Concerning the ferry situation, in the early 1960s Juneau’s ferry terminal was located in the downtown area. To save three hours’ travel time around Douglas Island to serve Haines and Skagway, they built a ferry dock at Mile 8 on the North Juneau Highway (called Tee Harbor) and based the ferry Chilkat there. Years later they moved the terminal to Auke Bay at Mile 6. In 1975, they extended and completed the North Juneau Highway to Berners Bay. Because of today’s low state budget revenues, now is the time to build an inexpensive, aft-loading, floating ferry dock at Berners Bay and save another 2.5 hours ferry travel time. Using one of the fast ferries, they could cut travel time more than half to just 1 hour, 15 minutes. It could do two round-trips to Juneau and one to Skagway per day in only 5.5 hours, vs. almost 12 hours for the LeConte, and only use 1,100 more gallons of fuel. What makes this possible is more than double cruising speed of 41.6 mph vs. 18.2! And, operating as a day ferry with a crew of 10 vs. 24 for the LeConte would save the state $1.8 million in labor costs annually. Hauling twice as many cars and passengers per day, it could handle the summer overflow problem.
Dave Werner