Alaska

Bottom line up front: This day was the weakest day of the entire Alaska portion of the trip. While the meal and atmosphere which was the focus of our excursion was excelent, the rest of the day underperformed in pretty much every way.

I understand there are good reasons for developing the docking facility at Ward Cove:

• Capacity: only one of the largest ships (NCL’s Breakaway Plus class, along with the largest of other lines’ ships) can dock at the downtown docks at a time. As the lines shift to the more-profitable mega-ships, this problem will worsen. The new facility can dock two Breakaway Plus-class ships at the same time.
• Economic Development: downtown is the only part of Ketchikan to directly benefit from tourism income. All of the city and bourough feel the indeirect impacts, both positive and negative, and adding the Ward Cove develpment will allow a whole new center of tourism to benefit the local economy.
• “Build it and they will come:” A new docking facility like this is like a new interchange on the highway. It may not be immediate, but the new business demand (tourism in this case) will eventually have supply to meet it.

But to have a facility seven miles north of town and then have ships stopping for only 6 hours (the first two of which nothing is yet open in town, and the last 1.5 of which are useless because of the shuttle logistics getting back to the ship, leaving just 2.5 productive hours in Ketchikan) borders on senseless.

In our case, the excursion was a 20-minute drive south of Ketchikan in George Inlet. So we had a 45-minute bus ride, a little under 90 minutes at the venue, and a 45-minute bus ride back…no chance to stop in downtown, enjoy any other aspects of Ketchikan, etc.

Again I understand the constrictions of needing to make the legally-required stop in Victoria by 8pm this evening, making it difficult to lengthen the stop. But maybe the Ketchikan stop could be on the way north instead of on the way south? I don’t know, but I do know Bliss made a Ketchikan stop downtown pre-COVID and I don’t remember seeing complaints about it being a whistle stop.

Bottom line, this will be enough that I will likely not do another Encore sailing to Alaksa. I’ll spend my money on the one-way smaller ships, probably the Jewel, which have the better itinerary IMO.

So how about the excursion?

George Inlet Crab Feast gets my highest recommendation, in spite of the long bus rides piloted by Mario Andretti (yes, it felt like we were competitiors in the MCI Bus Grand Prix at times).

When you step off the bus to this, the jostling and frustration fade quickly:

The crab feast is excellent, too, with generous portions of Dungeness crab, salad and crab dip, and a cheesecake dessert. And I finally learned the right way to eat crab legs!

A Specialty Dinner that Failed to Meet the Hype

We received a complimentary specialty dinner courtesy of the General Manager, and chose to have it last night at Onda by Scarpetta. We’d heard how great the restaurant was and how difficult to get into.

The good: some of the food was great!

This margherita pizza, for instance, was excellent. Rich flavor, crisp crust, and pleasing presentation. I’d come to regret not eating it all, but I wanted to leave room for the main course and dessert.

Roxan had a great appetizer as well, a trufffled mushroom dish.

The bad: pretty muh everything else.

My entree was the same as rOXAN HAD had a couple of nights ago at Ocean Blue: the 8 oz filet mignon.

The best thing about the entree was the side…steamed potatoes. The cut of meat I got was of lesser quality than she’d gotten previously, and it was slightly underdone. There just wasn’t any flavor and the texture was not at all enjoyable. The potatoes were also slightly underdone — something we’re realizing seems to happen with starchy foods on Encore.

Roxan had Scottish Salmon. She found the filet fairly tasteless, and it looked overdone to me. It was served skin-on, not that it makes a lot of difference but it would have been nice to know before ordering as it would have changed the entree choice.

The highlight of the night was the desserts! We both had a dessert with sorbet or ice cream, unfortunately I didn’t remember the name of them and the menu I have from Prima does not list either.

This is the first time in *any* restaurant on NCL I’ve had generalized service issues. It seemed like the pacing of the meal was all wrong, from the start. Our waiter would bring out a single item at a time, take off one of several plates we were finished with, this kind of thing. At one point it seemed like the restaurant had only one water pitcher and each waiter had to go to the back room and get it, then return it before they could do anything else. The pizza stayed on the stand until after we’d finished our entrees, even though we clearly told the waiter he could take it away. We sat 10 minutes after finishing entree before he inquired whether we wanted dessert. The overall meal took 1 hour 45 minutes…which is at least 50% longer than I would expect for two people. I’m glad we had a 5pm reservation since we needed to make a 7pm comedy club reservation.

So why didn’t I/we complain at the time? First, it would have just caused additional delay. Second, this meal was complementary. If we had been paying for it (even on the dining package) I would have expressed my displeasure. We are grateful for the complimentary meal, and have good feelings toward the ship and NCL because of it. It’s all on us that we chose the wrong restaurant.

As we look forward to the 3-week portion of the trip, I will be re-evaluating the restuarant reservations, dropping repeats at Ocean Blue and Onda. We have a consistently good experience at Cagneys, and plan to give Q Texas Barbecue a try in spite of the general consensus we’ve seen that it misses the mark on BBQ.

Fortunately the MDRs are appearing to have high quality….we’ll be choosing them more often, I suspect.