PALMER — Move over Boaty McBoatface.
There's a new vessel crowd-sourcing a name: the ferry formerly known as the M/V Susitna.
The borough last year finally offloaded the costly but never-used Susitna to the Philippine Red Cross at a major loss after five years trying to sell it or just give it away.
The ferry arrived in Subic Bay in December and is now docked in Manila Bay for launch as a water ambulance and disaster-relief ship this month.
Now the Red Cross wants a name that reflects the ferry's new mission.
A naming contest — #namethatredcrossship — is underway through April 15. Female names only, please.
Sorry, Alaskans: To join the official contest, participants must sign up to become an official Philippine Red Cross volunteer. Email zhollander@alaskadispatch.com or drop us a line in the comments to join an unofficial Alaska Dispatch News contest.
The former ferry would be "the only humanitarian ship in the Philippines" — at least as depicted in a glossy video with a dramatic drum-heavy soundtrack published this week on YouTube.
"What do you want to call the humanitarian ship?" a caption asks toward the end of the two-minute video.
Well, that's a loaded question around these parts.
The ill-fated 195-foot U.S. Navy prototype converted to passenger ferry never sailed the waters of Knik Arm between Mat-Su and Anchorage as intended.
Instead, plagued by political and funding battles, the Susitna sat at a dock near Ketchikan, bleeding money in the form of berthage, insurance and repair payments.
The Susitna became a multimillion-dollar drain on a cash-strapped borough with no major source of revenue besides property taxes. Once the failed offers started piling up, there was talk of scrapping the high-tech craft or storing it in a ditch at the Matanuska-Susitna Borough's struggling port on Point MacKenzie.
With the Philippine Red Cross agreement, the Mat-Su borough got $1.75 million — far less than the $6 million officials had originally hoped to pocket before they began offering the ferry for free to a good government home.
They're still saddled with a $12.3 million federal grant repayment, though borough officials are pushing to pay far less.
Even though they aren't taking name suggestions, the borough public-affairs office announced the contest Friday by sharing a link to the video produced by MovePH, identified as "the citizen journalism arm" of a Philippine-based social news network company called Rappler.
"From war ship to life-saving vessel," a caption proclaims as the video shows the freshly painted bright blue ferry bearing the Red Cross insignia pushed by a tug. Another calls the craft a "cargo-loaded barge that can haul itself onshore" and a "twin-hulled vessel that cuts through choppy seas" yet land on beaches in as little as 4 feet of water.
The video says this is the Red Cross organization's 70th year in operation. The vessel will be used as an ambulance and disaster-response ship in the "disaster-prone archipelago" visited by 22 to 26 typhoons and 170 maritime accidents a year.
Red Cross officials refused to respond to numerous information requests about the naming contest earlier this year.
Naming contests can be fraught with peril, as a British government agency discovered last year. The National Environment Research Council decided to let the internet decide a name for a new polar research ship.
The internet overwhelmingly went with RRS Boaty McBoatface.
The council ultimately dubbed the vessel the RRS David Attenborough after the naturalist and broadcaster but shifted the Boaty moniker to a remotely operated sub-sea vehicle, the BBC reported in May.
[Boaty McBoatface goes from online joke to polar explorer]
Given all that, opening a public naming contest for a ferry that came at only a cost to Mat-Su taxpayers and became synonymous with government missteps is a bold move.
Darcie Salmon, a former Wasilla Realtor now retired and living in Michigan, sat on the Assembly when the ferry was first approved.
"I think someone will recommend my name," Salmon said, at least partly joking, adding he supported not just the ferry but other so-far failed efforts to develop the Knik Arm Crossing bridge and the port. "Probably one of my children will throw that out there."
Salmon said despite a number of opportunities to get rid of the ferry, the $12 million grant repayment that included the cost of a new ferry terminal spooked some at the borough from "pulling the trigger" on potential offers.
Now, perhaps with the mellow hindsight born of retirement in another state, Salmon the ferry renaming "a point of healing."
"It's over, it's done," he said. "We fought, we struggled, it was a good idea when it started. It just didn't work out."