SEATTLE — As the days grow shorter and the last unofficial weekend of summer travel is here, Washington State Ferries is warning Labor Day weekend passengers of long lines and extended wait times.
More than 300,000 people are expected to board a state ferry between Aug. 29 and Sept. 2, with Saturday, Aug. 31, the busiest of the days. WSF is advising travelers to prepare for delays, opt for an early or late sailing and consider leaving the car at home and instead taking transit to the terminal and walking or biking aboard.
The agency also urges passengers to make vehicle reservations when possible and to download its mobile app or visit its website, wsdot.com/ferries/schedule, to view sailing schedules, terminal conditions, rider alerts and a real-time map showing vessel locations.
Preparation can only go so far, as the troubled ferry system’s busy summer shows. Crew shortages led to canceled sailing after canceled sailing. Terminal workers reported an increase in verbal abuse from delayed and angry passengers. Engine room workers went public with their demands for better pay.
Though state ferries completed nearly 40,000 sailings and carried 6 million passengers since Memorial Day, things could’ve gone better, said Justin Fujioka, a WSF spokesperson.
“Obviously, we know we’re not providing the service that we want to be providing. We acknowledge that it’s been a challenging summer for travel,” said Fujioka. “We have two No. 1 priority problems: our crewing situation and our vessel availability situation.”
As Fujioka suggested, the state is still in the early days of its mission to electrify the fleet. WSF has an aging collection of 21 ferries with $270 million in deferred maintenance. It needs 26 boats to run at full service, so it’s on a reduced schedule until at least 2028, when it anticipates delivery of the first hybrid-electric ferries.
The agency is also trying to replenish its ranks of trained and licensed crew members, which were depleted during the pandemic, as the strong global labor market for mariners makes it tough.
Official numbers have yet to be crunched, but based on the agency’s weekly reports, there were 1,020 canceled sailings between May 20 and Aug. 25. Of those, 71 were replaced with a later trip.
That means about 2.5% of the season’s 39,465 total sailings were canceled.
Since 2019, WSF has seen a worsening on-time performance during the months of July, August and September.
During those three months in 2019, WSF boats sailed on schedule 85.7% of the time. By 2023, the on-time performance was 74.6%. The state agency has an on-time goal of 95%.
During those same months in 2023, 1,069 trips were canceled. Four years before, in 2019, just 299 trips were canceled.
These numbers don’t reflect the sailings the agency no longer does, or does fewer times a day. They include the Anacortes-Sydney route, a daily service that went to British Columbia but has been shuttered since 2020; fewer runs between Bremerton and Seattle; the two boats that run the Southworth-Fauntleroy-Vashon triangle route, where there used to be three; and the Port Townsend-Coupeville route, which is the lowest priority for WSF in terms of restoring service.
On one day this week, WSF sent out nearly 30 rider alerts about delayed or canceled sailings, due to a slew of issues including crew shortages, an inoperable ramp and a power outage.
Fujioka did assert that there were “setbacks” but said WSF saw a “glimmer of hope” in June when it had the first week with no crew-related cancellations in years. But the Fourth of July weekend saw a slog of canceled sailings and stranded passengers.
It’s not just the state agency, or the work-to-ferry daily commuters, that faced hard times.
This week, Kitsap Transit suspended its passenger-only ferry service between downtown Seattle and Kingston. The fast ferry service has helped fill the gaps left behind by WSF, but two of its boats are in dry dock for months waiting for replacement parts from Finland.
Last week, WSF shared rare good news that it had sold two retired ferries, the Elwha and Klahowya, which were headed to Ecuador for scrapping. But an issue with the towboat that was going to take them south foiled the plans.
“We were just going to hook up the tandem tow in Eagle Harbor, but they had a problem with the winch,” said Russ Shrewsbury, a co-owner of Western Towboat, the local operator charged with helping deliver the vessels to the international crew aboard the tugboat Wycliffe.
To speed the process, Shrewsbury’s crew towed the ferries about 2 miles away from WSF’s Eagle Harbor Maintenance Facility on Bainbridge Island, but the Wycliffe’s crew still weren’t prepared to take possession of the boats.
“It was time to pull the plug because we had other things to do,” Shrewsbury said.
The boats were taken back to Eagle Harbor, in yet another canceled sailing.
