Chris McGraw has won the 71st annual Sitka Salmon Derby with a king salmon weighing in at 36 pounds.

McGraw has been fishing the derby for most of his life. But he said this year’s derby started out slow, even on Saturday (5-30-26) when he caught the prize winning fish.  

He started fishing at 7:30 a.m. but didn’t pull anything in until noon. McGraw said he “knew it was a decent fish, but didn’t realize that it was actually a contender for a winning size until we got to the boat and saw it, and thought, ‘Okay, now it’s serious, because it looks like a nice fish that could take the lead.'”

This is McGraw’s first derby win. He said he may have caught fish close to this size in previous derbies, but that was when the winners usually topped out around 50 or 60 pounds. He said he’s always appreciated that the derby is a family event. He said that’s usually what informs his derby strategy.

“In general, during the Derby, I fish with my family,” McGraw said. “A lot of them don’t particularly like rough water, so we usually try to find places that are calm, kind of in more inside waters, and in places that we’ve caught in the past.”

But McGraw said he “just happened to get lucky” when he secured the 36-pound king salmon in a spot he hadn’t fished before. He said he’s considering putting his winnings toward a fly fishing trip with his son. 

While McGraw will likely take home the prize for the single largest fish, the win for total pounds snagged will go to another contender. Sitka Sportsman’s Association president John McCrehin said there were high expectations for two-time derby winner Caleb Gray who took home last year’s biggest catch.

“He’s pretty good at it,” McCrehin said. “I’m gonna have to call it that everybody thought he’d win again.”

Though he didn’t appear on the leaderboard for biggest catch, Gray placed first for total poundage with 166.2. At just 10-years-old, he continues to reel in major prizes. 

McCrehin said that between two years of winning, Gray has racked up around $25,000 in prize money which he could save for college or other future plans. “He could be off to do whatever he wants to after college, and may not come back to fish, who knows? But I think he’s– no pun intended, but I think he’s hooked.”

Derby officials say this year 125 participants caught 335 fish, for a grand total of 4801.7 pounds of salmon. 

McGraw and Gray’s wins won’t be official until the derby’s awards ceremony on June 18. 

Local advocacy group Safeguard Sitka is hosting a community town hall for Sitkans to learn more about cruise tourism in Sitka. The group advocates for cruise tourism growth in Sitka and has encouraged residents to reject a ballot proposition that would limit cruise tourism.

Chris McGraw and Jeremy Plank joined KCAW’s Erin Fulton to discuss the goals of Safeguard Sitka and the details of the town hall, which will include a panel discussion and opportunities for Sitkans to ask questions. The forum is Wednesday, February 25 at 5:30 p.m in Centennial Hall. Listen to the full interview below:

The Gary Paxton Industrial Park board met on April 22 and  agreed that the $1 per head tariff charged last year for use of the GPIP floating dock was too low, and out of line with fees at Sitka’s other public facilities. Executive director Garry White said the city was examining rates charged in other Southeast cities, with the goal of establishing a consistent rate in Sitka.

“There’s a City & Borough’s in a study right now to do basically benchmarking,” he said, “looking at all of the different ports around Southeast to come up with some rates. And the goal is to get the harbor system and GPIP on the same field where we’re not competing against one another, where it’s a standard rate across.”

The board had previously considered bumping the per-passenger fee to $5 for use of the dock. Adventure Sitka, a local excursion company, is a major customer at the dock. Co-owner Chris McGraw said that his company had already cut deals with the cruise lines, and a fivefold increase in the tariff was not factored into their rate structure.

McGraw urged the board to hold the increase to $2 for this year, while the city resolved the broader tariff question.

“Ultimately, I feel  if we could get to some standard tariff rate that is community-wide,” he said, “whether you come here to Crescent, or you go out there, it’s the same for our type of shore excursion service versus actual ship that’s coming in letting off passengers.”

Sitka opened the 250-foot deepwater dock at the industrial park in 2018. It’s seen growing use by the fishing fleet, and increasing demand from small cruise lines for moorage. Adventure Sitka uses a finger float connected to the dock to board roughly 10,000 passengers per summer for its excursion in Silver Bay. Jeremy Serka works in the marine trades at the park. He suggested that Adventure Sitka was not only getting a good deal, it was also limiting the ability of industrial users to access the dock.

