Tourism

The first large cruise ship of the season arrived in Sitka on Wednesday. It was also Alaska’s first port call by a big cruise ship since 2019.

Serenade of the Seas’ arrival coincided with a major coronavirus outbreak in Sitka, but that didn’t seem to affect the number of passengers visiting town — all of whom were vaccinated, except for children. There simply weren’t that many of them.

In the urban center — the heartbeat of Sitka — you could barely feel a pulse. Chairs were on tables at the Back Door Cafe, and two or three folks were getting coffee to go.

There were a couple of shoppers in the bookstore and one in the Artists Cooperative. The day was breezy and gray — but not bad for Southeast Alaska.

A couple of blocks away at Centennial Hall, where cruise passengers catch their shuttles to the dock, there were just a few scattered people walking around. Pam and Patrick McDaniels from Layton, Utah were eating fish and chips.

They said they were enjoying the low density on the Serenade of the Seas. It has a capacity of 2,476 passengers, but this cruise has one-quarter of that, with just 632 guests and 804 crew. Which is part of Royal Caribbean’s startup plan, according to Fred Reeder, the Sitka port director for the Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska.

The McDaniels say they’re satisfied with the safety precautions, which include a vaccination requirement for everyone who is eligible to be vaccinated. So they feel safe on the ship — but what about in Sitka? The community is experiencing the biggest coronavirus surge of the pandemic, with over 200 active cases.

“We’ve heard that. So is every place. So is Utah where we’re at,” Pam McDaniels said. “There were 800 new cases in Salt Lake, just in the last 24 hours.”

The arrival of the Serenade of the Seas is the first of around two dozen cruise ship calls scheduled for Sitka between now and the end of September, although many late season ships cancel when the weather worsens on the outer coast.

It did not take the non-existent 2020 cruise season to refocus the strategies of Sitka’s downtown merchants.

Across from Harrigan Centennial Hall, in prime cruise passenger turf, Shirley Robards is staffing the desk at Stereo North. She says she hasn’t seen much traffic today, but that’s not really her market anymore.

“We were not dependent on cruise passengers,” Robards said. “We used to be, but that was before Amazon. When Amazon came in, it kind of took off. And Tuffy (Shirley’s son) thought about it and thought about it, and said I think we’re going to do furniture.”

And just because she’s not tethered to the cruise trade doesn’t mean that Robards doesn’t care. She’s an advocate for a visitor industry rebound that benefits everyone.

“I think it’s going to work out, I really do,” she said. “I really believe in God and I think that the people of Sitka just have to hang on and do what you can do and hope for the best.”

The Serenade of the Seas is scheduled to call again in Sitka on Wednesday, July 28. Holland America’s Nieuw Amsterdam is scheduled at the same time, giving Sitka its first two-ship day of the short — and quiet — 2021 season.

A small cruise ship that canceled a sailing this month because of COVID-19 cases plans to resume its summer schedule this week.

American Cruise Lines’ ship the American Constellation has been docked in Juneau since July 10. Three people tested positive for coronavirus and disembarked to recover in Petersburg July 9. The City and Borough of Juneau says the total case count from that ship eventually reached 16. Nine have since recovered. Juneau’s emergency operations center planned another round of testing for that ship Tuesday, July 20.

The company is requiring COVID -19 vaccinations for its passengers on Alaska cruises. Both vaccinated passengers and unvaccinated crew members tested positive during the outbreak.

During a meeting Monday, Petersburg borough assembly member Jeff Meucci said he was generally happy with the local response but wanted to be more informed.

“I would just had liked to been maybe more in the loop as things were progressing, just so in case the assembly was asked to weigh in on something. I wasn’t quite prepared at that time but I think overall I’m pretty satisfied with the way things went,” Meucci said.

Petersburg disbanded its emergency operations center at the end of last month after the assembly voted to end local health mandates. The community had been requiring cruise ships to get prior approval from the borough’s health officer before docking here, but that ended last month as well. This outbreak occurred a little over a week after that requirement expired.

