SOBC has a buggered standby Generator

[Ferryman]

Posted May 20, 2006

The Spirit of British Columbia is experiencing a problem with the stand by generator. As a result, the 7am sailing from Tsawwassen and the 9am sailing from Swartz Bay are cancelled. Engineers are working diligently to fix the problem in time for the scheduled 11am sailing from Tsawwassen.


(I wouldn't reccomend taking Route 1 this morning, 3 sailing wait )

[Curtis]

Another Result of the Long Weekend

[Political Incorrectness]

Along with the long weekend, boarder line ups are nuts! They better have plenty of extra sailings going on.

[Retrovision]

Unfortunately with the demand on a transportation link such as BCF's, you're dealing with something quite similar to a bridge: Once capacity is reached, the link becomes a bottle-neck, and like with the SoBC this morning, you remove a lane of a bridge because of a stalled car, and that bottle neck just got narrower.

[Neil]

It doesn't help that there has actually been sailing cutbacks over the years. Looking at a schedule for the May long weekend in '94, there was one more round trip a day on routes 1 and 2 than there is now. There were also 20 sailings every day in peak season on route 1, compared to 16 now, and 12 every day on route 2, compared to 9-11 now. And that's with the same ship capacity. What's our population grown in that time? So when you get a breakdown now, it's effect is even more pronounced.

[Dane]

hornbyguy said:

And that's with the same ship capacity.

Wouldn't the Spirits not yet be online by that time?

[Neil]

Yes, they were.
(and a clarification: Queen of Victoria was still in the fleet.)

[Dane]

Ahh I see, Route 2 has also seen a frequency cut, but the vessels being used were lower capacity.

[Queen of Nanaimo Teen]

Why wouldn't they use the Vancouver to fill in for the SOBC? She's sitting there doing nothing ight now??

[Neil]

In '94 route 2 had the C's on it, just like now. They've just cut the frequency at peak times.

[SHipbuilders daughterwife]

I remember when the last sailing was 11pm at night, on the Tsawwassen-Swartz Bay run. Those were the days.......

[Koastal Karl]

The Vancouver was being used today!

[Retrovision]

yeah, they couldn't survive without her in operation on a weekend like this:

Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Vessel --------------------Scheduled Departure---Actual Departure---Details
Queen of Vancouver--------8:00 AM---------------8:20 AM------Operational delay

[Ferryman]

dane said:

Ahh I see, Route 2 has also seen a frequency cut, but the vessels being used were lower capacity.

When Oak Bay and Surrey were on the run, didn't they run all night as well in the summer?

[EGfleet]

ferrymaniac101 said:

Along with the long weekend, boarder line ups are nuts! They better have plenty of extra sailings going on.

Speaking of, I saw on the news the other day that 3 of the 4 border crossings are going to be having on-going road construction going on this summer.

[hergfest]

I am sure they are expanding for the 2010 Olympics. Should be interesting to see how much tourism is effected by the new passport rules though starting in 2007.

[Neil]

In answer to Chris's question, I checked my old schedules, and it looks like the only years where there were late night sailings were the summers of '92 and '93. In '92, on route 2, ferries ran around the clock, every two hours, four days a week. There was also 1 and 3am sailings one other day, but no 11pm. The 1 and 3am sailings were half price. In '93, route 30 had a Tsawwassen departure at midnight, and one from Departure Bay (pre-Duke Point) at 4:30 am, four days a week. They dropped the experiment after '93.

[Dane]

hornbyguy said:

In answer to Chris's question, I checked my old schedules, and it looks like the only years where there were late night sailings were the summers of '92 and '93. In '92, on route 2, ferries ran around the clock, every two hours, four days a week. There was also 1 and 3am sailings one other day, but no 11pm. The 1 and 3am sailings were half price. In '93, route 30 had a Tsawwassen departure at midnight, and one from Departure Bay (pre-Duke Point) at 4:30 am, four days a week. They dropped the experiment after '93.

Route 2 also had hourly sailings for almost 20 years before the Cs were around, this obviously during peak sailing times.

[Dane]

I don't remember the 24 hrs sailings, but an older member of the board once posted they caused havoc, when a ship ran late it could then get later and later and later over three days, even with some small breaks in the schedule. I could believe it given the time it takes to load a C Class to full capacity (and unload...)

