KRBD - Ketchikan

It’s official: A Ketchikan woman now holds the Guinness World Record for “largest female mouth gape.” That’s how wide you can open your mouth vertically.

Guinness World Records announced Marie Pearl Zellmer Robinson as the new record holder on April 9. In an accompanying video, Robinson narrates as she fits a cheeseburger stacked 10 patties high between her teeth.

A Ketchikan dentist measured her open jaw at over three inches wide. The measurements varied but Guinness reported an average of 7.28 centimeters. Robinson said she was able to get up to 7.62 centimeters and may still be widening.

“I’m pretty sure I can beat my own record in the future as well,” Robinson said in her Guinness World Records video.

She shattered the 6.52-centimeter record previously held by Samantha Ramsdell, a Connecticut woman.

“Holding a record for something is like making a fact that the whole world can learn from. And people can look at that and think “that’s something that really exists,” she said.

Robinson and her husband co-founded a local delivery service called Ketch-A-Courier. She told KRBD in an interview prior to setting the record that she was inspired to reach for fame by an earlier Ketchikan record – when nearly 2,000 Ketchikan residents donned rainboots a little over a decade ago and broke the world record for “largest rainboot race.”

“Every time I see somebody do something amazing, I’m like, ‘Well, I can’t do that,'” she said. “But this one was one that I could do, and I surprised myself even.”

Robinson said if anyone thinks they can beat her world-class jaw, she welcomes the challenge.

A rockslide near Ketchikan on Thursday morning has blocked the island’s main road, leaving people who live north of the slide cut off from the city and its airport. It’s not clear when the road will be open again, but city and borough officials are urging residents to make plans for an extended closure.

“We understand how frustrating it is,” said Alaska Department of Transportation spokesman Sam Dapcevich. “It’s divided the community literally, and we’re hoping to get it reopened as soon as possible, so that people can get where they need to go.”

The slide came down at 10:55 a.m. near Wolfe Point just north of the airport ferry terminal, completely blocking Tongass Avenue. SECON, a construction company contracted by the Transportation Department, has been doing blasting in recent days along the hillside where the slide occurred as part of a hazard mitigation project to improve the slope’s stability.

Dapcevich said it’s too early to say if that caused the slide.

“I do know that the construction work at that area was to mitigate the hazards that already existed. So there’s been rock slides there in the past, and that’s why they’re working there,” Dapcevich said.

SECON spokeswoman Marianne Kordowski directed questions to the  Transportation Department.

City and borough officials said in a press release that they can’t begin clearing the road until state landslide experts can assess the stability of the hillside. They are expected to arrive around 5p.m. Thursday evening.

But Dapcevich said Department of Transportation geological engineers have already begun the assessment while they’re in transit.

“They just want to make sure that the risk is low of more material coming down before they start sending people in there,” he said.

For now, Allen Marine Tours is shuttling trapped residents across the slide area with a tour boat, which is going back and forth between Taquan on the south side of the slide to The Ketch on the north side. To use the free service, call 907-228-4635.

There are two fire stations north of the slide, but the island’s only hospital is south of the slide. Officials say they have a workaround in place to transport hospital patients across the slide zone.

Borough transit services are suspended for areas north of the slide.

The state Department of Transportation wrote on social media that the slide location is “complex and unsafe,” but that they would work to clear a single lane for emergency vehicles once geologists give the OK.

The city and borough has launched a joint emergency operations center, similar to last August’s fatal landslide in the White Cliff neighborhood. Emergency responders are currently setting up lights in preparation to work through the night.

Content warning: this story includes details of possible animal abuse that some readers might find disturbing.

The remains of two French bulldogs that went missing on Southeast Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island over a month ago were found in a pair of crab pots on Friday.

The dogs belonged to Prince of Wales residents Esther, Kane, and Shane Martin. According to Kane Martin, the dogs disappeared just before Valentine’s Day. He’d taken them to work at a logging operation near Thorne Bay.

“We take the dogs to work with us every day and they just run back and forth between us while we’re working,” Martin said. “At about 9:30 a.m., we didn’t see them anymore. We figured they just went up and stayed at the pickup but they didn’t. Somebody came by and picked them up.”

Martin said he thinks someone abducted the dogs from Sandy Beach Road near the timber site. They were about a year old.