Borough manager Steve Giesbrecht explained that spread of information would not be as quick without the emergency operations center.

“I would encourage people that have questions to talk to public health and the hospital and to just say the updates are not going to come as fast and furious as they were when we had literally an entire team of borough department heads focused on it as well as many other staff,” Giesbrecht said.

A spokesperson for American Cruise Lines emailed Tuesday that the company planned to resume its schedule, with the ship departing Juneau on Wednesday, July 21. The company declined an interview request. The spokesperson said the cruise line’s protocols have worked.

The ship arrived early in Petersburg Thursday, July 8, seeking testing for a passenger showing symptoms. The first positive was confirmed by the following morning. Nevertheless, other passengers disembarked in Petersburg and circulated in the community that Friday.

Sandy Dixson is the borough’s emergency manager and took part in a conference call with state and local officials and cruise lines representatives on that Friday, July 9.

“They had pondered going to Ketchikan,” Dixson said. “There was a person from Ketchikan and they were like, yeah, we don’t think so. So they immediately made the decision to go back to Juneau and cancel the trip. So they called their people back. Unfortunately people were already out on excursions and roaming about town, which was very unfortunate. But I think they did a pretty good job. I think the communication went well.”

Dixson praised the work of the Petersburg Medical Center and public health nurse to respond to that ship to test passengers and offer vaccine to crew.

Borough assembly member and book store employee Chelsea Tremblay also hoped for quicker communication. She noted that another small cruise ship also had passengers in town that day.

“You know, going forward, if there’s a way to once some things are known, figuring out how to let the Chamber know so they can disburse it from there,” Tremblay suggested. “Because all of us doing front retail, life, interacting with folks, immediately as we’re all talking about it, we’re having face-to-face interactions. I’m seeing other community members coming in who I know are vulnerable. That’s where some of the disconnect, not even just from assembly side, just from public knowledge side, hoping we can dial that in even more,” she said.

The other passengers from that ship continued on to Juneau and flew out of the capital city after an early end to the voyage.

These were not the only COVID-19 cases reported in Petersburg that week. Following a busy weekend of events for the community’s Independence Day celebration, the medical center had already reported two positives in local residents earlier that week with no connection to this cruise voyage.

A growing COVID-19 outbreak in Sitka is not likely to affect Wednesday’s arrival of Alaska’s first large cruise ship to bring commercial passengers since 2019.

Royal Caribbean officials put out a statement Tuesday touting the Serenade of the Seas’ 7-day cruise to Alaska.

Sitka emergency operations center Incident Commander Craig Warren said Tuesday afternoon that, as far as he knows, the stop in Sitka is a go.

“We have contacted them and talked with them regarding the ship coming in tomorrow with our high COVID case count here,” Warren said. “And as it stands right now, they are still planning on coming in.”

That’s despite at least 175 active cases of COVID-19 in the community of less than 9,000 people.

Royal Caribbean executive Russell Benford said earlier this month that the cruise line monitors COVID-19 activity in the ports that it visits, and may adjust its itinerary.

“We’ve seen places around the world that are experiencing a spike. We have conversations internally, we have thresholds and protocols in place. And so if we feel like for the safety of our guests, our crew and the community, we need to bypass, we can do that. But that’s a conversation we’ll have with each of the communities. It won’t be a decision that we make in a vacuum, it’ll be in the context of communication and collaboration,” Benford said at an event commemorating the arrival of the Serenade’s test cruise in Ketchikan on July 9.

The line is requiring all passengers 16 and up to be fully vaccinated for its July cruises to Alaska. From August onward, the cruise line will require passengers 12 and older to be vaccinated.

Nearly everyone aboard the Serenade of the Seas — 97% of passengers and crew — is vaccinated, Royal Caribbean said in a statement Tuesday.

That means few restrictions for most passengers while in port. Fully vaccinated guests are free to book independent shore excursions or stroll through town without a tour group. Groups that include unvaccinated people — like families with kids — will be required to purchase tours through the cruise line.

