Touring - Ferry-Hopping Combined with a Series of Short Tours?

Has anyone tried this approach -- taking ferries to coastal port towns, getting off and touring the area around a town (for 1-4 days or so), then getting back on another ferry to the next point of interest, and so on?

One possibility would be to fly into Seattle and then take ferries northward along the Alaskan coast and islands.

Any experiences or thoughts on this or any other tours that might work well with the approach?

That's a popular activity in the Pacific Northwest.

From Anacortes, Washington, you can ferry out to the San Juan Islands. Spend a day per island, and you can easily spend 4 to 5 days in the San Juans.

You can than ferry over to syndney, B.C. (Victoria) , and then ride up Vancouver Island, ferry over to the Gulf Islands. Keep going north on Vancouver Island, you can ferry over to the Sunshine Coast. Then ride back to Vancouver...

And so on...

It took me six boats to get around the gulf of St-Lawrence. From a cable ferry across a sea arm to several days on a cargo/ferry boat. That last one brings supplies to the lower north coast of the st-Lawrence. You can always hop off but there are no road to tour on and the boat only comes back days later.

http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/378812959_Z454m-Ti.jpg (http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/378812959_Z454m-XL.jpg) http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/362685738_Npmdu-Ti-1.jpg (http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/362685738_Npmdu-XL.jpg) http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/356233907_fLsEe-Ti-1.jpg (http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/356233907_fLsEe-XL.jpg) http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/370578294_zuXNm-Ti-1.jpg (http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/370578294_zuXNm-XL.jpg) http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/373925755_egMBH-Ti-1.jpg (http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/373925755_egMBH-XL.jpg) http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/394947841_hVc2t-Ti.jpg (http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/394947841_hVc2t-XL.jpg)

Not coastal but in my 2008 tour of Italy, I took a few lake ferries.

http://i42.tinypic.com/10ibbl3.jpg

I think it add a bit of charm to the tour.

This worked for me in western Scotland 5 years ago, if I had known how well it was going to work I would have spent more of that tour in the western Highlands and in the Hebrides Islands. Cal-Mac (http://www.calmac.co.uk/) ferries offer "Island Hopscotch" tickets that are a bunch of different itineraries on various routes that they cover.

One of these days I'm going to do Sicily-Sardinia-Corsica-mainland Italy.

did citavecchia -> cagliari -> santa teresa -> bonifacio -> bastia -> nice a couple years ago. was quite nice

My ferry hopping experiences have been between England and France. :)