Saltchuk Resources

Saltchuk Resources was founded in 1982 by a group of investors led by Mike Garvey, a founding partner of the law firm Garvey Schubert & Barer, who assembled about eight backers to buy Totem Ocean Trailer Express. Garvey retired in 2007 and ownership passed to his three daughters — Nicole Engle, Michele Seaver and Denise Tabbutt — making it one of the larger family-held companies in the Pacific Northwest. Headquarters is at 450 Alaskan Way South in Pioneer Square, taken in 2017 and expanded in 2024.

The group runs seven lines of business: Saltchuk Marine (Foss Maritime, AmNav, Cook Inlet Tug & Barge, Young Brothers, Foss Offshore Wind), TOTE Group (TOTE Maritime, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico, Tropical Shipping), Saltchuk Aviation (Aloha Air Cargo, Northern Air Cargo), Saltchuk Logistics (Carlile Transportation) and NorthStar Energy (Delta Western, Inlet Energy, Hawaii Petroleum and several regional fuel distributors). Revenue is around $4.85B on 2023 figures with roughly 7,600 US employees as of early 2024.

On 1 October 2015 the SS El Faro, a cargo ship operated by the Saltchuk subsidiary TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico, sank in the Atlantic during Hurricane Joaquin en route from Jacksonville to San Juan. All 33 aboard died. The NTSB found the probable cause to be the captain's insufficient action to avoid the hurricane, his failure to use the most current weather information and his late decision to muster the crew, with ineffective bridge resource management and the inadequacy of TOTE's shoreside oversight and safety management system as contributing factors (Marine Accident Report MAR-17/01). Flooding through an open scuttle cost the ship its watertight integrity as it went.

N1982S is a 2024 Gulfstream G500, serial 72140, hex A18892, registered to 331DC LLC at 450 Alaskan Way South Suite 708 — the same building as the parent. This is the rare entry in the Boeing Field batch where the corporate link is directly and publicly documented rather than inferred: 331DC LLC appears alongside Saltchuk Resources as co-plaintiff in a Delaware federal case against Dassault Falcon Jet, and the trade press recorded the G500 as the company's first. The tail reads as the founding year. The Falcon 2000EX it replaced, N331DC, is no longer Saltchuk's — the FAA re-registered that airframe to an unrelated Tennessee owner in March 2025, so it is deliberately not tracked here.