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Dear Friends and Neighbors: Greetings from Juneau! The 2nd session of the 33rd Legislature started this week. It is thrilling to be back, and I hope everyone in House District 2 is enjoying a healthy and prosperous new year. During this year's second regular session of the 33rd legislature I will continue to serve on the Education, Community and Regional Affairs and Fisheries committees. Please watch for updates on the committee work in this columnas the session progresses. Fisheries: Trident -...
Trident Seafoods issued a press release on Tuesday, Dec. 12 announcing a “comprehensive restructuring initiative” that will put the seafood giant “on a path toward streamlining its Alaska operations.” They announced plans to seek buyers for their shoreside processing plants in four locations: Petersburg, Ketchikan, False Pass, and Kodiak. “Our Kodiak operations are integral to the Gulf of Alaska fisheries,” said Jeff Welbourn, Senior Vice President of Alaska Operations at Trident Seafoods in the company’s press release. “They are highly effi...
With the rusty Matanuska out of service pending repairs, the Kennicott scheduled for tie-up due to lack of crew and the Tazlina in the shipyard to add crew quarters, the state ferry system’s draft summer 2024 schedule is limited by the number of vessels in service and looks about the same as this past summer. The Columbia would make a weekly northbound stop in Petersburg on Sundays and a weekly southbound visit on Wednesdays on its run between Bellingham, Washington, and Southeast Alaska. The marine highway system released its draft schedule D...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced it expects Southeast Alaska commercial fishermen next year will harvest around 19 million pink salmon — close to an average number based on 63 years of commercial harvest data collected since Alaska became a state. The department’s forecast, released in November, predicts a pink salmon catch of between 12 million and 32 million fish. Pink salmon harvest varies greatly from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, and the commercial catch in the 10 most recent even years has averaged 21 mil...
Alaska officials who say the stars are aligned for the long-dreamt, long-on-the-odds multibillion-dollar North Slope natural gas project are confusing shiny stars with black holes. Like the black hole the state already has poured close to a billion dollars into over the past two decades, thinking that international markets would like expensive Alaska gas better than lower-risk, less costly gas from anywhere else. But unlike black holes, where the force of gravity is so strong that nothing escapes, the Alaska gas line dream continues to survive...
The state wants to send the Matanuska, the oldest vessel in the Alaska Marine Highway System fleet, into a shipyard for the equivalent of a full-body scan. Management wants to find out just how much of the ship's steel has rusted, and how far the rust has eaten into the thickness of the metal. The 60-year-old Matanuska has been tied up at the dock in Ketchikan since last November, waiting for the state to decide whether to repair the vessel and restore it to working order, or give up on the...
Elected officials who say the proposed Alaska North Slope natural gas project is closer than ever to putting steel pipe in the ground and money in the pockets of construction workers should take a break from their political grandstanding and pay attention to the facts. Not a single analyst tracking gas projects around the world ever mentions Alaska when they list developments with the best potential of getting built. The talk about multiple liquefied natural gas export projects going to construction along the U.S. Gulf Coast, in Qatar,...
The Columbia state ferry has cancelled its sailings for at least a week due to a mechanical issue, affecting stops at ports between Haines and Bellingham, Washington, according to a service notice by the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS). The primary interruption to service is a seven-day period starting Wednesday, with a sailing from Ketchikan to Bellingham and back through Southeast Alaska cancelled, the AMHS notice issued Monday notes. The decision is due to a "mechanical issue with the ves...
On September first Dr. Jennifer (Jen) Hyer will begin an eighteen month sabbatical from the Petersburg Medical Center to sail from San Diego to New Zealand with her family. When she and her husband, Chris Hyer, first started dating twenty-seven years ago, Chris gave Jen the book "Dove," about a boy who sailed around the world, and told her it was a dream of his. She was immediately on board and boats have been a constant in their lives ever since. Their first home together was a 30' Sundowner...
In a change of plans from just a few weeks ago, the Alaska Marine Highway System reports it lacks enough crew to operate the Kennicott this summer. The loss of the Kennicott from the schedule likely would mean dropping service to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and the loss of two additional port calls in Petersburg each month, May through September. It also could jeopardize state ferry service to Yakutat on the cross-gulf route, and abandoning plans to run the Kennicott to Bellingham, Washington, once a month to help move the heavy load of su...
An ongoing shortage of crew is the “No. 1 risk factor” for the Alaska Marine Highway System, Transportation Department Deputy Commissioner Katherine Keith told legislators. As of a Feb. 2 presentation to the Senate Transportation Committee, the ferry system was short just over 100 crew for full staffing to efficiently operate the winter schedule, about a 20% vacancy factor for onboard employees. The ferry system, however, is able to run its schedule with crew members picking up extra shifts and overtime to cover the work, and with man...