“Not only are you getting that (moorage), you’re getting access with your buses all day long coming through there, too, which prohibits anybody from getting down to the dock,” Serka said. “So next year at this time hopefully that haulout is complete, and we’re going to have to look at what are we going to do if there’s a ship in town, or if somebody wants to lay up for a little bit to look at their engine.”

Board member Casey Campell agreed, but didn’t want to start that conversation on the eve of the summer tour and fishing seasons. He proposed taking up the user issue again in the fall.

“I think there’s a lot of long term concerns which are valid and that we’re going to need to address here sooner than later,” said Campbell, “with what GPIP looks like, you know, down the road with industrial activity, the haulout and, you know, tourism activity that is continuing to maybe grow out there.”

The Gary Paxton Industrial Park board voted unanimously to recommend raising the tariff for use of the deepwater dock to $2 for the 2024 season, and to $5 for 2025.

Traffic congestion will be a primary concern as Sitkans buckle in to plan for future tour seasons.

The Sitka Planning Commission on Wednesday (11-16-22) reviewed 2022’s Tourism Operations, to create recommendations for improvements in 2023 and beyond. Much of the forward-thinking, however, focused on how best to move half-a-million people in-and-out of town.

Listen to the entire November 16, 2022, Sitka Planning Commission meeting.

The starting point for the Sitka Planning Commission was data from a survey taken by citizens at the end of last summer’s season. Respondents had plenty of feedback – most of it positive – on the closure of Lincoln Street on days with high passenger volumes. But the 74 days that Sitka’s main downtown thoroughfare was closed to vehicles didn’t solve congestion elsewhere. Amy Ainslie, Sitka planning director, said addressing traffic and visitor dropoff and pickup would be a big concern for next year, 2024, and into the future.

Next on the list was an issue that’s been gaining momentum in public discussion lately.

“And then secondly, there are so many comments in the community survey about bus electrification,” said Ainslie.

Chris McGraw owns and operates the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal, where most of Sitka’s 383,000 passengers disembarked in 2022. That number could be much larger in 2023, possibly as many as 200,000 more. That would create round-trip bus traffic five days a week to downtown Sitka and back.

Even so, McGraw says electric buses don’t pencil out.

“As for the electrification of bus transportation,” said McGraw, “a 45 foot motorcoach, like we operate is in the $1-1.2 million range to purchase, and we have 17 of them. So the feasibility of a private entity funding electric buses at this point is non existent.”

Bruce Conine runs a wildlife tour business out of small buses. He offered a “50,000-foot” view of the problem. He recommended that Sitka look past buses, and go right to rail.

“As long as it’s electric and moving people, you guys will have access to huge amounts of government money,” Conine suggested. “And maybe even a company like Elon Musk’s boring company could bore a hole in the ground and pop up at the Centennial Building. It’d be a unique thing. I think some of the cruise ship passengers might even think it would be a cool stop to go and actually ride in a tunnel made that way. And it could be very fast. You could have a tunnel underground that maybe did 60-80 miles an hour…. I’d love to see it underground, just wouldn’t mess up our little town.”

Conine was perfectly serious about electric rail. Part of future planning is thinking big. His idea doesn’t sound so far-fetched when he contrasts it to the reality of moving almost 600,000 people by bus.

“But rather than have to hire 60 bus drivers to try to run that many people and keep that much machinery going on the road, which is very hard,” said Conine, “to have a rail system, they could bring them in quick, and get it paid for by government funds. Why not?”

Another, more down-to-earth approach, came from an unlikely source: Laurie Booyse, director of Visit Sitka. Booyse thought solving Sitka’s problem with visitor transportation included improving transportation for locals, by addressing the shortage of taxis in town, and optimizing the public transportation system, called The Ride.

“This is no reflection on the management of The Ride,” said Booyse. “But The Ride — our public transportation system –I think needs to be looked at as part of long-term planning. Who is it servicing? How is that working right now? It only works Monday through Friday. It doesn’t service the airport. We don’t have enough taxis, and people are walking into town over the bridge because they can’t get from the airport here.”

The Planning Commission’s task now is to make recommendations to the Assembly about 2023 and beyond, and many of them will expand on efforts begun last year on topics like temporary restroom locations, food cart permits, signage, and safety improvements.

This is a lot to bite off for a group whose traditional job involves reviewing and approving conditional use permits and variances. As the ninety-minute meeting drew to a close, Commissioner Darrell Windsor offered one last recommendation for municipal government. 

