First cruise ship docks at new Ward Cove terminal

The 1,094-foot-long Norwegian Encore made history on Aug. 4 as it emerged from a cloudy curtain of rain to tie up in Ward Cove, about a 7-mile drive north of Ketchikan's downtown cruise ship dock.

Before the ship pulled in, workers hurried to finish preparing the 57,000-square-foot cruise ship terminal for visitors, screwing smoke detectors into a restroom ceiling and drilling holes to install the last few rows of cable guardrails.

As the first throng of passengers walked into what had been the pulp mill - the heart of Ketchikan's economy for decades - their arrival was the culmination of a $50 million project to expand the scope of Ketchikan's cruise ship industry beyond city limits. It also is part of transforming the community into a hub for tourism after the decline of its logging industry.

The new welcome center, which the owner, the Ward Cove Dock Group, calls The Mill at Ward Cove, occupies just one building in a large complex that once housed the Ketchikan Pulp Co. mill.

The mill began operations in 1954, closing in 1997 with a payroll of 500 workers. The closure brought an end to the pulp mill era in Southeast Alaska, and the site fell into disrepair until 2011 when Dave Spokely and his son, Andrew, bought the property from the Ketchikan Gateway Borough for $2.1 million, hoping to use the site to start new businesses.

Movement toward a cruise dock didn't develop until 2019, when the Spokelys formed the Ward Cove Dock Group with Godspeed Inc., a company owned by Skip, James and John Binkley.

The group designed a plan to renovate one of the buildings at the former pulp mill as a welcome center for a new dock to be built in Ward Cove. The cost of building the dock and the completely renovated welcome center was estimated at about $50 million.

Work was underway in the early months of the Coronavirus pandemic, with projections that the dock would be ready to accept cruise ships by summer 2021.

But in February, Canada extended a ban on large cruise ships in Canadian waters due to the pandemic. It took congressional action to allow a waiver so that ships could bypass a stop in Canada on their cruises to Alaska.

That left Ward Cove Dock Group workers scrambling to complete the welcome center and dock in time for ships to start sailings in August - six months' worth of work to be accomplished in about two months, Director of Port Operations Shauna Lee said.

When it is completed, the welcome center will direct passengers through a forest of real trees filled with taxidermized animals. The trees will be regularly misted, and the sounds of the temperate rainforest of the Tongass National Forest will be piped into the building to enhance the atmosphere.

The building also will feature retail space, a theater for informational presentations about Southeast Alaska and a restaurant.

Time constraints meant that only a fraction of the amenities were in place for the first ship Aug. 4.

With so much empty space, organizers made do, fashioning chairs that had arrived the week before into a rough partition that fenced off the vast undeveloped space in the building and created a wide, straight path from the entrance to the bus lot.

All told, about 1,300 passengers were aboard the Encore, said John Binkley, the president of the Ward Cove Dock Group. The Encore, completed at a German shipyard in 2019, can hold about 4,000 passengers and 1,700 crew. It was built at a cost of almost $1 billion.

The vessel was completing a test sailing, going directly from Seattle to Ketchikan and back. Binkley estimated that when the Encore returns for a normal sailing each Thursday starting this week, it will have about 2,700 passengers on board.

All passengers aboard the test sailing were employees or friends or family members of employees at Norwegian Cruise Line's corporate offices in Miami, according to representatives from Norwegian Cruise Line, the owner and operator of the Norwegian Encore.

All passengers had to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination, and were tested for the Coronavirus before boarding the ship in Seattle.

Binkley said he was happy to see the ship and the passengers arrive. "It feels fantastic. Yeah. Couldn't be happier. It just looks so beautiful, that ship coming around the corner."