As the days lengthen and winter gives way to spring, one thing hasn’t changed — the town of Pelican is still without ferry service, at least until June. That’s made grocery shopping difficult and expensive for the town’s residents.
Last week, though, the Sitka Food Co-op was able to lend them a hand.
For the Sitka Food Co-op, bringing lots of food into town is nothing new. But recently they did something different — ship hundreds of pounds of bulk goods out of Sitka.
On a rainy afternoon, volunteers from the Co-op and the Sitka Conservation Society loaded the food and household supplies onto a sailboat bound for Pelican, a town that’s been cut off from ferry service since October.
“They’re just SOL right now,” said Keith Nyitray, general manager of the Food Co-op, who helped set up this long-distance grocery run. Pelican residents paid the normal prices, but the Co-op waived the membership fee for this delivery.
“So this is just one way we can step in and help them,” he said.
It’s not every day that the Sitka Food Co-op can ship a sailboat full of food out to a remote community. This trip came together because the Sitka Conservation Society was already sending one of their employees up to Pelican on a sailboat, and helped coordinate the order in addition to offering free cargo space on the boat.
Under normal circumstances, Pelican residents rely on the ferry to bring in bulk food orders from Juneau. But budget cuts and vessel breakdowns have left the town stranded for about six months, forcing residents to rely on expensive air freight and the occasional fisherman making a run to Juneau.
Celeste Weller, a fisherman and Pelican city council member, helped coordinate the Food Co-op order.
“Some of us were scrambling a little bit, we definitely all ended up paying more for our food freight,” Weller said.
Weller could be describing the situation in any number of remote coastal towns. The winter suspension of Marine Highway service severed supply chains from Kake to Cordova, leaving residents with few options as grocery store shelves ran bare.