“I think the assembly how to make a Tourist Planning Commission separate from this commission,” Windsor said, as laughter rippled around the table.

The newly expanded Sitka Sound Cruise Ship terminal welcomed its first seven sailings last week, commencing what’s expected to be a record breaking year in cruise travel. While a majority of dockings went without a hitch, the terminal sustained damage to its inside berth on Monday (5-9-22), after a cruise ship struck an outer mooring dolphin. 

A mooring dolphin is an off-shore steel structure that large boats can tie up to. In an interview with KCAW on Wednesday (5-11-22) owner and terminal manger, Chris McGraw says the 2100 passenger Radiance of the Seas hit the dolphin, damaging all four pilings, while backing into its berth Monday morning. The damage to the inside berth means the dock can no longer safely accommodate two ships, effectively cutting the dock’s capacity in half. McGraw says they’re currently working to notify incoming cruise lines. McGraw says the damage will affect future dates where two ships were scheduled.

While it’s still unclear exactly what the damage means for future cruise dates, McGraw says tendering passengers directly into town is a possibility in the meantime. McGraw says, some ships this year have already begun doing this when the dock is full.

A contractor from Anchorage based construction company Turnagain Marine will begin repairing the damaged dolphin over the weekend. McGraw says the timeline on repairs is unclear, but it could be anywhere from weeks to months before the berth is functional again. 

“Right now, it’s a lot of unknown. We’re going to try to figure out schedule changes and repairs. Who pays for it? You know, all of that is in process,” said McGraw.

Despite damaging the berth, the ship was left unscathed. McGraw says they successfully had 4000 passengers move through the facility on Monday, and the ship was able to moor and leave safely.

KCAW’s Robert Woolsey and Katherine Rose look back on 2021, and conclude that the year was was “Not as good as we’d hoped, maybe not as bad as we think?” Here’s their list of some of the top stories of the past twelve months.

1. The pandemic “partitions,” and grinds into a new phase

Sitka began 2021 with a glimmer of hope: Vaccine shipments had just arrived and shots were going into the arms of seniors and high risk people. And the community’s vaccine rollout was swift. Sitka was one of the first communities in the country to make vaccines eligible to everyone 16 and up, thanks in large part to efforts made by SEARHC and Sitka’s public health providers. SEARHC’s Dr. Elliot Bruhl helped put Sitka out in front, and on the front page of National Public Radio. 

Said Bruhl: “As these vaccines came, we saw it as a moral and ethical imperative that we would not leave vaccines in the freezer.”

Dr. Bruhl later explained that the pandemic had “partitioned,” and posed much different risks for vaccinated and unvaccinated residents, which contributed to the intense public debate that followed: primarily over mask mandates in the city and in the schools.

Although it was acrimonious at times, Sitka’s elected officials – like assembly member Crystal Duncan –  managed to find a way to speak to everyone. 

“We’ve never navigated a pandemic before and we’re doing it to the best of our abilities and we’re succeeding,” Duncan said during a particularly tense meeting, “But when we have opportunities to minimize spread, I think we need to take those steps. So we’re not here fighting about masks, we’re fighting for the health of our community. And to frame it more accurately, we aren’t fighting each other, we are fighting a virus.”

2. Innovations in housing and business

KCAW’s Report for America reporter, Erin McKinstry, did a deep dive into housing last spring. The stories could not have been more timely, with the cost of living on the rise in Sitka, and an unbelievably tight housing market. She found a single mom who was investing in a community land trust home, a local prefab manufacturer, and Robin Schmid, an attorney who completely gutted a trailer and transformed it into a beautiful waterfront home

“I feel like I’ve gotten my life back without the debt hanging over my head,” said Schmid. “Yeah it’s about freedom to me.” 

For some people, 2021 was a year of unexpected opportunity. Erin McKinstry’s successor in the KCAW newsroom, Tash Kimmell, spent the summer profiling businesses that had either opened during the pandemic, or found a unique way to weather the storm. One of Tash’s most memorable pieces was about Megan Cropley, who opened Sitka’s only adult boutique.

“There’s not one set demographic,” said Cropley. “Everybody comes in here. And I love that. people have been extremely supportive and very accepting. I have people that come in every week since I’ve been open, and they say, thank you for being here. 

3. A major (maybe overwhelming) cruise rebound next year.

The biggest story in tourism for 2021 is not the partial cruise season Sitka had this summer. The biggest story of the year is: What will happen next year? 478,000 passengers projected for next season – which starts in April.

