KFSK - Petersburg

It’s visitor season again in Petersburg, and cruise ship passengers are already wandering the streets in brightly colored jackets. This year a Norwegian cruise line is stopping here for the first time, with a state-of-the-art hybrid ship. And it’s excited to connect with Petersburg’s Norwegian roots.

Passengers arrive in small, bright orange boats. They attend a cultural presentation at the Sons of Norway Hall. And outside, they snap pictures of the Viking ship. It’s a little smaller than their cruise ship, the Roald Amundsen. But it shares the same roots.

“Roald Amundsen was — is — the national hero of Norway,” said Steffen Biersack, an expedition leader with the cruise line. “He’s the first man who actually flew over the North Pole with a with an airship, which then landed close to Nome. So that’s why in Nome, and on the other side, where they started in Svalbard, they have the identical bust of Roald Amundsen in bronze. And he was the very first man sailing through the Northwest Passage. So he’s quite the explorer.”

The MS Roald Amundsen is one of the larger ships to visit Petersburg and can hold just over 500 passengers. It stays out in Frederick Sound and lighters passengers in on smaller boats. It’s sailing to Alaska this summer for the first time after voyages scheduled for 2020 were canceled due to the pandemic.

Hurtigruten Expeditions, the cruise line, began in Norway in the late 1800’s when it established a coastal route.

“In Norway, hardly any places are connected by street. So they had to have a system to provide the people in the fjords with food with news with whatever it is, and then they also transported fish, herring mostly on the coast,” Biersack said.

And if that sounds familiar, the feeling is mutual. Biersack said of Southeast Alaska, “It’s such a stunning country. It’s like Norway on steroids, you know? It’s so much wilder. The peaks are higher. The trees are taller. It’s great.”

The Roald Amundsen was completed in 2019 and  features cutting-edge technology. It’s a hybrid vessel and uses battery packs in conjunction with its four diesel generators. One of the crew described it as a giant floating Prius. Its propellers face forward, so they pull the ship through the water rather than pushing it. And while the ship does have two anchors on board, it doesn’t use them much.

“We have something else which we call DP – dynamic positioning,” said Biersack. “That means the ship has very, very accurate GPS systems, several of them. And this dynamic positioning is operating the bow thrusters and the propellers and keeps the ship in position without an anchor. And it’s so precise that we do not move more than five or four centimeters at all. Even when the wind picks up, then the system kicks in and gives us more stability. So then we can stay in a spot where an anchor would actually not catch.”

The ship will continue to Vancouver and then turn around for its next voyage up to Nome. It’s scheduled to call in Petersburg two more times this summer.

“I had a lot of very big honchos on the ship last trip, because it was the very first time we did that,” said Biersack. “And we all agreed that Petersburg is the coziest of the places. Definitely. And you have a Viking ship.”

During the Roald Amundsen’s next stop, the Petersburg Chamber of Commerce plans to present it with a wooden plaque, hand painted in traditional Norwegian style.

Per capita, Alaska is the most-scammed state in the country, according to the state’s Department of Law. So far this year, there have been close to a thousand reports of fraud. As CoastAlaska’s Angela Denning reports, some scammers pretend to be local businesses, requiring residents to stay extra-vigilant.

When 73-year-old John Havrilek of Petersburg saw an email from GCI, his internet provider, he read through it carefully. There had been changes to his services recently and he wanted to know what’s next.

“It looked very legit,” he said. “It had the GCI logo on it and everything.”

It told him that in order to continue services to reply with his account and password, which he did. The next thing he knew he had friends contacting him.

“One call after another after another, people that we had in our email list called us and said, did you just email me? And this is from people all over the country, relatives and things like this,” Havrilek said. “And I said, ‘No.’ And they said, ‘Well, we just got an email from you saying, ‘Hi, are you busy and could you email me? Regards John.”

A few friends did respond to the email and they told Havrilek the scammers—pretending to be him–wanted something specific.

“They asked for, ‘Oh, I’m trying to get a $300 Amazon gift certificate, could you help me?” Havrilek said.

As far as Havrilek knows, none of his friends gave the scammers any money. He changed his email account and contacted GCI about it.

This type of scam, called an imposter scam or phishing, is by far the most common type in Alaska. It’s when someone pretends to be somebody else to get money. Sometimes it’s a familiar person and other times they’re purporting to be from organizations like the FBI, social security, the IRS or banks.

They all have one thing in common. There’s a problem.

“Either there’s a problem or something that you need to do,” said Assistant Attorney General John Haley of the Alaska Department of Law. “You’re locked out of your account, you need to click this link.”

Haley says the scammers will ask for an immediate response and sometimes threaten to arrest the victims.

