Once a month, you can hear the Alaska Fish House in Ketchikan from blocks away. The cozy little room is packed. People are thumping on the long wooden tables and singing. A man named Greg Thomas is usually in the back standing by the wood stove, singing the loudest. He leads these sea shanty nights. He’s been doing it for a long time. 

Sea shanties have been around for centuries. But in recent years, they’ve made a pop culture comeback. You can hear them all over TikTok or in the video game Assassin’s Creed 4. But Thomas has been leading generations of people in swashbuckling song for over 30 years. 

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The next day, Thomas was down at the Ketchikan Yacht Club, a little floating clubhouse on the docks in Thomas Basin.

Thomas grew up in Sydney, Australia. He spent some time in St. Louis, Missouri before coming up to Ketchikan.

“I came up here on a whim 30 years ago to go kayaking,” Thomas said . “Never left.” 

Thomas brought the shanty tunes with him. It seems like he can’t help it. 

That’s how he met the woman who would become his wife. He was singing sea shanties one night at the New York Cafe.

“And my wife – who wasn’t my wife then – said she’d heard the loudest voice singing she’d ever heard, so she had to go in and see it,” Thomas said. “And she’s also from Australia.”

That was two decades ago. He said sea shanties are the mutual love of their lives. He’s traveled all over Southeast Alaska singing them. 

“You know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head? I’ve had a song stuck in my head for 55 years,” Thomas said.

That song is “The Maid of Amsterdam” from the 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick. The song is also known as “A-Roving.”

I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid

A-roving, A-roving, since roving’s been my ru-i-in

I’ll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid

“In the opening scene, Richard Basar goes into the inn to get his room, and he gets sucked into a sea shanty,” Thomas said. “The sailors are in the bar. They all get up, and they’re doing what you always think of a traditional sailor dancer. They’re all doing that and singing. He gets sucked in. And that has stuck with me forever.”

“A-Roving” is what’s called a “four stroke pump shanty.” Old wooden merchant sailing ships leaked almost constantly. So to keep them buoyant, sailors spent hours on the deck pulling water up out of the inside of the ship with a big levered pump.

The tempo of the song matched the rhythm of four guys pushing and pulling that lever over and over again. Thomas said a lot of sea shanties are like that: work songs that match the tempo of the repetitive work to be done on the high seas.

But for Thomas, sea shanties aren’t just about hauling levers and what one could possibly do with a drunken sailor. They were about class struggle and labor exploitation. Like the classic “According to the Act,” an ode to an English politician named Samuel Plimsoll.

“He could see the injustice of thousands of sailors dying because these huge companies would load up a ship so you couldn’t fit anything else on it, and they would over-insure it, because they knew there was a good chance it would sink,” Thomas said. 

But those corporations didn’t really care if the ships sank. They collected either way. So Plimsoll fought the corporate machine by introducing the Merchant Shipping Act, which gave merchant mariners new rights and cargo limits. Thomas said Plimsoll was practically booed out of politics and died penniless.

“I always introduce that song to let people know that a man did this. Thousands of people were dying, and people didn’t care. The rich people of the world didn’t care,” Thomas said.

Thomas said a lot of the songs they sing are hundreds of years old. Many originated on the East Coast in places like Nantucket. 

“The whole whaling history is, to me, where the sea songs all came from,” Thomas said. “Singing was a big part of their lives. Not only the work songs up on the deck, but songs down below. People would sing their things that were familiar to them about home.”

If you’re on social media, the sea shanty you probably know best is “The Weller Man.” The song is inspired by one of the biggest whaling companies in the South Pacific in the 1800’s. It was owned by the Weller brothers. Thomas said every six months or so, the company would send the whalers supplies. The company man with the supplies was called the “Wellerman.” The song is an intense ballad about killing a whale but Thomas said that probably wasn’t the original intent.

“The guy with the supplies never really harpooned whales,” he said.

Thomas always ends his sea shanty singalongs at the Alaska Fish House with a ballad called “Leave Her, Johnny.”

Frederick Pease Harlow, a sailor in the 1800s, wrote that they’d sing the song on the last day of a voyage, often as a way to complain about everything that went wrong.

It’s a long, hard pull to the next payday

And it’s time for us to leave her

Thomas said the important part of sea shanties is the camaraderie; everyone singing together.

“It’s important that everybody sings, and I think that’s the fun part of it,” Thomas said. “People say, ‘Oh God… sing?’ But they do.”

For Thomas, what makes sea shanties so universal is that they’re simple songs. You can sing them anywhere, with or without instruments. And perhaps they say something about humanity’s pursuit of a port in the storm.

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Bob Cooley, a cruise passenger visiting Ketchikan from Texas, witnessed Thursday’s car crash that killed one pedestrian and sent the car and driver into Ketchikan Creek.

