A ferry tale: This ferry between Prince of Wales Island and Ketchikan connects a number of isolated communities and enhances quality of life.

• Author: Swagel, Will

To get a sea cucumber ready for processing, you make a long slit down the length of it. The sea creature, named after the salad vegetable, closely resembles one-except for the all-purpose mouth orifice at one end. Sea cucumbers range in size from a petite pickle to that of a football.

Standing in a 17-foot aluminum skiff bobbing off the coast of Prince of Wales Island, at the south end of the Southeast panhandle, Dennis Watson makes just such slits, pulling sea cucumbers from a special dive bag that his girlfriend and dive partner Harriet Wadley has filled with creatures plucked from the ocean floor. Wadley is the diver, working about 30 feet below the waves generally, while Watson works topside at a specially built cleaning table right on the skiff. He stores the cleaned cucumbers in a gray, plastic, insulated fish tote. The skiff also holds reserve air tanks for Watson to help Wadley "switch out" to new tanks so she can stay down longer.

Watson, who serves as mayor of Craig-population 1,397-when he's not slitting cucumbers or out trolling for salmon, also is the president of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association, made up of individual dive fishermen who impose a tax on themselves to pay for management of the sea cucumber, geoduck clam and sea urchin fisheries.

Dealing with live or freshly killed dive products depends on reliable transport both to the processors and to air transportation. That's why Watson is so pleased with the new Inter-Island Ferry, which can can-y totes full of cucumbers, geoducks and urchins from Prince of Wales Island to Ketchikan in under three hours. After a decade of planning and engineering, the ferry began service in January.

"Last year, the sea urchin fishery was largely nonexistent because we didn't have good transportation," says Mayor Watson. "The previous three years, the urchins were a significant portion of the wintertime economy in Craig.

"Transportation is the big issue and we're getting it under control with this IFA (Inter-Island Ferry Authority) ferry."

PRINCE OF WALES ISLAND

The third largest island in the U.S. (after the big island of Hawaii and Kodiak), Prince of Wales island has more than 1,000 miles of road connecting about a dozen town and hamlets.

About 6,000 people inhabit the stretch of civilization from the tiny fishing settlement of Point Protection in the north to Hydaburg--population 382--in the south. For years, Prince of Wales was the scene of much of the wood cut...