This winter’s state ferry schedule is again impacted by an old fleet needing maintenance. One ferry will be designated for Southeast Alaska’s mainline route, stopping in eight communities from Skagway to Bellingham, Wash. The round trip takes about a week.
There will be no mainline service Dec. 1-11 when the Columbia replaces the Kennicott. The 50-year-old Columbia has been in maintenance all summer. The much younger Kennicott will go in for service to replace its generators.
The work will take nearly a year, according to Alaska Department of Transportation spokesperson Sam Dapcevich.
“When it goes offline, it goes into a federal project to replace its generators, which has to do with emissions and efficiency,” he said. So that’s going to be a long project. It’ll be out for about 11 months. So, the Columbia will be the mainliner all the way up until next winter.”
Communities off the main route, like Sitka, will see one ferry a week going either north or south. In other words, it would be a nine-day round trip from Sitka to Juneau.
That’s a far cry from how it used to be with twice-a-week service, according to Melissa Wileman who works for the City and Borough of Sitka.
“It’s our highway within Southeast Alaska, and that’s what folks aren’t understanding,” Wileman said.
Residents used to ferry their vehicles to Costco in Juneau for supplies that Sitka doesn’t have, Wileman said.
“The highway is – was – the Alaska Marine Highway System for quite some time and ferrying back and forth between our little communities. And that opportunity is dwindling. . . and dwindled,” she said.
Sitka is one of Alaska’s larger communities, with a population of over 8,000. It’s on Baranof Island where Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium or SEARHC is building a new hospital. Wileman said the recent marine highway schedules restrict access to healthcare.
“With Sitka poised to become the SEARHC hub soon, there’s a clear opportunity for the ferry system to increase the ridership here and to help assist with those transportation needs for those folks from smaller communities to Sitka,” Wileman said.
One of those communities is Kake, located south of Sitka on another island. Kake can’t get to Sitka via ferry, at least not directly. Residents will see one round trip to Juneau per month this winter. Kake doesn’t have jet service, only small planes. However, resident Robin Ross said that tickets for small planes are more expensive than ferries, and they don’t run in bad weather.
“You know how the weather is in Southeast,” Ross said. “Sometimes the weather’s out for two, three days, from snow, fog, no planes, and we have people waiting for meds. “(They) miss their very important hospital appointments too because of the weather in the wintertime.”
Ross grew up in Kake and now works at the school. She said she sees students missing events because they can’t travel, which wasn’t a problem when she was in high school 20 years ago.
“We were able to go on all our trips, ferry to ferry, staying in the budget, and it was a lot cheaper,” said Ross. “Now it’s really hard to get out anywhere. Just to get our kids out for cross country, our high school for regionals, it’s going to cost us 12k.”
In past decades, two ports connected Alaska to the Lower 48 – Bellingham, Washington and Prince Rupert, British Columbia. However, the Prince Rupert port has been off-limits for five years because of disputes between Alaska and Canada.
Dapcevich said the state’s marine highway system plans to reconnect with Prince Rupert, but they don’t have a timeline yet. The dock needs to be fixed first, he said.
“There are international issues regarding how funding can be spent for those projects that have to be reconciled between the two countries,” Dapcevich said. “And it has to do with, whether we purchase U.S. steel for the project or Canadian steel, and it gets a little bit complicated there.”
The 60-year-old Tustumena will be offline for three months of maintenance beginning Jan. 1. So, there will be no service for Kodiak, Homer, and the Aleutians in southwest Alaska during that time. The LeConte goes offline Oct. 1 through April 1 for an overhaul and the Hubbard will cover the Northern Panhandle communities during that time.