[Retrovision]

hornbyguy said:

In answer to Chris's question, I checked my old schedules, and it looks like the only years where there were late night sailings were the summers of '92 and '93. In '92, on route 2, ferries ran around the clock, every two hours, four days a week. There was also 1 and 3am sailings one other day, but no 11pm. The 1 and 3am sailings were half price. In '93, route 30 had a Tsawwassen departure at midnight, and one from Departure Bay (pre-Duke Point) at 4:30 am, four days a week. They dropped the experiment after '93.

I can remember reading in the book "Evergreen Fleet" (published sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, I think) about 24hr service on one of the two routes from downtown Seattle.


Other than the scheduling issues mentioned by Dane, I'm surprised to hear the timing of those years with 24hr sailings. That's to say that I'm surprised that they were introduced *after* extra capacity had started to come online, i.e. the Spirits on route 1. I thought that the 24hr sailings would have been a stop-gap measure put in place leading up to the commissioning of new ships, not the other way around. I'm also surprised because I would have expected them to either have only started experimenting with things like 24hr sailings at a time like now, when the combination of lack of both ship and terminal capacity has made traffic in the BCF system arguably the worst to-date, or to have worked out the bugs/issues of 24hr-sailing-scheduling over the past decade+ (or atleast over the period of time since the fastcat-fiasco), atleast conceptually, enough to be able to implement a 24hr schedule at a time of need such as now.

...Then again, I'm saying all of that without taking into consideration the unknown magnitude of the already known-to-be strong friendship (to say the least) between the BC SoCred... err, umm "Liberal" party, BCFS and WMG... And I'm sure that our SoCreds wouldn't feel right taking business away from one friend (Seaspan) and giving it to another (BCFS), that would be favoritism

[just visiting]

The Burnaby use to do the overnight run in '93

It was one of 2 ships devoted to the run at night.

Jumbos were used for odd hour sailings during the day 7am-9pm

[Dane]

which was the other?

[Neil]

There was only one extra round trip in '93, so only one ship.

[Low Light Mike]

For Route-2 (Dep Bay - HS Bay), I took the middle-of-night sailing twice.

.....It was the summer of 1992. Garth Brooks was ropin' the wind, Mike Harcourt was Premier, Brian Mulroney was PM, and the Penguins had just won their 2nd consecutive Stanley Cup.

I was on vacation: destination-Edmonton to see a relative. I took the 3:00am sailing out of Dep Bay, and it was a C-Class....running 1/2 hour late. Once at HorseShoeBay, I travelled north on Hwy-99, had breakfast in Pemberton, and took the newly paved Duffy Lake Road (gravel portion thru Mount Currie).....and made it to Quesnel by noon (then on to Dawson Creek, Athabasca, and down to Edmonton.....).

Later that summer, I did the 3-Ferry-Day, by taking the 3:00am sailing again out of Dep.Bay (again a C-Class), then turned around on the upper-levels-hwy, then waited in line for Langdale and took the first sailing to Langdale. Then a drive up the lower-S-Coast to Earl's Cove, and a ride on the "new" Chilliwack to Saltery Bay.....then on to a week's vacation visiting my girlfriend on the upper sunshine coast.

------------------------

If my photo-memory serves me correctly, the next summer (2003), there was no 24-hour-schedule on Route-2, but instead they promoted selected late night sailings on the new Mid Island Express. Likely 2 late sailings, maybe just during a few days per week. That may have been when they were using 3 ships on Route-30 during summer....but I'm likely wrong.

After August-1992, BC Ferries had all the publicity that they needed re the new Mid-Island Express route.....allbeit the bad kind, because of the Askew-QNW tragic accident at Departure Bay.

(forgive the topic roaming here: but I also remember that there was a near-miss accident the next day or so after the Askew accident, at Westview, where the Sidney also tried to leave the berth while vehicles were still loading. It was less than 3 days after the NewWest accident....I guess the Sidney crew must have missed watching the news that week......) There was actually news video or private video, showing the Sidney leaving-early from the dock).

PPS: the surviving grandmother of the Askew family got a "lifetime-exemption" from ever having to use an upper-ramp on a BC Ferry. ie. BC Ferries promised to always load her on the main deck from then on, whenever she had reason to use a ferry.

[Dane]

hornbyguy said:

There was only one extra round trip in '93, so only one ship.

There were two ships accroding to just visiting.... That would facilitate the 2 hour turn time, didn't they maintain that?