“They were great little dogs, I mean, just lovable as hell. I’m sure that’s why they just jumped in somebody’s rig with them,” he said.

Martin and his family posted flyers with pictures of the missing dogs – named Whiskey and Yoda. They advertised a $500 reward for their return. After a couple weeks without a lead, they doubled the reward.

About a month later, Alaska Wildlife Troopers were doing routine inspections of shellfish pots around Thorne Bay Harbor. They hauled up two crab pots that each had the remains of a dog in them. Troopers compared photographs and information from the Martins. They identified the dogs as Whiskey and Yoda.

According to Martin, law enforcement dropped the pots back in the water to see if their owner would come back for them, but someone came in the middle of the night and took the pots.

Trooper spokesman Austin McDaniel declined to share more information on the crab pots or their potential owner. He said the case is being investigated and troopers are attempting to corroborate information from potential witnesses before sharing it with the public.

Martin said he is also offering a $2,500 reward for information on the people involved.

“The troopers told me they thought it was something personal. I mean, there’s only one person on this island that has any kind of vendetta against me at all and it’s not even that much that I know of. I mean, I’ve lived here my whole life,” he said.

Anyone with information regarding the disappearance of the bulldogs are encouraged to contact the Prince of Wales Trooper Post at 907-826-2291.

For most people, being told you have a big mouth is fighting words. But for one Alaskan, it could mean a world record.

Marie Pearl Zellmer Robinson of Ketchikan is going for the Guinness record for “largest mouth gape (female).” That’s how wide you can open your mouth vertically. Robinson says she’s wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for a long time.

“Every time I see somebody do something amazing, I’m like, ‘Well, I can’t do that,’” she said. “But this one was one that I could do, and I surprised myself even.”

With her mouth closed, Robinson looks like anyone else. But not when she tilts her head back and opens wide. Robinson can easily fit a 12-oz. aluminum can between her teeth.

The current record, set by Samantha Ramsdell of Connecticut, is 6.52 centimeters. Ramsdell also holds the record for “world’s widest mouth” — she’s popular on social media for pushing things like wine bottles and Pringles cans past her shockingly wide-spread lips.

But when Robinson saw the height of Ramsdell’s open mouth, she thought she could do better. So she submitted an application to Guinness, and they accepted it.

But then she had to prove it. According to Robinson, there’s a very strict verification process. When she first went for the record over a year ago, she didn’t get the witness statements and the filming quite to Guinness’s exacting standards.

When she tried again, her gaping mouth had grown by a couple millimeters, which she attributes to practice. With her husband recording and local dentist David Albertson measuring with a set of steel calipers, Robinson’s open jaw clocked in at 7.62 centimeters. That’s about three inches — more than a centimeter larger than Ramsdell’s. The video and the numbers have been submitted to Guinness World Records.

Robinson has known she has a world-class mandible since she was a kid.

“I used to, as a child, shove large objects in my mouth for fun because, you know, when you have siblings you tend to stick stuff in your mouth,” she said. “To show off.”

Robinson said she doesn’t think the skill runs in the family, but it still may be genetic.

“I’m pretty sure what happened is my jaw is just positioned in such a way that it’s just slightly further back, like I can feel my jaw in my ear canal. Which most people apparently don’t,” she said.

Robinson and her husband co-founded a local delivery service called Ketch-A-Courier. Their white cars with a halibut on the side are hard to miss around town. But she says she was inspired to reach for fame by an earlier Ketchikan record.

A little over a decade ago, nearly 2,000 Ketchikan residents broke the world record for “largest rainboot race,” donning rainboots and marching across the Third Avenue Bypass. They were soon dethroned by an athletic club in Ireland.

Now it’s a waiting game for Robinson. She is hoping to see herself flexing her wide open mouth in the world record book by next year, if not sooner.

A fishing boat with one person believed to be aboard remains lost in Southeast Alaska waters near Ketchikan, a week after it was reported missing.

The 43-foot commercial geoduck clam dive boat Canis Majoris was last heard from Feb. 20 just north of Thorne Bay on Prince of Wales Island. The U.S. Coast Guard picked up an emergency radio transmission from the vessel at about 6:30 p.m. that evening.