“She put her foot on the pedal, and that’s when my eyes zeroed in on her car,” Cooley said. “And then it went ‘bam’ and popped out over the curb.” 

He says the driver pulled into a parking spot across the creek from Good Fortune Chinese restaurant and, in one fluid motion, seemed to go through it. The car went through the boardwalk — Cooley said he didn’t see it strike the cruise passenger from Indiana who died — and then broke through the wooden railing. It was roughly a ten foot drop to the rocks and creek below. 

Hamilton Gelhar, who owns a business on Creek Street, took a video immediately after the crash. In it, onlookers shout as the smoking car sinks nose-first into the creek.

Gelhar recognized the driver of the vehicle as one of his neighbors, a fellow business owner on Creek Street. 

“It was crazy. It was crazy. Everybody wanted to help, but they just couldn’t,” Cooley said.

Then Cooley saw a young man with a long, dark ponytail.  

“He literally ran and just jumped into the water. I mean, he was amazing,” Cooley said.

The young man was 26-year-old Dylan Self, a server at the Chinese restaurant who was waiting for his shift to start. 

“As soon as I saw her head go underwater, I knew she wasn’t gonna last more than 30 seconds before the inhale,” Self said. “I just scaled the rocks as fast as I could until I got to the car and then dove in.”

Self grabbed a rock and dove across the frigid, fast-moving creek. With both hands, he smashed the rear windshield. The glass cut a long gash in his arm. 

Self said a friend yelled to him that the submerged driver side window was open. He fought the current to pull her through the window and on the top of the sinking car. 

He started CPR, but he’d never done it before. People shouted instructions down from the crowd: “Go higher on her chest. Move up a bit. Check for obstructions.”

“By the time I pulled her out, she was already turning blue, really, really bad,” he said. “And then the water started kind of flowing up and out.”

He said the color in her face began to come back. 

After the EMTs arrived and brought her to shore to continue CPR, Self found an ambulance to treat his bleeding arm. Later, he said he was surprised by how much strength he was able to conjure in the creek. 

“I have zero endurance,” he said. “So also the adrenaline really helped.” 

Cooley guessed the driver was probably underwater for about two minutes. He said another man jumped in to help but had to swim back to shore.

“It was literally that young man alone that saved that woman,” Cooley said. “He was a hero today.”

As of Friday morning, the driver was still in the hospital in critical condition but stable. Ketchikan Fire Chief Rick Hines said that the driver went into cardiac arrest, but they don’t know yet if that caused the crash or was a result of it. 

Self also went to hospital to sew up his arm but was released the same day.

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Ketchikan police say the victim of Thursday’s fatal car crash into Ketchikan Creek was a 57-year-old woman from Auburn, Indiana. The woman, who was walking along the boardwalk when the car struck her, was visiting the city on a cruise with her husband. 

Officials have not yet named the victim or the driver, who survived and was rescued from the creek.

The crash happened just off of Creek Street. Ketchikan Creek runs through the center of the busy downtown shopping district downtown. 

Police said during a press conference Thursday evening that the couple was walking toward the Tongass Historical Museum along the boardwalk just after 8:30 in the morning when the driver accelerated through a parking space in the Centennial parking lot. The car struck the Indiana woman, broke through the wooden railing, and landed in the creek. 

“That vehicle accelerated at a pace where no pedestrian could have gotten out of the way. It was at the wrong moment for that woman. That vehicle grabbed her and took her over that embankment as it entered the creek,” Ketchikan Police Chief Eric Mattson said during the press conference.

The woman was pronounced dead at the island’s hospital. Officials said her family has been notified. Mattson said her husband, a retired volunteer firefighter in Indiana, was also taken to the hospital with injuries.

Ketchikan Fire Chief Rick Hines said that the driver went into cardiac arrest, but they don’t know yet if that caused the crash or was a result of it. 

“We don’t know definitively what occurred that caused that vehicle to go in the water,” Hines said. 

Mattson said they interviewed the driver of the car when she regained consciousness but are still investigating the crash. The car was removed from the creek Thursday afternoon. It will remain in police custody until the investigation is complete. 

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UPDATE Thursday, 9/4/2025 – 4:30pm: Officials confirmed that one person has died following a car crashing through a fence into Ketchikan Creek Thursday morning. In a press release, the city said the driver accelerated through a parking space in the Centennial parking lot. The car struck a pedestrian, broke through the wooden fence, and landed in the creek. The pedestrian was pronounced dead. Officials identified the victim as a 57-year-old woman from Auburn, Indiana. She and her husband were cruise passengers visiting Ketchikan.

Three other people, including the driver, were transported to the island’s hospital. One remains in critical condition. The other two were released with minor injuries, according to the city.

