A grand experiment: a private port at Hoonah: new Cruise ship stop opens soon to the delight of visitors, but other Southeast towns may feel the pinch of fewer visitors as a result.

• Author: Swagel, Will

When the Royal Caribbean/ Celebrity cruise ship Mercury calls at Icy Strait Point near Hoonah in Southeast Alaska on May 11, the visit will signal a first-of-its-kind attraction in the state--a private port purposely built to attract ship passengers.

Huna Totem Corp., in a joint venture with the Junean-based guiding firm Koma Sales Co., has developed an old cannery site into a cultural/historical attraction that they hope will be a must-see for tourists sailing to Alaska.

But the cannery site is only the heart of the operation. Nestled amid the peaks and fjords of northern Chichagof Island and only 22 miles from magnificent Glacier Bay already one of Alaska's premiere destinations--Port Icy Strait will offer all of the activities tourists already flock north for: fishing, bear-watching, flightseeing, cultural activities and much more.

"We think the combination at (Icy Strait) and the close proximity of things people are supposed to see in Alaska bodes well for us," says Johan Dybdahl, president of the Point Sophia Development Co. L.L.C, the developer and operator of the property.

Tourist industry leaders in Southeast Alaska say they are watching the project closely to see how the new attraction stacks up against the more traditional stops of Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway and Sitka. In these towns, private firms provide many of the bus tours, charter fishing and flightseeing operations. At Icy Strait, the Point Sophia Development Co., the joint venture, will control nearly all of it. In Sitka, tourism leaders are especially chafing, since at this point, each cruise ship stop at Icy Strait will mean one less stop in Sitka-about a 10 percent loss of overall traffic for the 2004 season.

BIG IDEA, BIG IMPACT

In the 1930s, the Icy Strait Packing Co. cannery was an economic mainstay for the village of Hoonah and the Southeast salmon industry in general. But as tastes changed, the cannery closed for processing fish and was underutilized for many years. Timber then took the place of fish processing and Hoonah became the gateway to one of the most active logging areas in Southeast. But with the decline in that industry, too, executives at Huna Totem, Hoonah's village Native corporation, started looking for alternatives.

"When we bought the cannery property in 1997, we weren't quite sure what we were going to do with it," says Bob Wysocki, CEO of Huna Totem. "We started looking at ways to develop it. Number one, we're a village ANCSA corporation and...