Chris McGraw at the new Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal anticipated this growth, and the rest of Sitka is now playing catch-up. Whether residents see it as a boon for Sitka, or a scourge, cruising is evolving. Nevertheless, McGraw shares the same concerns that many people have about Sitka’s character.

“My hope is that our downtown remains unique, it is and is walkable,” McGraw said. “That it just keeps that kind of small town character because, you know, even the Royal Caribbean executives that we’ve had here a number of occasions, that’s the one thing that they comment they make is, you know, this, this feels like authentic Alaska. And I think it’s important that we keep that.” 

4. Welcome to Beartown

Not all visitors to Sitka in 2021 were human. Sitka had an unprecedented year for bears, with more bears – and unfortunately, more bear deaths (14) – than anytime in recent memory. Something that stood out for a lot of long-term residents was the complete closure of Sitka National Historical Park, which created a sort-of downtown bear sanctuary. That hasn’t happened before. 

Closing the park probably helped keep the peace in town. But just outside of Sitka there were some close encounters – way too close. Jess Coltharp was working near a stream for Fish & Game this summer, and  a bear caught him by the leg. Coltharp had a rifle, but he didn’t have time to use it. A few paces behind, his partner got off a shot.

5. Herring: The ongoing struggle to balance commercial and subsistence interests

Herring is one of those issues where – in the very end – all parties want a sustainable herring stock in the Sound. What’s controversial is how we get there. Here are two seiners I spoke with, Justin Peeler and Matt Kinney, prior to this spring’s record commercial harvest.

Peeler: “Our boats, our gear, all that stuff is made to go on. It’s not made to just be here for once or twice and talk about our big catch…we want these biomasses of herring or salmon or black cod to keep going.” 

Kinney: “People think we just have one thing on the brain, and that’s harvesting, harvesting, harvesting,’ and that’s just not the case.” 

Nevertheless, the subsistence community is worried about the continued commercial pressure. Traditional herring spawning patterns are changing, and it’s harder to harvest roe close to town. Louise Brady led a protest by the Herring Protectors outside Fish & Game offices this spring.

“I really appreciate you being out here because the voices of our Tribal Elders, the voices of our culture bearers have spoken loud for several decades at the Board of Fish with no response,” said Brady. “With no response. Because our herring are so precious to us.”

6. The best of the rest

Steve Johnson’s vigil on the Sheldon Jackson campus, in honor of children who died in residential schools in Canada.

“I feel like the kids who were rounded up and taken to Sheldon Jackson college,” said Johnson in an interview with KCAW. “Their story is underrepresented and I would like to see it included in the canvas that is our town…we don’t have to whisper about these things anymore…that we can talk about them and we can address them.” 

Paulette Moreno on the relocation of the Baranov statue.

 “Having courageous conversation in our communities brings many things forward,” said Moreno. “Some of them are pain, some are conflict, misunderstandings. But what it ultimately does is bring forward an opportunity for healing.”

“Alex Tratuf,” and her incognito team who create Sitka Memes on Instagram.

“It could be anybody…your neighbors, your friends, your coworkers,” said Tratuf. “I will say I have coworkers that follow my account which is crazy. We’re a group of people who just agree that Sitka is funny, and quirky. And we’ve got a really unique crowd here, things that happen here that wouldn’t happen anywhere else.” 

Bhargavi Pochi who introduced Sitka to Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights.

“I think the big motivation of me wanting to do this here and celebrate is because I love sharing my culture with my friends,” said Pochi. “I thought it was a good reason to celebrate and I thought this would be a great excuse to just have some people over and celebrate life.”

And nobody celebrated more this year than Courtney MacArthur, who recovered her cat Blueberry, after finding an imposter – Not Blueberry – in her house.

“I posted on Sitka Chatters but you know a picture of my cat Blueberry and a picture of the other cat which I called ‘Not Blueberry’ because I didn’t know the cat’s name at the time,” MacArthur explained. “And pretty quickly, a woman contacted me and said that she thought that was her cat possibly.”

Blueberry/Not Blueberry is possibly the best example of why 2021 was “not as bad as we think.”

And the the top story for our social media fans? The humble blue mud shrimp, whose struggle against a blood-sucking parasite was our most-shared story of 2021.

Here’s to a 2022 that is “better than we expect”.

