ave Allen is the owner of Alaska Dream Cruises and Allen Marine Tours, a family-owned business and one of the oldest tour companies in Alaska, operating in the Inside Passage for more than forty-five years.
Allen Marine operates more than thirty vessels, employs more than 300 Alaskans, and provides daily and week-long tours and cruises throughout Southeast Alaska. The company also builds aluminum boats and structural products at its boat shop in Sitka.
Alaska Business: How did you get your start?
Dave Allen: I grew up in the family business, which started as a shipyard in Sitka in 1967. Our family spent countless hours hauling boats, propping them up, scraping barnacles off hulls before adding fresh layers of copper paint, and making repairs.
Junior Achievement of Alaska
Our refurbished tour vessel, the Manana II, was re-christened as the St. Michael and we began running tours of Silver Bay. Dad was the captain, mom was the first mate, and my siblings and I were deckhands.
AB: Where did you grow up?
Allen: I was born in Kodiak in 1967; however, our family moved to Sitka when I was less than a year old. My parents, Bob and Betty Allen, funded the move through our family’s first entrepreneurial venture—recovering and selling communication cable that had been buried in the ground and laid along the seabed during WWII. My dad came up with an efficient means of pulling the cable so that the copper and lead could be recovered in paying quantities.
AB: What were your parents like and what was your family life and upbringing like?
Allen: Dad had a way of making even the most tedious and disagreeable chores seem like fun—to the point that us siblings, who generally got along well with each other, would sometimes end up fighting over the privilege of completing whatever task was at hand. The working part was almost like play. We loved being around the shipyard and we all participated in the family business.
Here’s a story to illustrate how much we liked to be at the shipyard: One time my sister, Kipper, had an accident where she got her hair caught in a planer. She was able to get the machine stopped but not before it separated her scalp. She ended up with three stitches. Well, I was really young and started yelling “I told you! Now we won’t be able to go to the shop anymore! You ruined everything!” And I was right—at least for a bit. For what ended up being less than three days my Mom didn’t allow us to go anywhere near the shipyard. But after that short amount of time, she couldn’t take the begging anymore, and she let us go with dad to put a boat in the water.
Me and my siblings would sit on the boat’s dashboard as dad steered the boat, competing with each other for the privilege of working the hand operated windshield wiper. Dad was great at keeping work and play the same. We never had any regrets of missing out on other things in life. Helping out with the family business was our life and we loved it. In my teens I was seriously involved in high school athletics, but I devoted every spare hour, especially on weekends, to helping in the shop.
Dad was innovative and punctual. He always said, “Nobody waits for Allen Marine.” We were always on time for our tours and lightering services.
My Mom is Alaska Native of the Tlingit tribe. Some of her early memories are of experiences aboard her Dad’s small troller fishing vessel. Like Dad, hard work is part of who she is. When she was growing up, she says her Dad (my Grandpa) would say, “Don’t wait around—no one is going to give you money—you got to go work.” And she did from a young age. When she was just sixteen, she began working at a remote cannery in Hawk Inlet on Admiralty Island, where she had spent her summers since infancy.
Allen: In the summer of 1970, the same year we began the Silver Bay Tour, a new kind of tour ship arrived in Sitka Sound. The arrival of larger cruise ships heralded the beginning of a new era for tourism in Sitka and Southeast Alaska. In 1971 we were invited to ferry passengers from the cruise ship at anchor (there was no dock in town big enough to accommodate the ship) to shore and back.
For the first three years, almost all business with the ships involved lightering (ferrying) passengers. Halfway through the fourth season, dad finally got a Princess Cruise shore director to commit to a Silver Bay tour. Though we were promised twenty-six guests on our first tour, the shore director arrived with just two guests—a husband and wife. The director offered to cancel the tour, but Dad said that we would take them. They sat in the wheelhouse talking with Dad and enjoying the scenery of the Bay and Southeast Alaska. About ten days later, Dad got another call from the same shore director: “I have forty-nine people for you.” This time forty-nine people showed up. The director told Dad that those first two cruisers were known aboard the cruise ship as not being satisfied with anything about their cruise. Other passengers were even avoiding them because they were complaining about how miserable they had been. But when those two passengers got back to the cruise ship after our tour they spent the remainder of the cruise talking about the wonderful trip they took up Silver Bay with the Allens.
That true Alaskan hospitality and family ambiance and attention to safety caught on and we developed good relationships with the excursion directors aboard the ships. Over the coming decades we were able to expand operations to Juneau and Ketchikan. Nearly all of the vessels in our fleet were built by us in our Sitka shipyard.
AB: Do you believe there is value in educating young people about free enterprise? If so, why?
Allen: Yes, we strongly believe in the value of educating young people about free enterprise. This can help prepare them to be successful in their endeavors throughout life—regardless of the specific path they choose.
AB: What can schools and parents do to ensure that young people don’t encounter financial pitfalls?
Allen: When I was in high school, we had a class called “Single’s Living.” In that class we learned how to manage money, balance checkbooks, basics of banking, and practical “real-world” skills. These kinds of courses can be of significant benefit to prepare students for their eventual careers and for life in general.
Allen: It is important to be actively involved with the local school district. We enjoy hosting class field trips to our shipyard, where students learn about business operations and the various positions we offer—from welding and plumbing to accounting and marketing. We also participate in mock job interviews for the upperclassmen of Sitka High to help them be better prepared for interviews with their future employers. We’re thrilled by the positive feedback we always receive from both the teachers and students after these events.
We have also done in-class visits to tech and vocational courses, where we’ve taught about shipbuilding and design, engineering, and mechanical work.
AB: Did you have a role model growing up? Do you think young people benefit from role models?
Allen: For all the reasons listed in previous questions, my Mom and Dad were my role models. Their hard work and determination are inspiring. Role models can be both good and bad, and it’s critical that young people have role models that will uplift and encourage. It’s on all of us as parents, business leaders, coaches, et cetera to exhibit positive traits for our young people to emulate—because they will.
AB: What can we do to prepare young people to succeed in a global economy?
Allen: We need to teach our young people to work hard and not give up—resiliency. I also believe it is important to teach real-world skills in the classroom—the basics that will help students transition from educational settings to the workplace.
AB: So far, what accomplishments are you most proud of?
Allen: One thing we’re proud of is our signature design—a catamaran with four waterjets and four engines. This setup had never been done anywhere in the world, and some waterjet engineers even doubted the design. It ended up being very efficient and stable and became a standard throughout the world. We’re also proud of building one of the largest whale watching and sightseeing operations in the country.
AB: What do you hope for your own future and/or the future of Alaska?
Allen: The negative effects of the current pandemic have been unfathomable. Our greatest hope is that stabilization can occur.
AB: What do you want your legacy to be?
Allen: Our mission has always been to immerse each guest in a personable level of service we’ve come to call True Alaskan Hospitality. Even though we coined that term just a few years ago, it has really been our mantra from those first tours. We expect every employee to treat each passenger as a special guest. 