Some have worried that high COVID-19 infection rates in Alaska port communities could lead to canceled port calls or restrictions on visitors. Small cruise ship operator UnCruise canceled two planned port calls in Ketchikan in May, citing a spike in cases in the community.

Cruise lines were required by Centers for Disease Control rules to coordinate with local authorities in the communities they visit. But Sitka’s EOC commander Craig Warren says the agreements are designed to protect communities from infected ships — not the other way around.

“In our port agreements, the multi-port agreement that Ketchikan also signed on to, we had put in there that the local health authority could turn a boat away if it had an outbreak,” he said. “But there was nothing regarding the opposite, turning away a boat for a large outbreak in the community.”

The inaugural 2021 voyage will go from Sitka to Hoonah’s Icy Strait Point, then on to Juneau and Ketchikan before returning to Seattle next week.

On Monday, the Juneau Assembly took one of its first substantive steps to follow through on a task force’s recommendations for managing the visitor industry.  

The first recommendation in the Visitor Industry Task Force’s final report (completed in March of 2020) was to establish a tourism management office in the city government, which means creating a new position for a tourism manager. 

“We have a mosaic of management on the waterfront, between Public Works, Parks and Rec, and Docks and Harbors, and it can be clunky, but it can work quite well, as well. And it requires a lot of coordination,” said City Manager Rorie Watt. 

Centralizing would mean the city could more easily work with the cruise industry with a holistic view. 

The position description hasn’t been written up yet, but Watt said there’s one specific duty that would give the city better leverage with the cruise ship industry. 

“The lynchpin though, I think for the success of a tourism manager is … that they have a role in the scheduling of the docks,” Watt said. 

The city owns two of the four berths large cruise ships can tie up to but largely leaves scheduling and logistics up to a private business that works with the cruise lines. 

Watt is working on budget legislation to pay for the position. That will still have to go through a public hearing process and Assembly vote before it’s final. He estimated $150,000 in cruise ship passenger fees would be enough to fund the position once hired through next June.

He said he hopes someone will be hired by September.

The Canadian government announced Monday that it will open its border Aug. 9 to vaccinated Americans.

Travelers will have to upload proof they’ve been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus for at least two weeks. They will also have to get tested within 72 hours of arrival and submit a negative test result. In most cases, Canada requires visitors to submit the information through the ArriveCAN app or web portal.

The Canada-U.S. border has been closed to nonessential travel since March of last year. Alaskans were generally allowed to pass if they could show they needed to transit Canada for work or school or to get home.

This is a developing story.

Canadian authorities say they’ll lift a pandemic-era ban on cruise ships in the country’s waters, but it won’t happen until after the end of Alaska’s 2021 cruise season. The decision means cruise ships could again sail from Vancouver and Victoria to Alaska in 2022.

“As Canadians have done their part to reduce the spread of COVID-19, our government continues to work hard to safely restart our economy and build back better. We will welcome cruise ships — an important part of our tourism sector — back in Canadian waters for the 2022 season,” Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra said in a statement.

Until this year, large cruise ships registered abroad were required to stop in Canada on their way from Seattle to Alaska to comply with federal law. But after Canada extended its cruise ship ban through the 2021 summer cruise season, Congress granted a temporary waiver to allow cruise ships to bypass a foreign stop.

The law that needed waiving was the Passenger Vessel Services Act or PVSA. It requires passenger ships sailing between domestic ports to be U.S.-built, owned and crewed. It’s meant to protect the U.S. shipbuilding and transportation industries.

The waiver expires when Canadian ports reopen. But at an event last week in Ketchikan, Sen. Lisa Murkowski said it might be time to change the law.

“I’m working with colleagues as we speak to look at some of the reforms that we might put in place, and how we can better ensure that when we’re talking about U.S. economies, it’s not only shipbuilding and jobs within the cruise industry, but it’s also the significance of protecting local economies,” Murkowski said.

Murkowski says her effort is limited to the PVSA; she said she is not pushing for reforms to the Jones Act which restricts cargo shipping between U.S. ports.

Canada’s ports reopen to cruise ships Nov. 1.