The Sitka Planning Commission got a first look at a plan to alleviate congestion at Harrigan Centennial Hall next summer, when between 400,000 and 500,000 cruise ship visitors are expected to call in town.

The objective is to segregate uses — and vehicles — in a way that is safe, and keeps people moving.

The high volume of passengers could mean as many as 15 large green Alaska Coach buses on the road at a time shuttling visitors between the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal and Harrigan Centennial Hall, and they will have to shoulder in among the usual white and blue buses operated by Prewitt Enterprises, numerous smaller vans and buses operated by companies like Sitka Wildlife Tours and Tribal Tours, taxicabs, and the Sitka Community Ride, the city’s public bus system.

The two main options in the “Traffic & Staging Plan Summer 2022” would generally segregate vehicles by size, and commit much of the curb space in the so-called “Harrigan Loop” to the 65-passenger green shuttles. Option 1 would give all of the loop to the shuttles, and send tour buses into the Crescent Harbor Parking lot. Option 2 would have shuttles on one end of the loop, and tour buses on the other.

Clint Daniels has driven a bus for Sitka Tours for 24 years. He was uncomfortable with taking out parking spaces to accommodate tour buses in the Crescent Harbor lot.

And there was another problem.

“For us, the way the system has been working for the past three, four years where we park on one side (of the Harrigan Loop) and they’re (the green shuttles) on the other side — we’re able to set up tours,” said Daniels. “The other problem too is we have a dance show that occurs in this building. Where do we drop up passengers if you move us out and put shuttles there?”

Creating room for the large shuttles made sense to Bruce Conine, who operates Sitka Wildlife Tours out of four smaller vans. But he was concerned about potential conflict with the blue tour buses in the Crescent Parking lot. While he didn’t need much time to load his tours, he reminded the commission that he was “herding people,” and that people on vacation are not necessarily prompt. Problems could occur.

“For years, I’ve operated out of ‘A’ (the Harrigan Loop) and I have small vehicles,” said Conine. “And I understand the need for space for the big guys. I’m definitely willing to give up that space and not fight for it to have some dedicated space on ‘B’ (Crescent parking lot) where we don’t have to contend with large vehicles mixing into our small vehicle groups making it even tougher.”

Another part of the plan is to stage outfitters in the area immediately behind Harrigan Centennial Hall, above the boat launch. John Dunlap has operated his kayak outfitting business, Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures, out of a parked school bus in the Crescent Harbor parking lot for over twenty years. He wasn’t sure what the change in location would mean for his business, but he recognized that it was important to hash out a plan before summer.

“I’m not a bus guy,” said Dunlap, meaning his tours didn’t move via bus. “I just wanted to say I think conceptually, the work that that your group is doing here is very good. You’ve got your priorities right and in what you’re trying to do is achievable. And at the end of the day, not everybody not every user is going to be completely happy with what you come up with. But I encourage you to just keep going with this process because you’re going in the right direction.”

Read a memo from Planning director Amy Ainslie about the need to develop longer-term plans for addressing cruise tourism growth in Sitka.

Planning director Amy Ainslie reminded the commission that the parking and staging plan is short-term. First, Sitka has to weather the two-fold increase in passengers this coming summer, then begin to look at longer-term infrastructure development. She read into the record written testimony from Chris McGraw, the owner of the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal. McGraw was already thinking beyond 2022.

“I would like to propose at CBS look to create a separate transportation hub for cruise ships shuttle and tour operations. The one that I feel could be developed Baranof School playground. This is a large space that could be reconfigured to include a transportation hub that could include space for both school bus and tourism-related vehicles. In addition, an upgraded playground for Baranof School could be part of the project.”

An alternative idea was suggested by Dennis McConnell, with Alaska Coaches. He proposed that the infrastructure was already in place to ease congestion at Harrigan Centennial Hall. Again, this is Planning director Ainslie reading written testimony from McConnell:

“There really is no reason for any tour operators to schedule their tours to depart from downtown. All tours should depart from the pier (at the cruise terminal). Having any tours depart from Centennial Hall creates multiple issues, which the tourism group is trying to solve. Guests taking a tour with operators who choose to place their equipment at Centennial Hall requires the guest occupy a seat on the shuttle, debark the shuttle motorcoach, then reload onto their bus that is staged Centennial Hall. This creates confusion for the guests, and increases the congestion of buses and people at Centennial Hall that could otherwise depart directly from the pier.”