The car was removed from the creek Thursday afternoon. Ketchikan police are still investigating the incident. They said the deceased victim’s family has been notified.

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City officials in Ketchikan say at least one person is dead after a car went over the guardrail into Ketchikan Creek at about 8:40 Thursday morning. A press release from the city said pedestrians were also involved in the crash. How many people were involved and how badly they were hurt were unclear as of Thursday afternoon. 

Ketchikan Creek runs through the center of Historic Creek Street in downtown, which is a busy area during tourism season. A wooden railing and walkway near the footbridge appeared to be damaged from the crash. It was roughly a 10-foot drop to the rocks and creek below. 

At noon on Thursday, the car was still submerged upright at the bottom of the creek, between the Tongass Historical Museum and the Good Fortune Chinese Restaurant. Ketchikan police and all of the island’s fire agencies were still on site. The north entrance to Creek Street and much of the Centennial Parking Lot were cordoned off to keep out crowds of onlookers. 

City Spokeswoman Kim Simpson said the state Department of Environmental Conservation was at the crash site to deal with any fuel that may leak from the vehicle into the creek, which is a salmon spawning stream. 

Simpson said the vehicle will be removed once the police investigation is finished. 

This is a developing story. 

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Ketchikan students who don’t speak English as their first language got a win recently. The Ketchikan School Board voted to restore its English Language Learning department at its most recent meeting.

School board member Ali Ginter said that reestablishing the department is a matter of dedicating resources. She said it wouldn’t add an extra cost to the district. 

“We can provide sustainable support for our ELL students without financial strain. We’re focusing on the pivotal role of the superintendent’s appointment of an ELL department head,” she said at the meeting.

PJ Ford Slack is the interim Ketchikan school superintendent. The school board’s vote means that she is tasked with reestablishing the department and organizing ELL instructors. Ford Slack said at the meeting that she wasn’t yet sure what that entails. She said that the district has lost a lot of staff in the last year.

“I am just nervous about not being able to do a good job, especially in light of getting certified people to do ELL. I looked at our numbers, and I understand why that might be a good thing. But I just I need to hear a little bit more about how the committee thought that this would work here,” she said.

English Language Learners’ programs are federally mandated in schools. They support students who are navigating school in a new language. But Ketchikan schools have seen a sharp decline in these resources over the last decade. The department dwindled from half a dozen staff to none. Teachers have reported that the non-native English speakers in their classes have begun to fall behind. 

Board member Paul Robbins Jr. said it was a “no brainer” that resources should be restored but he disagreed that it would be “at no cost.”

“We have to task an administrator to be the head of this thing, which means we have to either pull them from another program or overload already overloaded administrators, because this board has removed so many administrators from the district that we are now so low on them that’s what’s going to happen,” he said.

The vote to restore the department passed unanimously after debate. 

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Plans to rebuild the burned-down South Tongass fire station near Ketchikan are finally underway. Ketchikan’s Borough Assembly approved a contract to rebuild the destroyed South Tongass Volunteer Fire Department at their meeting on Monday. 

The South Tongass fire station was destroyed in an April fire last year. It happened in the early morning hours when no one was on duty. Officials said the fire stemmed from a piece of equipment on one of the vehicles in the bay. 

The contract approved by the Assembly is with Dawson Construction for nearly $2 million. The Borough received over $2.2 million in insurance money after the fire. 

Vice Mayor Glen Thompson said they plan to rebuild and restore what’s left of the burned-down structure. Then, work on designing things up to code. 

“This is one of those situations where we have some of the money in hand, but we don’t have it all, but approved for way more than what we need. So this gets the thing moving along,” he said.

The transmittal letter said the new station will be wood-framed and two stories – similar to before the fire. It said it will feature staff offices, a mezzanine for storage, public meeting space, living quarters, and multiple bays for fire trucks and emergency vehicles. 

It will also include some upgrades, like a sprinkler system and fire alarms, which the previous structure didn’t have. 

The assembly approved the contract unanimously with almost no discussion. 

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The Native Village of Saxman is getting more affordable housing thanks to a $500,000 loan the city received from the Rasmuson Foundation. 

The Anchorage-based philanthropic organization recently approved over $6 million in grants. Rasmuson spokeswoman Ruth Hall said in an email that some of that money was given to Saxman to build 20 units of affordable housing. 

Saxman City Clerk Yeił Atoowu Ginger McCormick said it’s actually 14 new units. The new apartments are meant to serve low income residents. 

Seven of those apartments were completed on June 28. McCormick said the other half will be ready to accept tenants by mid-July. McCormick said the apartments will be divided into four buildings. The buildings will be named Wolf House, Eagle House, Bear House, and Eagle Nest House. Each will have access to a dishwasher, washer, and dryer. 

