This story has been updated to correct the times public tours are being offered Friday.
Capt. Michele Schallip says if the U.S. Coast Guard’s Healy icebreaker she commands was suddenly homeported in Juneau rather than Seattle she’d be fine with it, but there would be some adjustments to ensure heavy-duty maintenance and other necessary operations could be performed in port.
The Healy, scheduled to dock in Juneau until Sunday after returning from research-oriented operations in western and northern Alaska, may draw more than the usual amount of interest from residents and local officials due to the Coast Guard announcing a newly purchased icebreaker will be homeported here within a few years. Public tours of the 420-foot-long vessel — the largest in the Coast Guard’s fleet — are scheduled from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Friday, and a delegation of local officials is also scheduled to receive a tour.
Schallip, returning for a second tour as Healy’s commanding officer in June of 2023, spent three years working at the Coast Guard’s command center in Juneau as one of her assignments in Alaska that dates back to 1999. She said one of the main duties for crew when the icebreaker is in its Seattle homeport is maintenance of the vessel.
“We work on maintenance on the engines, we overhaul cranes, we take leave, we’ll go to schools,” she said. “So we stay pretty busy in port.”
How would Schallip react if the Healy’s home port was switched to Juneau?
“We have an assignment, and we rotate to large cities and small cities all of the time,” she said. “So I don’t think that would be anything that would be unusual for us.”
Capt. Michele Schallip, commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Healy icebreaker, discusses the vessel’s research operations this fall in western and northern Alaska aboard the ship on Thursday. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
The ship that is scheduled to be homeported in Juneau is the Aiviq, a 360-foot-long privately owned U.S. vessel built in 2012 that congressional lawmakers targeted for purchase for years until an allocation of $125 million was included in the federal budget passed earlier this year. Coast Guard officials have stated about 190 personnel could eventually relocate to Juneau for the deployment, plus roughly 400 family members, with extensive dock and other support infrastructure upgrades planned.
A key question now for policymakers from the local to congressional level is what steps are needed to make Juneau a suitable home port for the Aiviq and the people moving here with the ship, with discussions covering issues ranging from shore infrastructure to childcare availability.
Schallip, while avoiding speculation about the Aiviq since its crew and mission will differ from the Healy’s, said homeporting her ship in Juneau right now would require some adjustments for duties such as major maintenance.
“I think at this point it would take some pre-staging,” she said. “We would be what we call at dockside. So we are at the pier, and there are contractors that come in and do the work externally from Seattle.”
Such work already occurs, including turbos that were replaced in Dutch Harbor, and even in Seattle contractors doing dockside maintenance don’t necessarily come from that city, Schallip said.
As for being out and about while docked in Juneau, she offered unqualified praise.
“We’ve been very much looking forward to this port,” Schallip said. “It’s a great support city for us. There’s plenty to do.”
Haley Howard, a lieutenant junior grade who prepared the “port brief” for the stop, said “the crew’s excited for Gallery Walk,” referring to the roughly 150 downtown museums, shops and other entities that will be hosting holiday happenings right about the time the public tours aboard the Healy end.
“One of the things that the crew is probably most excited about is Eaglecrest opening,” she added. “We want to go skiing on Saturday.”
The U.S. Coast Guard’a Healy icebreaker in dock downtown on Thursday. The ship is scheduled to remain in Juneau until Sunday. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
The Healy has a crew of about 85 permanent members, only a few of whom are residents of Washington state, Schallip said. Which means most of the crew rents homes in Seattle that they may then rent out to others while the ship is deployed.
“The majority of us come from all over the world,” she said. “We have a very diverse crew on here who’ve become citizens of the United States and joined the Coast Guard.”
The primary mission of the Healy, first launched in 1997, is providing support for polar region research activities conducted by visiting scientists. Three such missions were planned starting in June of this year, but things got off to a rough start due to an electrical fire July 25 in Canada’s Northwest Territories which forced the ship to return to Seattle for repairs.
The ship was redeployed in October and in November completed operations that included seabed mapping Chukchi and Beaufort Seas north of Alaska as part of the Alaskan Arctic Coast Port Access Route Study, according to a Coast Guard press release. Among the discoveries during the voyage was a “a subsea volcano-like feature.”
“The science party discovered a volcano-like feature rising 500 meters from the seabed, approximately 1,600 meters below the surface at its shallowest depth,” the release notes. “Upon further review of water column data collected at the site, the science team detected a potential gas plume rising from just above the feature to near the water’s surface. The feature poses no risk to navigation as it is well below navigable draft of the largest modern vessels.”
Schallip said the research during that first mission provided important depth-survey data that will boost navigational safety, along with other environmental data.
“Then on the second mission we brought aboard 10 early-career scientists — young post-doctorate — to give them the opportunity to do research in the Arctic on a ship,” she said. “And Healy’s very unique in our ability to allow researchers to get to really difficult-to-reach places.”
Working in the Arctic in October and November meant dealing with some harsh weather and conditions, so working with scientists to determine what research can be done safely is part of their learning process, Schallip said.
The Healy also engages when called upon in other Coast Guard duties including search-and-rescue — and thus became involved in the search for a Sitka-based fishing vessel that capsized near Juneau on Sunday with five people aboard who remain missing and are presumed dead. Schallip said her ship was about seven hours away in Frederick Sound near Kake when an alert was received.
“So that very much demonstrates that we are multi-mission capable,” she said. “So it’s not just about just about science, but it’s about providing Coast Guard support in whatever area we are in.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