Planning Commissioners didn’t pick a preferred option in this first look, although some expressed support for dedicating the Harrigan Loop to the green motorcoach shuttles — primarily for safety reasons. They asked Planning director Ainslie to incorporate a recommendation for a permitting and fee structure that could support the addition of three more employees at Harrigan Centennial Hall.

The goal is to have a final draft of the Traffic & Staging Plan Summer 2022 completed by December 15.

Assuming the pandemic steers a better course next spring, Sitka is bracing for a record cruise ship season in 2022, with over 400,000 passengers expected to visit the community.

This number is over twice as many as arrived in 2019, the last full season, and about 100,000 more than the previous record.

The reason for the big jump is twofold: More large ships are coming to the Alaska market, and Sitka now has a place to put them.

KCAW’s Robert Woolsey recently took a tour of the new Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal with its owner, Chris McGraw.

Ten years ago, a private cruise ship dock was a bit of a pipedream, frankly. Sitka had two public lightering docks, and a three-decade old system of bringing cruise passengers to town aboard the ships’ own tenders.

Chris McGraw and his family had a boatyard, on land that fronted deep water. Why not build a cruise dock? Could James Earl Jones be wrong?

(movie clip: Field of Dreams)

Oh… people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. 

Ray… you’ll lose everything… you will be evicted.

The Field of Dreams is part of American culture now, and so is the idea that you can build something, and a market will follow. Chris McGraw and Kevin Costner, who portrayed “Ray,” the Iowa farmer who saved his farm by building a baseball field, have more in common than you might think.

“We built the dock in 2011 and spent the first year without a single customer,” McGraw said. “The second year, we were able to attract one of the very small lines and had less than 15 dockings. And that grew very slowly over the next three years. And the whole time the larger ships were still tendering and you see them anchor out downtown, and we have a nice empty dock.” 

It’s not empty anymore. Just below us, two Panamax-class cruise ships are tied up, the Serenade of the Seas and the Nieuw Amsterdam. They tower over McGraw’s dock like office buildings in New York City.

It wasn’t until 2015, after three years of knocking on doors and attending cruise conferences, that McGraw got the first Holland America ship to tie up here. And that was the proof of concept he needed to transform his Field of Dreams into a 40,000 square-foot, timber-framed and glass cruise facility.

“And once they started coming, you know, the rest of the various cruise lines that called in Sitka I think saw that ‘Oh, it works!’ And really the apprehension was, since we’re located five miles out of downtown, that the passengers may view that negatively,” McGraw explained. “And we’ve gotten very little negative feedback for the passengers having to get on a shuttle, the shuttle is provided for free, so the passengers aren’t paying for it. And in reality, it’s a 10 to 15 minute ride, and it’s fairly scenic, the traffic isn’t that bad. And I haven’t cruised very much, but talking to other people that have ports around the world, it’s very common to get dropped off, not necessarily in the downtown core, where you have to take some type of transportation to get to the downtown.”

McGraw won’t say how much he’s invested in the terminal itself. He halted construction last year during the pandemic, but resumed when legislation passed allowing cruising in the second half of the summer. A retail store is open, but the taproom and restaurant remain under construction. Although neither the Serenade of the Seas or the Nieuw Amsterdam is at full capacity, passenger foot traffic is moving easily to and from the downtown shuttle buses.

Next year, this smoothly-flowing system could be put to the test, with over 400,000 passengers projected to arrive in Sitka, many aboard neo-Panamax class ships like Ovation of the Seas, which holds 4,900 paying customers. In 2018 Sitka had only 158,000 cruise passengers, and a little more than 200,000 in 2019. McGraw’s cruise terminal is helping drive that increase, but he’s attuned to the interests of the community, and to Royal Carribean, which bought a minority interest in the dock itself.

“My hope is that our downtown remains unique, it is and is walkable,” McGraw said. “That it just keeps that kind of small town character because, you know, even the Royal Caribbean executives that we’ve had here a number of occasions, that’s the one thing that they comment they make is, you know, this, this feels like authentic Alaska. And I think it’s important that we keep that. And to a certain extent, I think having the dock removed from downtown will help that a little bit because that already kind of distributes those people a little bit. You know, we can only bus so many people per hour into town and were opposed if you had, you know, two berths, right downtown, then you could have instantly 6,000 people walking around.”

