Giant, gleaming yachts make their way to Southeast Alaska every summer. Many line the breakwater at Juneau’s Statter Harbor. More anchor out in Auke Bay.
Some are the playthings of billionaires. Others, despite their opulent touches, are small family businesses, which are facing growing competition from new entrants they accuse of skirting a 140-year-old federal law meant to protect U.S. shipbuilders, vessel owners and mariners.
The Dauntless, a $1.65 million motor yacht owned and operated by the husband-and-wife team of Alisa Jestel and Jim Edgars, falls into the latter category. Aboard, it looks like a luxury condo: stone countertops, a jet-black toilet, a hot tub, an herb garden, glossy metal prints of glaciers.
During a tour of the 92-foot vessel this summer, Jestel pointed to a dramatic shot of a tidewater glacier.
“This is Carey Case out of Petersburg,” she said. “We homeport in Petersburg. That's where Jim and I live full time, and, actually both of our crew members are local to Petersburg as well. So we like to incorporate the local touches whenever we can.”
This is their fifth summer running the Dauntless. Edgars was a commercial fisherman for four decades. Jestel was a fine dining chef on a private yacht. But the two rarely got to see each other. And fishing was hard on Edgars’ body.
So they decided it was time for a change. Edgars and Jestel put up their home and their fishing quotas as collateral for a Small Business Administration loan and bought the Dauntless in an effort to turn their passion for Southeast Alaska’s wild places — and highbrow hospitality — into their livelihood.
They’re all in, and the bet has been paying off: Multigenerational family reunions, groups of couples, are all happy to pay the Dauntless’s $72,000-a-week rate.
Up until this year, bookings were on the rise, Jestel said.
“This year was the first year coming into the season that we had three prime weeks open. We had two in July and one in August,” she said. “Even in our first year, that didn't happen.”
Those weeks make the difference between making a profit for the year or taking a loss, she said.
Jestel attributed some of the slowdown to unease with the U.S.’s political climate. Overseas tourism is down 4% from 2024, and visitors from Canada are down twice that, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
But the drop in bookings is mostly due to new competition, and the competition isn’t playing by the rules, she said.
Jestel and a tight-knit group of captains and boat owners are circulating a list of dozens of vessels that they say are operating in Southeast Alaska in violation of a law meant to protect domestic operators: the Passenger Vessel Services Act of 1886, the passenger equivalent of the Jones Act.
The short version of the law is, if you want to transport passengers between U.S. ports without a stop in a foreign country, the boat they’re on needs to satisfy three criteria: It must be U.S. built, U.S. flagged, and U.S. crewed.
The Dauntless is all three, and it wasn’t cheap. Jestel and Edgars were considering a boat that was about a third of the price of the Dauntless, she said. But they walked away when they learned it was built in Canada.
“We took a lot of extra steps and a lot of extra time, spent extra money to find the boat that worked,” Jestel said.
Dozens of others are skirting the rules, though, according to Jestel and the informal coalition tracking sightings of yachts they say are violating the Passenger Vessel Services Act and other laws and regulations governing the industry in Alaska.
They logged sightings of 26 suspected “illegal foreign vessels” — some are foreign-built, some are foreign-flagged, others are operating in violation of federal waivers, they say — in hopes of spurring the U.S. Coast Guard to take action.
It’s an issue that’s built up over years, said Dan Blanchard, the owner and CEO of Uncruise, a Juneau-based small-ship cruise line operating a fleet of U.S.-flagged ships in Southeast Alaska and around the state offering voyages that start at nearly $5,000 per person.
“What we're seeing is a slow erosion,” Blanchard said in an interview.
As Blanchard sees it, the problem goes well beyond 12-passenger charter yachts. More and more boats are coming to Alaska with lower-cost hulls and lower-cost crew, he said.
“It's the U.S.-flagged fleet across the board that's being impacted by this unfair playing field,” he said.
Blanchard and other members of the U.S.-flagged coalition have been meeting with federal officials this summer, looking to turn up the pressure, he said.
Last month, they had some success when the Coast Guard stopped a Canadian-built yacht near Sitka accused of operating outside the bounds of a federal waiver allowing it to take domestic trips.
On Aug. 20, law enforcement officials on a Coast Guard cutter boarded an unnamed foreign-built vessel near Sitka, according to a news release from the agency. Officials “terminated the voyage” and escorted the yacht back to port.
The Coast Guard did not respond to a series of interview requests seeking details of the boarding or its enforcement more broadly.
The owners of the vessel, the motor yacht Bear Paw, declined an interview but released a statement from Capt. William West, one of its owners. West said Bear Paw Charters LLC had been transparent with federal authorities and would “fulfill whatever (the U.S. Coast Guard) requires of us.”
The vessel had run charters out of Sitka for years under a waiver of the U.S.-built requirement, and that federal officials were “well aware of our operation,” West said.
Its waiver, published in the Federal Register under the vessel’s former name, Thomas Crosby V, allows it to take passengers from Friday Harbor, Washington to Ketchikan, nearly 200 miles southeast of where it was intercepted near Sitka. West said the waiver allowed the vessel to operate throughout Alaska.
“For four years, Bear Paw has had the ‘nod’ from the Sitka USCG office to operate like we have,” West said in the statement. The waiver, he said, authorizes the Bear Paw to operate throughout Southeast Alaska despite being built in British Columbia.
West said the Bear Paw would relocate to Ketchikan, where he had recently found dock space, though he insisted the move was “not in reaction to the latest enforcement.”
Blanchard, though, saw it differently. He recounted a meeting in which the U.S. Maritime Administration, which is known as MARAD and issues waivers of the Passenger Vessel Services Act, told the Coast Guard to take action.
“MARAD, on a Microsoft Teams call from D.C., told the Coast Guard that it had every, not only right, but were required to enforce the law and that the vessel is operating outside its MARAD waiver,” Blanchard said.
The boarding was a good start, said Blanchard, who hoped the incident would serve as a warning to others operating illegally.
Still, the Bear Paw and vessels like it are “low-hanging fruit,” Blanchard said. He’d like to see federal authorities crack down further.
“To get this job done, it's massive,” he said. “In Southeast Alaska, going all the way up to Yakutat, there are over 30 vessels that we've identified that are foreign flag vessels that are operating charters regularly.”
But law enforcement is underresourced, he said. Just a handful of people are tasked with enforcing the century-old law in a region nearly the size of Florida, he said.
“The real issue,” he said, “is that there’s just hardly anybody there.”
