Matt Spears pulled into Skagway with salt-cracked hands, a back that had taken days of punishment from open-ocean swells, and eyes that may or may not have been crying. After 1,300 miles of solo riding from the Washington coast through Canadian channels, across open Pacific crossings, and deep into Alaskan wilderness, he had just become the first person ever to complete this journey alone on a jet ski, with no support crew and no outside help.
That distinction mattered because every mile of it was genuinely hard. This was not a leisure cruise along a coastline. It was a weeks-long gauntlet of mechanical failures, zero-catch fishing nights, storms that outpaced weather forecasts, and an ocean that regularly tried to end the whole thing.
A bought-it-wrecked Sea-Doo carrying 65 gallons of fuel
The machine at the center of the trip was a Sea-Doo Explorer, the largest jet ski Sea-Doo makes, at 12 feet long. Spears had bought it wrecked from Harper Motorsports after someone had driven it into rocks and punched holes in the hull. He repaired those, then spent months building a custom aluminum rack because, as he noted, no one manufactures one large enough for this kind of trip, for the obvious reason that no one attempts this kind of trip. The finished setup carried 65 gallons of fuel across an internal tank, a hull tank he had added himself, and a row of jerry cans strapped to the custom rack. On the bow sat an orange Starlink box for connectivity in the middle of the Pacific.
The very first morning nearly unraveled everything. A switch panel controlling the dual-battery system failed at camp in Canada, leaving one battery dead while the other sat fully charged. Spears tore the dash apart on the beach, found a broken connector between the two batteries, and wired them directly. The fix worked. Hours lost, momentum recovered.
Starving, crabbing badly, and then a bear swims past at night
For the first four days, Spears ate almost nothing he actually caught. His crab pot came up empty on six straight checks. A venomous-spined quillback rockfish he landed after the open-ocean crossing went back in the water because it was too small, a decision he immediately regretted out loud: ‘I already regret throwing that back.’ A second rockfish, a larger one, finally made it into the pan, battered and fried, the first real meal of the trip.
The hot springs he had aimed for on day three were reached a day late after a rogue wall of waves near a channel corner knocked him off balance and into the water. He jumped free before the jet ski could roll. His anchor was gone, lost during a police inspection stop. He improvised by tethering the jet ski to his crab pot.
The wilder encounters accumulated as he pushed north. A humpback whale cruised alongside him for a sustained stretch after the Pacific crossing, matching his course. A bear swam directly into his path in the dark water outside Juneau, its eyes briefly visible before Spears swerved and the animal hauled itself up a bank and ran. A pod of orcas followed him through a bay near Haines, close enough that he tasted the mist from their spouts.
The crab pot finally delivered at a forest service cabin deep in an Alaskan bear sanctuary. It came up full of Dungeness crabs after sitting near a bear feeding area on the shore. The largest one was too big for his cooking pot and had to be split in half. He ate until he felt ill.
The couple who handed him halibut and rice
One of the quieter moments of the trip happened at a spot where bears were supposed to be fishing for salmon out of a waterfall. There were no bears. A couple anchored nearby asked if he wanted dinner instead. They had caught a giant halibut that morning. Spears put his camera down, sat in what he described only as their home, and ate halibut and rice. ‘They just made my trip,’ he said afterward, standing in the dark outside the cabin.
He arrived in Skagway to find his wife and his dog waiting at the dock.
The dog named Goose at the dock in Skagway
A dog named Goose was on the dock in Skagway, Alaska, when Matt Spears arrived after 1,300 miles.
Spears rode into the harbor with cracked hands and a low-oil warning he had fixed with a spare bottle somewhere in a cove near Haines, his back sore enough that a planned 45-minute run to the final destination had stretched into the better part of a day. The custom rack held. The wired-direct batteries held. The wrecked jet ski he had patched and rebuilt held all the way to the end.
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