Keeping those 6,000 people busy doing something other than overcrowding Sitka’s downtown district is critical to the vision of the terminal. McGraw’s tour subsidiary, Adventure Sitka, has struck a deal with Shee Atika, Inc, Sitka’s urban Native Corporation, to build an adventure park with zip lines and trails on  17 acres of leased land adjacent to the terminal. At the other end of the road system, Adventure Sitka plans to pick up passengers by boat in Silver Bay, and take them to the far end of the bay for kayak tours, based out of an old hunting cabin McGraw’s family has owned for years.

Family is an important aspect of the business. The McGraws have been in construction for decades in Sitka, thinking big, and building big.

When the 964-foot Serenade of the Seas and the 936-foot Nieuw Amsterdam pulled into port this morning, there wasn’t a crew of beefy longshormen to meet them. McGraw, his 12-year old son, and his dad tied up the ships, along with an employee from their boatyard.

This is how things roll out here.

“It only takes about 45 minutes to tie up a ship, and 20 minutes to untie a ship,” said McGraw. “So, you know, hiring full time staff just for an hour and a half a day is not really practical, and with how difficult it is to find help right now. It works where we just do it.”

McGraw says he’s going to spend the winter working on organization at the Sitka Sound Cruise terminal, so each one of those 400,000 passengers next summer can disembark and find their shuttles or tours without needing to ask anyone. McGraw built it, and it looks like they are in fact coming.

(movie clip, Field of Dreams)

…And it will be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces…

The news that a bill allowing cruise ships to sail to Alaska later this summer is both a welcome surprise and unexpected challenge for the people who run Sitka’s port.

The problem? The number of ships and the number of passengers coming in July remain big question marks, and the summer season is already under way.

It was only just a short while ago — May 4 — that Sen. Dan Sullivan was in Sitka bearing bad news: The Alaska Tourism Restoration Act had failed to win unanimous consent in the United States Senate, and there was no telling when it might return for another vote.

Giving a break to foreign-flagged cruise companies has never been an especially popular idea in Washington DC.

“I think your point about not having a lot of friends is a pretty good description of what goes on in Congress,” Sullivan said in an interview with Sitka media during his visit.

What may have changed in the meantime is that Sullivan, his senate colleague Lisa Murkowski, and Congressman Don Young somehow succeeded in making this a bill more about helping Alaskans, rather than helping cruise lines, and it won passage. Once Pres. Biden puts his pen to it, the ships will be able to sail directly between Seattle and Alaska, without an interim stop in Canada to comply with the 135-year old Passenger Vessel Services Act.

(Update 5-24-21: President Biden signed the bill on Monday, May 24, 2021.)

The question is, now what?

“Until I see the bow of the ship, I don’t know,” said Fred Reeder.

Fred Reeder is the Sitka port manager for the Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy on May 21 issued a news release announcing the return of Princess (July 25-Sep 26), Carnival (July 27-Sep 14), and Holland America (July 24-Oct 2) cruise lines to the Alaska market beginning near the end of July.

Although Reeder may be just a little bit skeptical that the cruise lines will be able to sell berths and staff their huge ships in less than two month’s time, he doesn’t see any reason not to share Gov. Dunleavy’s outlook.

“I guess I’m as optimistic as the governor,” said Reeder. “If he says we’re going to have cruise ships, it gives me some hope that we might have some.”

Reeder’s staff for the summer is already in place: In Sitka it’s himself and one other person in the office, and two security guards. This is how many he needs to manage the smaller ships calling in Sitka, those with fewer than 200 passengers which were never affected by Canada’s port closures. In a non-pandemic year, he might have 2-3 times that number, to transport crew members boarding or leaving ships in Sitka. But he doesn’t see the need this year.

“I think once they get their crew on board and they’ve all been tested, I would assume that they’re not going to do a lot of switching of crew around.”

Reeder’s flexibility isn’t shared by the Sitka Cruise Terminal, Sitka’s privately-owned cruise ship dock. Owner Chris McGraw launched a major expansion of his facility a couple of years ago, but slowed work down when 2021 looked like it was going to be another summer without ships.

The passage of the bill has caused him to step up the pace.

“We’re not quite done yet, but now we’re going to make sure and put the manpower on it and have everything wrapped up here in the next few weeks,” said McGraw.

McGraw says that cruise lines began booking passengers shortly after the Alaska Tourism Restoration Act passed both houses of Congress, and that he’s confident Sitka will see ships this summer. What he’s not so confident about, is what those passengers will see when they land at his terminal. The mall-like structure will be done, but all the vendors and attractions won’t be there yet.

