SITKA — The newest vessel in the Alaska Dream Cruise fleet suffered two groundings on two different coasts before it was revived with a 100-ton remodel by Allen Marine.
The 207-foot cruise vessel, previously owned by Cruise West, was called the Spirit of Nantucket when it grounded near Virginia Beach in 2007.
It was moved to Alaska and renamed the Spirit of Glacier Bay before grounding outside the National Park of its new namesake, in 2008. Shortly after that Allen Marine, which operates Alaska Dream Cruises, bought the vessel and, with it, a project.
“We removed, all told, approximately 100 tons net weight,” said Jamie Cagle, senior vice president at Allen Marine. “We removed some cabins, some deck structure, false smoke stack. Things like that.”
The hull was repaired in Seattle before the boat was brought to Sitka, but even so the boat that would be rechristened the Chichagof Dream was found to be out of conformance with U.S. Coast Guard requirements.
“We had to remove a lot of weight off the vessel, due to new stability requirements,” Cagle said. “It was just heavy in general.”
That meant the crew at Allen Marine had to remove nearly a story and a half of superstructure from the back deck, which is now a solarium.
Throughout the process, Cagle said, crews worked with the Coast Guard and marine architects on the required modifications, and in the process they also overhauled the entire interior.
The work also reduced the passenger capacity from around 100 to the present 70 or 80, Cagle said.
After the 2008 accident at Glacier Bay, the then-owners took the boat to Seattle for hull repairs, and it remained there until it was brought to Sitka at the end of 2014.
Cagle said his company has been working in the year and a half since that time to correct the boat’s stability problem.
“We’ve been working with the Coast Guard basically since we bought the vessel to figure out the best plan for the vessel and the best direction moving forward,” Cagle said. “Physically it took almost two years. With all the paperwork and the thought process, it took almost four.”
As for what the biggest overall change to the vessel was, Cagle said he couldn’t pick just one.
“We’ve touched everything on this boat. So yeah, it’d be hard to pinpoint any one thing. Obviously her profile is significantly different because we’ve removed 100 tons, but from the paint job to the fixture and the finishes, the plumbing and the things you don’t even see, everything is new,” Cagle said.
The Chichagof Dream completed its maiden voyage earlier this month following the two-year remodel project. It was in Sitka Sunday for an eight-hour turnaround before taking on a new load of passengers for another seven-day voyage through Southeast waters.
The skipper, Stu Vincent, said the overhauled ship has been living up to expectations.
“It’s going well. Any time you make this much change to a vessel there’s always the thought, well, what’s going to go wrong. But I’ve actually been surprised that things have gone as well as they have,” he said, adding that the scope of the remodel isn’t a surprise to him.
“Having been involved with the company and having done a lot of that work in the past myself, that’s one thing I can tell you about the Allen family. They’re not intimidated by any project. ‘No’ is not in their vocabulary,” he said.
For Cagle, the amount of work done in Sitka is a major point of pride.
“There’s a lot of pride in that we were able to do the vast majority of this project here locally. I’m pretty proud of what some local Sitka boys and gals can do,” Cagle said.
He wouldn’t say how much the project cost.
“Single project, this was definitely one of the largest. We’ve had other contracts that were larger but it was building multiple vessels for things like New York Waterways,” Cagle said, referring to the New York Harbor ferries the Allen company built in the 1990s.
The Chichagof Dream remodel didn’t stop simply at making the boat seaworthy. The vessel made the jump from grounded to grand, including a first-of-its-kind Himalayan Salt Cave, a sauna-like room with walls of Himalayan salt.
“The human body has approximately 87 minerals that it’s comprised of. Himalayan salt most closely resembles that. So being in the room it cleans the air. Obviously it’s giving off some of those elements. It’s relaxing. People come in and just enjoy the atmosphere,” Cagle said, adding that he’s tested it out personally.
“I have been in here before and it is relaxing,” he said.