McCormick said many island residents can’t catch a break when it comes to housing – especially elders with fixed income and young residents entering the job market. She said she hopes these units will help. 

According to McCormick, their goal is to fill all 14 of the new apartments by December. They are accepting applications. Would-be tenants can turn in their housing applications at Saxman City Hall.

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Seven Ketchikan and Sitka residents have pleaSeven Ketchikan and Sitka residents have pleaded guilty for their involvement in an international drug trafficking ring. 32-year-old Ketchikan resident Patricia Seal-Uttke was the final defendant charged in the case. She pleaded guilty on Tuesday.

The group was responsible for moving drugs and laundering money across the state. 

Court documents state that the U.S. Postal Service intercepted a package full of methamphetamine and heroin in 2022. The package was addressed to Seal-Uttke. When the drugs arrived in Ketchikan, Seal-Uttke’s boyfriend Larry Marsden picked them up and was arrested by police. 

Federal authorities said the Southeast Alaska operation was part of a bigger ring run by an inmate in a California prison. Court documents state that they were mailing drugs into Alaska from California and then moving the money back out to California and Mexico. The U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement that the operation at its peak was moving over 10 pounds of fentanyl, meth, heroin, and cocaine into Southeast Alaska in one month. 

The defendants in the case were:

• Karly Fuller, 31, of Sitka, who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering on April 23, 2025. Authorities believe Fuller manages the drug ring’s operations and recruited people. She is set to be sentenced on September 3, 2025, and faces up to 20 years in prison.
  
• Larry Marsden, 43, of Ketchikan, sentenced to 66 months in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty in December 2024.

• Patricia Seal-Uttke, 32, of Ketchikan, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute drugs and launder money. She is scheduled to be sentenced on September 24, 2025 and  faces up to 20 years in prison. .
  
• Stormy Cleveland, 39, of Ketchikan, sentenced to 135 months in prison and five years of supervised release following her guilty plea in November 2024.
  
• Mario Klanott, 38, of Sitka, who pleaded guilty on June 13, 2025, and will be sentenced September 9.
  
• Douglas Vanmeter, 34, of Sitka, who pleaded guilty in May and is scheduled for sentencing on August 6.
  
• Sara Orr, 34, of Ketchikan, who entered a plea on June 6 and will be sentenced September 9.
  
• Julia Brusell, 43, of Ketchikan, sentenced to time served and two years of supervised release after pleading guilty to money laundering in November 2024.

In total, over 60 people across Alaska and California have been charged in connection with the operation.

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Ketchikan’s tribal government will soon be under new leadership. The Ketchikan Indian Community announced on earlier this month that Emily Edenshaw will be their new CEO. 

Edenshaw is currently the president of the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. She previously worked for the Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

KIC has more than 6,500 federally recognized tribal citizens. The tribe’s attorney Steve Hartford served as the interim top administrator before Edenshaw was hired.

The tribal government said in a press release that Edenshaw is Yup’ik and Iñupiaq from the Native Village of Emmonak in Western Alaska. Edenshaw is a shareholder of two native corporations in the interior: Doyon Limited and Calista Corporation. The press release said that Edenshaw’s husband is from Hydaburg and she was adopted into Haida Gwaii’s Raven Thunderbird Clan.

Gloria Burns is KIC’s tribal council president. She wrote in a press release that Edenshaw has “a love for elders and education as well as a passion for economic sovereignty.”

Edenshaw is set to officially step into the role in August. 

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Heavy rains and flooding in Southeast Alaska triggered a series of small landslides in Ketchikan on Wednesday that blocked roads and damaged a home. 

The most destructive slide came down just after 1 a.m. Wednesday morning off North Tongass Highway. The slide happened on private property north of town. Ketchikan Fire Chief Rick Hines said that the earth of one property gave way, taking a large chunk of the homeowner’s driveway with it. The slide then hit the first floor of another home below, damaging it and the residents’ car. Hines said the people in the damaged home were evacuated without injuries.

City spokeswoman Kim Simpson said in a text to KRBD that there have been no additional slides on the property. She said that Assistant Fire Chief Greg Karlik and Public Works Head Seth Brakke met with the victims Thursday morning to provide guidance but since the slide was on private property, the city and borough won’t be handling the cleanup.

Airport weather data shows Ketchikan saw nearly seven inches of rain in the couple of days before the slide. It’s one of the wettest Mays on record in the First City. The U.S. Forest Service is also reporting significant flooding in the Ward Lake campground area north of town.

Another slide came down Wednesday blocking White River Road. The Ketchikan Borough said that the slide trapped a logging crew, a construction crew, and a handful of employees of a local outdoor adventure tour company on the other side. Alaska Department of Transportation crews managed to clear a path through the slide zone after about seven hours. No injuries have been reported in any of Wednesday’s landslides or flood events.

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