“You know, I think most people would like to think they wouldn’t be fooled by these, but people are,” said Haley.

Alaskans lose a lot of money this way. Of scams reported so far this year, residents have lost $5.5 million, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Last year it was $14.2 million.

“We have people who go around from store to store buying thousands and thousands of dollars worth of gift cards giving the money to a scammer who they believe works for the IRS or the FBI,” Haley said.

Besides gift cards, they’ll often ask to be paid in Bitcoin transfers or cryptocurrency.

GCI spokesperson Josh Edge says the company is aware of scams that use GCI’s name and logo, like the one involving the Petersburg resident.

“Unfortunately, we do receive reports of similar scams and phishing attempts very regularly,” he said.

Edge says sometimes it can be hard to identify scams, but if there’s a doubt, Alaskans should not hesitate to call GCI.

“If it seems suspicious at all, if they’re asking for any types of personal information, passwords, things like that, reach out to us directly,” Edge said.

According to Haley, although seniors lose the most money through fraud, 18 to 30-year-olds actually get scammed the most. He says scammers will pay to find out who to target.

“There’s a large market for information and some of that on the dark web and some of that frankly out in the open,” Haley said. “So, it is easier for scammers to go out and buy information to try and find the right people to target, which I think is unfortunate.”

Scammers are often working from other countries where American dollars are worth a lot more.

“You know, they’re able to scam somebody and get $5,000 out of it,” Haley said. “I mean, that’s such a sort of tempting target.”

If someone does give scammers information by accident, Haley says they should consider freezing their credit card and bank accounts, at least temporarily. You can also call the consumer protection line of the Attorney General’s Office at (907) 269-5200.

Other than that, the best line of defense is to stay vigilant.

A fishing and hunting business on eastern Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska is cleaning up after a fire destroyed most of its buildings right at the start of the busy season.

The fire burned early on May 31 at the Ruff It Resort, a group of cabins and general store in Whale Pass, a community of around 84 full time residents and many seasonal visitors.

Douglas Browand, who works and lives there, described a narrow escape.

“I woke up at 2 in the morning — my little dog woke me up and my whole cabin was on fire,” Browand said. “I picked up my dog and I ran out of my cabin and put my dog down. And I tried to turn back around to come in to at least grab my wallet, and the whole place was just on fire. It just — one cabin went off after another until all of them were lit up.”

The fire burned five cabins and two boat houses and caused newly filled propane tanks to explode. The main house also sustained major damage.

Browand said the four people and their pets living in the buildings were able to escape the fire. The community’s volunteer fire department and neighbors helped battle the fire.

Browand does not think the business will be able to operate this summer and will have to cancel bookings.

“We’re kind of coming to grips with that. You know, at this point, we’ve got a hell of a mess to clean up,” he said. “There’s just no way. We’re going to just try and keep a roof over our own head at this point.”

There’s no word yet on the cause of the fire.

A small group of Petersburg High School students calculated the latest position of the terminus of the southernmost tidewater glacier in the northern hemisphere. They’re part of a decades-long tradition to survey the LeConte Glacier.

High school math teacher Tom Thompson assigned data points to the sophomores, juniors and seniors who were gathered to eat pizza and crunch the numbers. Just days before they spent the day recording those points using survey equipment, helicoptered up to spots high up on either side of the steep walled fjord.

Senior Lathum Johnson used a software design program called Rhino to map out the survey points.

“It kind of shows how far the glacier is receding or if it’s increased since the last time,” he said. “I guess it’s been really stable over the last few years which is awesome. It’s a lot better than what was happening before.”

Using Rhino is new. The Forest Service used to do this part of the survey for the students.

“So just because the Forest Service is super busy right now, I took a class a couple years ago that’s allowed me to kind of figure this out and doodle on my own,” Johnson said. “So kind of just working and figuring out as I go, watching YouTube videos and stuff.”

Johnson had a scheduling conflict and was disappointed not to be able to travel to the glacier this year. But he recommends the experience.

“The glacier trip, taking a helicopter up and being able to look at LeConte Glacier is definitely one of the highlights of high school,” he said. “So I totally recommend it for any kids who want to try it out as they’re coming up through middle school and elementary school as something to look forward to and definitely apply for because it’s amazing.”

The students give up their lunchtimes Wednesday throughout the year to learn how to use the surveying equipment and trigonometry they’ll need.

“We take angles from the south side to a specific point on the glacier,” said DD Toyomura, looking down at a complex drawing of the angles she recorded. “Then we fly over to the north side and try to find the same point on that side and then take the angle measure of that point. And then since we know the distance between the north side and the south side, we use the law of sines to find the lengths to the point…After we find the side lengths, we use the law of sines again to find the longitude and departure of that point. And then we use those vectors to graph it on the graph. And if it lines up about then that’s where we plot that point.”