After the heat wave-induced collapse of the Bering Sea snow crab fishery, some fishermen were looking, with hope, at the upcoming tanner crab harvest out of Kodiak. The nearly 6-million-pound quota was the highest in decades. And some people spent more than $100,000 to buy a permit to fish this year, said Kevin Abena, one of the leaders of the Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative. But fishermen’s hopes for a banner season are now in limbo, as the 130 boats in the Kodiak tanner crab fleet are on strike — holding out for higher prices from the sea... Full story
The federal ship has come in for the Alaska Marine Highway System, carrying more than $284 million for upgrades to old vessels, money to help pay for a new ferry, dock repairs, additional service to small communities and even a proposed electric-powered ferry for short runs. The Federal Transit Administration announced the awards last week. The grants were awarded under a competitive application process, but Alaska’s congressional delegation wrote the provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2022 with the intent of s...
Washington, DC — U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both R-Alaska, announced Wednesday that the Federal Transit Administration is awarding more than $285 million of investments to improve the reliability and service of Alaska’s ferry system, which serves more than 30 communities across 3,500 miles of coastline. The funding, all awarded to the Alaska Marine Highway System, is designated to replacing an aging vessel, upgrading ferry dock infrastructure in rural communities, modernizing four vessels, procuring an electric ferry, des...
The state ferry Matanuska will not return to service from its winter overhaul as scheduled next month and will require millions of dollars more of steel replacement work if it is ever to get back to work. In its place, the Alaska Marine Highway System plans to put the Columbia back to sea after almost 30 months in layup status to save money. The loss of the Matanuska will mean more than a month without ferry service for Petersburg. The ship had been scheduled to resume sailings the first week of February to replace the Kennicott, which was...
The halibut charter boat fleet in Southeast and the Gulf of Alaska will be able to collectively buy quota shares from commercial fishermen under a provision in the federal omnibus budget bill passed at the end of December. The program would be funded by a fee charged for every angler aboard a halibut charter. Seward’s Andy Mezirow is on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and has been a champion of the program for a while. He said it’s a long time coming. The program was vetoed by President Donald Trump in his final weeks in office and...
Petersburg is expected to be in for a cooler than normal winter as La Niña conditions return for an unusual third consecutive winter. The weather patterns in Southeast brought on by La Niña can be traced all the way back to trade winds off the Pacific coast of South America according to Rick Fritsch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau. Enhanced easterly trade winds coming off of the Pacific coast of South America blow the warmer water at the surface of the ocean w...
State and federal fishery managers are forecasting a commercial harvest of about 19 million pink salmon in 2023 in Southeast Alaska, which would be a “significant drop” from the parent-year harvest of 48.5 million pinks in 2021, according to this month’s announcement from the federal NOAA Fisheries and Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A 19-million fish harvest would be at the high end of the “weak” range (11 million to 19 million fish), according to the announcement, which added that a harvest of that size would be only about 39% of the av...
November 24, 1922 – Forced to turn out to sea for six days, with the engines running every minute without a stop, and one member of the crew kept a prisoner in the hold for twenty-four hours, the halibut fishing boat Sentinel was held in the storm that raged in the Gulf of Alaska last week according to Captain Louis Sunderland in command. Nearly all of the oil was used and not a fishing line was cast during the entire trip, Captain Sunderland said. The Sentinel weathered the storm safely and came into port for supplies before leaving again l...
September 29, 1922 – “Theoretically and scientifically and in accordance with official lore, the run of sockeyes up the Chilkat closed on the 15th of August and at that date the stream watchmen were withdrawn. The truth of the matter is that the run of sockeyes was only beginning when the watchmen were withdrawn and the result was that within three days after the watchmen were withdrawn, no less than twenty-seven purse seines, the first ever used off the Chilkat River, were fishing there most industriously and with marvelous success, with thr...
Three years after adopting a pricing plan that adds a surcharge for passenger, vehicle and stateroom fares on popular sailings, the Alaska Marine Highway System has decided to suspend the program for its fall/winter schedule. The ferry system's "dynamic pricing" added 5% to 50% to ticket prices, depending on the percentage of a ship's capacity already booked - similar to airlines raising prices as flights fill up. The Alaska Department of Transportation announced the decision last Friday to...
Petersburg has been hit with below average rainfall this summer according to data collected by the National Weather Service. From June 21 to July 6 Petersburg had just 0.42 inches of precipitation and though that has picked up this past week, the borough is still dealing with the challenges caused by the dry weather. According to Edward Liske, a meteorologist with the NWS in Juneau, the dry conditions have been observed across Southeast and are the product of a high pressure ridge. "Well the...
Western Alaska villagers have endured the worst chum salmon runs on record, several years of anemic Chinook salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, harvest closures from the Bering Sea coast to Canada’s Yukon Territory and such dire conditions that they relied on emergency shipments of salmon from elsewhere in Alaska just to have food to eat. Many of those suffering see one way to provide some quick relief: Large vessels trawling for pollock and other groundfish in the industrial-scale fisheries of the Bering Sea, they say, must stop i... Full story
Global supply chain shortages and delays have extended past grocery stores, car dealers and electronics to the Alaska Marine Highway System. The state ferry Kennicott was delayed coming out of winter overhaul. Instead of returning to service last week, as had been scheduled, the ship left Ketchikan on Tuesday for a two-week trip to Juneau, Yakutat and then into the Gulf of Alaska before sailing into Bellingham, Washington, to fully start its summer runs. The Kennicott's scheduled return to servi...
