Loading for an even keel

[glasseye]

How much of an issue is it for the terminal traffic directors and deck crews to keep the ferries floating upright given the unpredictable weight of heavy commercial vehicles?

I'd always assumed that terminal personnel would direct incoming trucks to specific lanes in order to make sure that each ferry was loaded with a roughly even weight over each quarter. But, obviously this can't be done at the smaller terminals where there is only one waiting lane and yet we don't have problems with ferries capsizing at the dock after leaving one-lane docks like Snug Cove.

Are the ferries simply designed to cope with any reasonable weight imbalance (e.g. two loaded gravel trucks on one side of the Capilano and two empty gravel trucks on the other) or do the terminal and deck crews have to put some thought into keeping on-board weight balanced?

[Ferryman]

The Chief Officers are pretty conscious of things like this while they're directing which lanes the traffic must go in. Depending on the ship, the center lanes of the car deck are usually saved for the bigger things, and then the surrounding lanes are filled in with smaller vehicles. Or if you have Platform decks on vessels such as the Queen of Nanaimo, the heavier vehicles have to be put on the outboard lanes. Sometimes though, it can't be helped if there's a little more weight on one side due to the loading pattern the deckhands must follow, which is a fairly common sight with the Queen of Nanaimo. The bridge has an electronic reading of how the ship is sitting in the water, and of course there are limitations as to how much they're allowed to let it list.

I know that with the Skeena Queen, the bigger vehicles are clustered together at the terminal, and then they all come at once after theres been a few dozen cars already loaded. The cars will be loaded in such a way that they're even right across the deck. This is called block loading. