A ferry cancellation will affect travel plans for some participants of the Kluane Chilkat International Bike Relay. The annual bike relay sees hundreds of people biking either solo or relay-style from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Haines, Alaska, on summer solstice.
Alaska Marine Highway System staff were working to rebook passengers after the cancellation of the Hubbard’s June 22 sailing south.
“I don’t have the number [of passengers] off the top of my head,” terminal manager Ryan Ackerman said. “But it was a pretty full boat, just because of the bike race.”
Space for vehicles is generally at a premium on ferries this time of year, but Ackerman said there was a lot of space available on the Monday sailing of the Columbia so most of the vehicles were booked to leave just one day later.
Ackerman said terminal staff are contacting people to rebook their travel and hope to be done with that process by the end of Tuesday.
“They need to wait for a phone call because everything is being done in the order they were booked,” he said.
One of those passengers who had to be rebooked was Juneau-based Rob Welton, who is the president of the bike relay’s board of directors.
Welton said he got a text saying to call them, and rebooked onto the Columbia the next day.
“I’m spending another day in Haines,” he said. “I like Haines and I’m retired, so it’s not a problem. But some of the people on my team, they’re scrambling.”
Generally, he said, cyclists from Juneau make up about 25 to 30 percent of the field of about 200 teams. He estimates between 50-70 people and their vehicles are all impacted by the cancellation.
In most years, the race would have around 1,250 riders. This year, Welton said less than 1,000 people have registered.
“I imagine a lot of teams are dealing with it,” he said. “We may end up reshuffling the deck on our team to cover more legs if some of those people can’t make it.”
Welton said from his perspective the bike relay is one of the Upper Lynn Canal’s biggest weekends of the year and given that there has been a dip in visitation from Canadians, it’s “not a great time to be inconveniencing the America-based travelers,” he said. “The timing is pretty awful.”
Alaska Marine Highway spokesperson Sam Dapcevich said the Hubbard’s Sunday sailing was cancelled because the ship needs to undergo U.S. Coast Guard inspection in order to maintain its certificate of inspection. The Hubbard’s annual certificate of inspection expires June 28, according to the Coast Guard’s maritime information exchange database.
Those inspections include things like the ship’s lifesaving equipment, firefighting systems, and machinery. Generally, they include onboard tests which Dapcevich said usually happens when a ship goes out of service for work, which the Hubbard did in February for what he called a “mini-overhaul.”
But, Dapcevich said, those tests didn’t happen and marine highway staff were trying to figure out how to get them all done while the Hubbard was underway, without affecting the schedule.
“They tried on a run to Kake recently and it just didn’t work,” he said.
With the deadline looming, they coordinated with the Coast Guard to do the tests on Saturday, then realized they’d need more than one day. But that meant choosing either the Friday sailing – which would have brought many KCIBR guests to town for the race – or the Sunday sailing.
“Initially, they were going to cancel that Friday and that would have thrown a big monkey wrench [into the race] in that case,” he said. But ultimately, some Coast Guard staff agreed to work through the weekend and marine highway system staff decided that it was better to get people home from the Chilkat Valley after a delay, rather than cutting off the trip that would get them the community in the first place.
• Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the Deputy Editor for the Gulf States Newsroom and a reporter for Alaska’s Energy Desk in Juneau. Currently, she’s editing a project with KYUK and ProPublica and in 2024, she bought the weekly Chilkat Valley News in Southeast Alaska where she is focused on building a sustainable local newsroom. This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
