<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-full is-resized"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">An 80-foot halibut schooner called “”the Westward” sunk two years ago at Kake’s harbor, and has remained there since (photo courtesy of Mayor Lolanda Cavanaugh)</figcaption></figure>



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Lloyd Davis is the former mayor of Kake. He remembers the day nearly two years ago that an 80-foot halibut schooner sank in the city’s harbor. 

“Nobody was watching it, apparently, and bailing it out or whatever. [It] sunk and kind of rolled underneath them, one of our end fingers on the main dock,” Davis said. “You could obviously see the oil spill, the slick on top of the water and whatnot.”

Davis said the vessel initially was brought to Kake a few years ago from Wrangell, and was exchanged in a handshake deal. Kake’s current mayor, Lolanda Cavanaugh, said the Coast Guard and locals worked together to clean up the fuel from the vessel when it first sank. In the years since then, she said that the boat continued to be a hazard for sailors. 

“The boat is sitting in our harbor at low tide. It sticks out. It’s kind of a safety hazard, because if boats don’t realize it’s there and they’re coming into the harbor, you know, they could easily run into it or get stuck,” said Cavanaugh. “It blocks some of our parking spaces for boats and other marine vessels. We need to get it out.”  

She said the sunken vessel not only poses a risk to the safety of boaters, but also the harbor’s environment. 

“That’s where a lot of the local people crab pot, sometimes fish and herring move into the harbor and you’ve got kids off fishing on the docks,” said Cavanaugh. “We don’t know exactly what kind of contaminants are still basically in the vessel. It was old, very old. It probably should have been moved out of the harbor years prior to its sinking.”

Cavanaugh said the boat’s owner has been “uncooperative and unresponsive,”  so the city is taking responsibility for its removal, a costly and logistically challenging endeavor.

Cavanaugh initially applied for assistance from a derelict vessel removal program with the State Department of Natural Resources, but the request for reimbursement was rejected because the city hadn’t yet spent any money to get the vessel out of the harbor, and the estimated removal cost was over $50,000. Reapplying is not on the table, as a bill passed earlier this year by the Alaska state legislature axed funding for the program.

Kake is not the only community that struggles with derelict vessels. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources has documented over 400 abandoned and derelict vessels, over half of which are in Southeast. Petersburg Harbormaster Glo Wollen said that communities struggle to fund these removals themselves. 

“You have to demo them in a manner that ends up costing a considerable amount of money to the municipalities that you know are on the hook to to end up dealing with this,” said Wollen.

Wollen said it is important for coastal communities to work together and learn from each other to address the shared problem.  

“I talked to our neighbors quite often. And we approach a lot of things together, and many of us have ordinances that seem to work for our community,” Wollen said. “Maybe other communities can look at them and and blend whatever their uniqueness is with ours, and we can have kind of a cohesive approach to what we’ll tolerate in southeast Alaska.”

And that’s just what Mayor Cavanaugh did. Last fall, she learned at a city council meeting that the Borough of Wrangell applied for the Department of Defense’s Innovative Readiness Training Program to assist with a similar situation. 

“So we’ve been looking for the application to come out again. And so when it did, I have a gal who helped me with some grant writing, and she wrote the application for us,” said Cavanaugh.

Right now, Cavanaugh is waiting to hear whether their application will be accepted. If so, the Department of Defense will remove the sunk vessel from Kake sometime in the summer of 2027. She also applied for another federal grant program, to explore options. But with the current government shutdown, it is unclear how long the process will take. 

“We’re just in a waiting game,” said Cavanaugh.

While the City of Kake remains stuck in a sticky situation as they await federal aid, they are able to keep their hope afloat. 

The city is accepting feedback on their application for assistance from the Department of Defense until Oct. 30.