Maritime Museum Presents Shipwreck Talk

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Museum Presents Tastes And Tales Of The Sea VI

Casey Kelly/KMXT
Lisa Polito/KMXT

The Kodiak Maritime Museum will present a talk this weekend about a pair of shipwrecks that occurred in Alaska during the first half of the 20^th Century. It’s part of the museum’s annual Tastes and Tales of the Sea fundraising dinner.

Mike Burwell will give the talk. He manages federal Minerals Management Service’s Alaska Shipwreck Database. When he first joined the agency, Burwell says he worked with a colleague to write a technical paper on Alaska shipwrecks and things blossomed from there.

(Shipwrecks 1:41s“…about 5,000 records.”)

Burwell’s presentation will focus on two shipwrecks specifically: The Princess May, an Alaska steamship that once transited the Inside Passage and ran aground on Sentinel Rock in 1910, and the Phyllis S, a mail boat that sank off the coast of Kodiak in 1943, after being accidentally struck by a Navy boat.

Kodiak Maritime Museum Director Toby Sullivan says shipwrecks are an unfortunate fact of life in Alaska, and the presentation should be pretty interesting to a Kodiak audience.

(Shipwrecks 2:26s“…Historical Society on that.”)

In addition to Burwell’s presentation there will also be dinner catered by Chef Joel Chenet of Mill Bay Coffee and Pastries, and a silent auction. Sullivan says there will also be a tribute to Wanda Fields, a founding member of the Maritime Museum, who died in a tragic cabin fire at her family’s setnet site last summer.

(Shipwrecks 3:10s“…museum and the community.”)

You can hear a full 48-minute interview with Mike Burwell about Alaska shipwrecks on KMXT’s Talk of the Rock with Lisa Polito, tomorrow morning in the 9 o’ clock hour. The Alaska Shipwreck Database can be found online at the MMS’s Alaska region website, M-M-S dot GOV slash Alaska.

The Maritime Museum’s Tastes and Tales of the Sea will be Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Golden Anchor. Tickets are 50-dollars apiece and can be found at Mill Bay Coffee and Pastries.

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