Save our ferry system: A plea for help from an islander

When I became a San Juan Islander in the late 1970s, the Washington ferries were a world marvel. Countless magazine articles extolled the ships. I remember a National Geographic piece describing people flying kites off a ferry stern. Seeing a green-and-white ferry pull into the dock took your breath away.

Today the ships are rust-streaked and embarrassing. The metal deck plates on some boats creak and wobble underfoot. Who knows what the girders hidden beneath look like, much less the engines. The galleys are closed as often as not, and dispensing machines have handwritten out-of-order signs taped on them. An Anacortes or Friday Harbor ferry leaving on time is a godsend; too often islanders or delivery drivers arrive only to discover the scheduled ferry is canceled. That means a wait of hours for the next one. That takes your breath away, too.

It reminds me of a once-great sports franchise that decades ago changed hands, bringing in those with other management approaches and coaching styles, whose mission to win a World Series took a back seat to other values. A famous brand that hasn’t been to the playoffs in years. Wistfully, we still wear the logo caps and the fading T-shirts. But it hasn’t been the same for a long time.

Sure — no one knew COVID-19 was headed our way, that vaccination requirements would become a philosophical issue, that supply chains would become stressed, that inflation would take hold, that in-state boatbuilding yards would shrink to an overstretched single one. But the ferries were aging ungracefully long before that. Announced plans for new boats sounded great but disappeared below the surface. Crews were getting older, too. And they were finding it harder to live on ferry wages in a region with growing living expenses. All these obstacles were in our way but no one turned the rudder hard enough to miss them.

One of the most obvious problems is a system of outdated state and federal laws that limit where Washington ferries can be built. Recent changes in Olympia allow boats built out of state but shipbuilding in the USA (once a national treasure) has all but collapsed. About 10 commercial shipping vessels are built in America each year; China now builds more than 1,000. Washington state has led the charge on national issues such as smoking, Facebook’s effect on youth mental health, a supermarket merger and everything Trump. But I cannot recall a similarly vigorous effort to overturn the 1920s Jones Act, which bans the state from looking at the best shipyards in the world, as Canada’s ferry system does. That protectionist act (meaningless these days) costs Washington taxpayers billions.  

There have been considerable periods when both the state and federal government have been ruled by a single party (the same party). Whether that is good or not is a matter of opinion, but at least at such times these old regulations could have been more easily swept aside and replaced by more seaworthy ones. But they weren’t. 

These days islanders in envy read the Victoria, B.C., news outlets announcing new hybrid ferries arriving to join British Columbia’s fleet. Several luxurious new B.C. vessels were finished in Flensburg, Germany, in 2020. Others have been built at Gdańsk, Poland. High-speed hybrid ferries sailed in from Romania just recently. Could we learn something from the Canadians?

You might assume Washington’s system is so much larger that it must be more difficult to run. But British Columbia has 36 boats to Washington’s 21, and carries 22 million passengers to Washington’s 17 million per year.

Given the already existing crew problems with state ferries, a Friday Harbor businessman wrote in the local newspaper that Gov. Jay Inslee’s order to fire those who wouldn’t get vaccinated was “stupid.” The resulting lack of crew is a continuing problem. British Columbia had the advantage there, too: being federal employees, B.C. ferry workers faced “administrative leave” if they didn’t get the shots. As a result, nothing hindered their return once the crisis eased.  

Another letter writer in the Friday Harbor paper recently suggested perhaps B.C. could run our system.

He might be on to something.