The Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is winding, turbulent, and deep - an ancient, thousand-mile-long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races.. "When Jonathan Raban set out alone in his own boat to sail from his Seattle home to the Alaskan Panhandle, he wanted to decode the many riddles and meanings of the sea: in Indian art and mythology, in the journals of Vancouver and his officers and midshipmen, in poetry and painting, in the physics of waves and turbulence. His voyage began as an intellectual adventure, but he soon found himself in deeper, more ominously personal waters than he had planned.