“As far as our development complex out here, a lot of the spaces won’t be finished on the inside,” said McGraw. “The restaurant won’t be open, so passengers will see an empty space. And they’ll realize that it’s probably because of (delays due to) covid.”

McGraw says industry officials have been unable to tell him how many guests they’ll be bringing to his port. Nevertheless, he’ll be trying to increase his staff to accommodate them — a hiring process that normally takes place in the winter.

Despite the challenges, shore agent Fred Reeder is upbeat that cruise ships appear likely to make a comeback in Sitka this summer. It’s a sign that “we’re getting through all this,” and he likens it to the feeling of getting vaccinated: “A burden was lifted that I didn’t know I had.”

And, as a former mayor and school board president, Reeder is excited to share his town.

“Seeing visitor, people enjoying what we see every day is a good thing,” he said.

The cruise industry in Southeast Alaska remains frustrated by Canada’s decision to close its ports to large ships for the year, effectively prohibiting anything close to a typical visitor season in 2021. But in 2022, the cruise rebound in ports like Sitka could be staggering.

Representatives from the industry outlined some of the barriers to cruising in the coming season, and warned about a record surge in the next, during a presentation to the Sitka Chamber of Commerce (2-17-21).

Mike Tibbles is with the Cruise Lines International Association in Juneau. CLIA represents 17 of the cruise lines that sail in Southeast, from the biggest players in the market, to some of the small ships.

Canada’s announcement in early February that it would not open its ports to ships with more than 100 passengers for another year amounted to putting a tourniquet on Alaskan cruising. But he thinks Canada’s no-sail order could be revised under the right circumstances.

“So I think we were a little surprised that it went all the way out to February of ‘22,” said Tibbles. “But we have been continuing to communicate with Canadian officials. They’ve indicated that they’re focused on the health aspect, and that if conditions improve, an interim order is not as tough as a regulation. So that date could potentially be revisited.”

But it’s not just a matter of Canada rescinding its order. Tibbles explained that the US Centers for Disease Control had replaced its own no-sail order with a framework that allows cruising, under rigorous safety guidelines that cover everything from single-use berths for crew members and lavatories, to test sailings and safety plans for port communities. Putting a cruise season together under these terms — on short notice — would be an extraordinary challenge.

“We have a really high hurdle here,” said Tibbles. “It’s going to be extremely difficult to align these things — getting the guidance from the CDC and meeting those requirements, finding some solution to the announcement from Canada, and then getting all the plans in place with the local communities before sailing.”

Even if there was movement from Alaska’s congressional delegation for a workaround for the Passenger Vessel Services Act — the law which requires all foreign-flagged ships to stop in a foreign port while on their Alaskan itineraries — Tibble said, “We have an uphill fight.”

There could be another kind of fight in 2022, however, if the COVID pandemic is brought under control: The struggle of Southeast communities to keep their heads above water under a deluge of cruise visitors.

Chris McGraw runs what was formerly known as “Old Sitka Dock,” and has now been rebranded as the “Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal.” He said that Royal Carribean was adding three ships to  its Southeast Alaska itinerary.

“And two of those ships will be their Quantum-class ships,” he said, “which have capacities in excess of 4,000 passengers.”

That could push Sitka’s cruise visitor count in 2022 to over 400,000, a record for the community. McGraw is investing in a new passenger terminal at his facility, expanding its capacity from just over 2,000 people to something around 9,000. He’s uprgraded his docks to accommodate two of the 1,100-foot Quantum-class ships.

He wants the rest of Sitka to be ready.

“Looking forward to 2022 I think Sitka really needs to start planning to adequately accommodate from both a local perspective and a visitor perspective, these passenger volumes,” said McGraw. “Planning for Centennial Hall needs to be developed, the large shuttle traffic.”

McGraw said that there could be over 40 days in the summer of 2022 with over 5,000 cruise passengers in town, which would mean running 25 shuttles. He noted that Sitka’s downtown Lincoln Street corridor feels crowded when there are only 1,500 passengers in town.

“And we’re going to have days when we have 8,000 passengers,” he warned, “and the sidewalks, the traffic — that all needs to be improved in my opinion.”

He recommended that anybody in the industry begin thinking about the issues stemming from such large increases in volume, and that local government should begin planning. He said, “Everyone should be able to enjoy themselves and live in Sitka without feeling like we’re being overrun with visitors.”