The cruise liner Wilderness Discoverer docks at Wrangell Sept. 24, the last ship of the island's 2014 cruise season. Run by Seattle-based company Un-Cruise Adventures, the Discoverer can carry 76 passengers and has a crew of 24. It stopped into Wrangell 10 times this year.
With the departure of Un-Cruise Adventures' "Wilderness Explorer" last Wednesday, Wrangell's cruising season officially comes to an end. Fifty-seven such vessels had been scheduled to arrive this year, according to information provided on the Wrangell Chamber of Commerce website.
There were 15 leisure ships scheduled to dock in Wrangell 57 times this year.
Doing the arithmetic, if each cruise ship scheduled to arrive was fully-booked and if every passenger disembarked when the ships stopped in Wrangell, then a possible 8,338 tourists could have visited this season, not counting crew.
"It seemed like a really exciting season," said Cyni Waddington, of Wrangell Chamber of Commerce. "We are very lucky to be right here at the dock," she said, getting a good view of the summer's activity.
Tourism and recreation play a substantial role in Southeast Alaska's economy. In Rain Coast Data's regional economic overview presented to last month's Southeast Conference, it found that out-of-state visitors brought $595 million to the region in 2013.
Representing a fifth of private-sector jobs in Southeast, the industry also brought in $28,351,190 in wages last year, up by 23 percent from 2010's totals. In terms of earnings, the visitor industry only follows behind the government and seafood sectors.
The number of cruise ship passengers had increased by 14 percent between 2010 and 2013, to 400 shy of a million people. Rain Coast Data projects that number should be down a bit for the 2014 year to 975,000, due to two ships being replaced with slightly smaller vessels.
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