.

However it is not an easy place to cruise. Unlike navigating the once glaciated waterways of the Inside Passage, where the dictum "if you can't see it, there is isn't anything there" can almost universally be applied, navigating this stretch of coast requires a change of mind set.

Littered with thousands of off lying rocks and skerries, some of which extend as far as 5 miles offshore and with the inner leads similarly encumbered, it is much more akin to navigating through the rock strewn skerries of Norway with one exception - the latter are generally well marked but this part of the Chicagof coast is effectively completely unmarked.

Furthermore the area is poorly charted compared to other parts of SE Alaska, where the volume of fishing activity and more recently, cruise ship traffic, have provided an imperative for making the main routes extremely well surveyed and charted.

We read more than one account of cruising yachts that have come to grief on unmarked or incorrectly marked rocks in this area, and had an uncomfortably close brush with one of the latter ourselves. To compound this the GPS chart datums cannot be relied upon in this particular region and we encountered errors of between 100-200 metres in some cases.

One particularly dangerous rock is Olga Rock (57.24.6N 135 56.5W) which lies on the direct rhumbline route between the Khaz fairway buoy and Salisbury Sound. It is a completely isolated offlier, is , and is only really visible on the NOOA and Navionics electronic charts when zoomed in to the highest levels.