Part of the challenge is making sure one group on the north side of the fjord and another on the south side are taking a sight on the same spot on the ice face thousands of feet away. And sometimes that point they’ve just recorded breaks off from the glacier and disappears. That only happened with one this year and the students seem pretty happy with the data they collected.

They had some help from a couple of alumni of the program, Lydia Martin and Julian Cumps, back from college.

“I was invited back just to help out with doing the math again,” said Cumps. “I’ve been working on my computer trying to kind of automate the process, just kind of testing out some different functions and seeing if there’s an easy way to check our work.”

On the desk nearby there are printouts from previous year’s mapping and photos of the teams of prior students who’ve been in the program. It was started in 1983 by teacher Paul Bowen and has happened almost every year since then, carried on by other instructors and now Thompson.

“It’s such a big glacier when you’re looking at it from our perspective, it’s really hard to see the recession and procession until you really plot the data, because it looks kind of the same and you might realize that it’s moved 500 feet or 1000 feet either way, but what we plotted on Friday could be totally different here on Monday, because even as we were there it calves so much,” Thompson said. “And if anybody’s been out there recently LeConte is full of ice. There’s a lot of ice moving off that thing so it’s, it’s a living body.”

Prior students have documented some big retreats of the ice sheet but it now hits tidewater in a relatively narrower and shallower part of the fjord. It’s position has been somewhat stable in recent years.

For another senior, Leiah Kittams this year was her second surveying the glacier and she was able to lead her group.

“I guess going up a second time I just had more knowledge of what we were supposed to do like setting up and then I guess trying to find the angles in the first place because you have time match up the two different spots from what would be on the north side and what would be on the south side,” Kittams said. “So it’s a lot of like re-imagining where the points are actually at on the glacier.”

Another senior Rose Quitslund helped with calculations last year, but didn’t make the trip to survey the ice until this year. She said it’s a much different perspective than her past experiences.

“It’s spectacular,” Quitslund said. “I’ve gone out to the glacier so many times since I was a little kid just going out on the boat with my dad, and it’s such a different experience getting helicoptered out there because the elevation that we’re at it’s about 1200 feet I think and so you can just really see the whole entire glacier and the bay. And it’s like a birds eye view of it.”

The survey captures the ice sheet position at just one point in time – it’s dynamic and can change dramatically from day to day. But they try to do the survey around the same time every year to make a good comparison. This year’s data shows the terminus advanced compared to last year, and it’s also further out in the fjord from positions mapped in 2019 and 2018.

It’s a special moment, watching a gigantic humpback going for a deep dive. The whale’s back arches and the tail swings up, disappearing below the surface like the pointed toes of an Olympic diver.

The black-and-white patterns on the underside of a whale’s tail fins, or flukes, are unique. Now a citizen science program called Happy Whale uses artificial intelligence to quickly identify humpbacks from those patterns.

Through photographs shared by whale watchers, Happy Whale has recorded thousands of whales that travel to and from Alaska.

“Like facial recognition, we can tell who it is,” said Ted Cheeseman, an expedition scientist who has studied whales all over the world, including in Antarctica. He co-founded Happy Whale as a way to track humpbacks, a species that’s known to travel thousands of miles.

It’s helping to answer a lot of questions about their individual behavior.

“Who does the whale hang out with? Does the whale have a calf?” Cheeseman said. “What is the larger story here such that we can build family relationships and so on, tell more of the story of the individual. To me, that’s a huge part of this.”

The difference between this photo ID program and others in the past is the manpower needed. Happy Whale uses an automated computer program to ID the photos instead of people doing it by hand. Just one full-time and two part-time employees run the database and confirm the results.

The program started in 2015 but took years to test and fine tune. Now, whale watchers can share their fluke photos and locations to the online database, which has identified 68,000 humpbacks worldwide.

The program started with 18,000 whale photos that had been previously identified by hand. Cheeseman says Happy Whale is more efficient.

“Somebody gives me a dataset of a thousand photos, it used to be that that would be an hour per photo,” Cheeseman said. “The actual matching time is now insignificant. If someone gives me a thousand photos I can tell them the next day that, ‘Oh, 700 of them are these known whales and these 300, those are probably new.'”

The program has documented about 30,000 humpbacks in the North Pacific, which Cheeseman expects is about 70% of the population.

Participants are rewarded for their work. They usually get an initial response within a few days to a week and get notices when their whale is spotted again.