Coast Guard Petty Officer John Hightower said Guardsmen responded aboard the cutter John McCormick, a 45-foot fast response boat dispatched from Ketchikan and a Jayhawk helicopter from Air Station Sitka. According to Hightower, crews sought the Canis Majoris for about 25 hours before suspending the search.

“They have a large number of factors that they take into account to determine the survivability of the person that’s being searched for,” Hightower said. “So they use all those factors to determine the optimal survivability of the missing person and how long it would be reasonable to search for them before shifting into a recovery position.”

Hightower said the Coast Guard has no word that anyone else was aboard the boat when it disappeared.

“It’s estimated that it was only the owner/operator,” he said. “Next of kin were contacted, and all the possible or suggested crew members and deckhands for the vessel were all contacted and they were confirmed to not be on the vessel.”

Canis Majoris is registered in the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission database to a Ketchikan man named David Klein. Alaska State Troopers listed Klein as a missing person on Saturday.

Hightower said when watchstanders received the distress signal they alerted the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry Hubbard, which was nearby in Clarence Strait en route to Juneau.

AMHS spokesman Sam Dapcevich told the Ketchikan Daily News that the Hubbard didn’t have passengers aboard at the time. She was headed to Juneau to resume service after an overhaul at Ketchikan’s Vigor shipyard. Dapcevich told the paper that the ferry sent crew on a speedboat to the site of the distress call. They found a life raft and floating debris but no survivors. The weather got worse and the ferry crew had to return to safety.

The Coast Guard asks anyone with information on Klein or the Canis Majoris to contact Ketchikan troopers at 907-225-5118, or the Coast Guard Southeast Alaska Command Center at 907-463-2980.

Ketchikan is joining other Southeast Alaska communities like Sitka, Juneau, and Skagway in collecting sales tax on goods and services purchased on board cruise ships while they’re docked in the First City. Ketchikan’s city and borough governments recently passed laws to repeal their preexisting exemption on sales tax for cruise ships.

At their meeting on Monday, the Ketchikan borough assembly discussed if cruise ships should pay sales tax. Up to this point, the dozens of cruise ships that dock in Ketchikan every year carrying millions of passengers are exempt from paying local sales tax in their onboard shops and restaurants and Borough Attorney Glenn Brown said it’s been a “burr under the saddle” for local businesses.

“It’s been a longstanding inequity for local brick-and-mortar businesses that sell similar items to what is sold aboard the vessel, where you have essentially one one operating tax-free and one not,” Brown said.

Brown explained that this borough ordinance would repeal that exemption, subjecting the cruisers to the same sales tax as everyone else in the Ketchikan area. Brown’s report estimated the additional sales tax revenue to the borough would be between $200,000 and $300,000.

“This is drafted so when they are in the territorial waters of the borough, its taxable sales aboard the vessel,” said Brown.

Assembly member Glen Thompson brought up the question of compliance. How do you enforce that a cruise ship is actually following the rules? Brown said, basically, you audit them.

But even then, Brown said there are other ways a cruise ship could skirt paying the tax.

“There is some anecdotal evidence from Juneau that some of the cruise lines in response to the removal of the exemption closed their stores, closed their restaurants aboard the vessel. So it’s really hard to tell what the market will do in response to the removal of this. There may be some sales that no longer occur,” he said.

Assembly member Jaimie Palmer owns a small business in town. She said that if cruisers can’t spend money at the on-board store and have to buy local, that’s even better.

“I just want to let everyone know we’ve already been called idiots online for considering this,” she said. “There was an article today I saw that said we were really dumb to do this, and it’s going to make all the ships bypass us, which clearly its not because the other communities north have been doing it for a while. And I fully support this, and think it’s about time. And if there’s other exemptions like this out there that I hope that we find them and remove them also.”

Assembly member Sharli Arntzen said that the onboard tax levels the playing field for local businesses serving tourists.

The ordinance passed the borough assembly 6-1.

The vote came just four days after the Ketchikan City Council approved their ordinance to repeal the same exemption. City Manager Delilah Walsh said in a letter that the intergovernmental initiative was borne out of council members Riley Gass and Mark Flora saying that Ketchikan needs to maximize visitor revenue to help the city’s struggling finances.

The ordinance passed through the city council with very little debate.