Dennis Rogers, a long-time whale watching guide in Petersburg, has uploaded over 5,500 photos to the program.

“It’s very interesting just to see the migrations,” Rogers said. “Some of these whales go to Hawaii for the winter, and they’re re-sighted there, which we get a notification when that re-sighting happens. Some of our whales go to Mexico. It’s real interesting, some of our whales go to Mexico one year and to Hawaii the next year.”

Rogers encourages his clients to send in their photos as well. He says other tracking systems, including satellite tags, can fall off whales within days.

“This is purely un-invasive and gives a great amount of information over time. Some of our whales, we’ve been tracking close to 40 years,” Rogers said.

The program has found some unusual migrations in Alaska’s individual whales, said Scott Roberge, a board member for Petersburg’s Marine Mammal Center.

“They’ve followed one from Alaska to Hawaii to Japan back to Alaska,” Roberge said. “Made the loop of the North Pacific.”

Roberge also contributes photographs and enjoys getting the feedback.

“It’s incredible to get that information and to get the email that says, ‘Oh, the whale that you took a picture of last summer was just found in Hawaii, and it just had a baby,” he said.

Cheeseman believes that over 95% of humpbacks in Southeast Alaska are in the database already. But the program is expanding. Cheeseman hopes to automate dorsal fin recognition within the year, which would allow them to identify and track orcas and other species a lot faster.

Cheeseman gave a presentation in Petersburg on May 18 at the Wright Auditorium.

Tourist season is beginning in Southeast Alaska, which likely means around a half million people will be hoping to see whales. Residents also look forward to encounters out on the water. But sharing space with the marine giants isn’t always easy.

Mike Schwartz of Petersburg, who is 80 years old, has been around whales his whole life. As a fisherman and outdoorsman, he’s had many close encounters. Once, while watching a group of humpbacks bubble feeding, he ended up a little closer than he wanted.

“One whale started bubble feeding on the far side, and then opposite him, maybe a hundred feet, another whale started bubble feeding,” Schwartz said. “So, the two of them bubble fed all the way into a circle.

Schwartz found his boat in the middle.

“It was a little bit unsettling to realize you’re inside the bubble circle,” he said. “And what do I do now? And then all of sudden they’re there, they’re all there. And of course, the herring are all squirting out of their mouth.”

Humpback whales are common in the region, even in high-traffic areas. Orcas or killer whales show up too. Schwartz remembers traveling with his wife from Ketchikan to Petersburg when they discovered they weren’t alone.

“It was rain thick and when everything lifted we realized we were in the middle of the biggest pod of killer whales we’d ever seen,” Schwartz said. “We quit counting at 80 and they would come up right alongside the boat.”

It’s not always intuitive how to act around whales, says Suzie Teerlink, a marine mammal specialist with the Protected Resources Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It is really difficult to interpret the behaviors because all the behaviors that you might see could be occurring for lots of different reasons,” she said.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act protects whales from harassment. Teerlink says that can mean anything that might change their natural behavior.

In 2019, NOAA issued eight on-site citations, according to the law enforcement office in Juneau. In an email, the office says they have fined a tour company nearly $9,000 for dropping off paddleboarders to approach humpback whales. They fined another company nearly $4,500 for approaching killer whales head-on in a narrow pass causing the whales to turn around and swim away.

In general, though, it can be very difficult to prove wrongdoings just from complaints. Instead, NOAA likes to focus on education.

Teerlink says when people encounter whales in the wild, they should remember that the animals are busy doing something, often feeding, nursing, resting or socializing.

“They have an agenda, they have things they need to be doing,” Teerlink said. “And it might not be visible from the surface of the water.”

She discourages people from trying to interpret whales’ behaviors. A tail slap, for example, could mean several things like a sign of distress or a form of communication within the pod.

Teerlink says they may be behaving in an interesting way but it’s not for the sake of people. They aren’t — as some people like to say — “putting on a show”.

“There isn’t a part of their biology that is driven to perform,” Teerlink said. “There isn’t a show; they’re not trying to pull in humans to, you know, participate. It isn’t for entertaining boats.”

Over 20 years ago, a rule was established in Alaska requiring whale watchers to be 100 yards from humpback whales. Teerlink says it’s a good practice for all marine mammals.

But sometimes judging proximity is hard. Whales can swim underwater and surface near a boat, something that Mike Schwartz knows all too well.

And for him, it’s often unforgettable and emotional.

“For me it’s a deeply, deeply spiritual experience,” he said. “It’s hard to put into words.”

Whales are intriguing for residents, tourists and tour guides alike. Teerlink says one thing that could benefit tour companies is signing up for the whale SENSE program. It promotes stewardship and education for responsible whale watching.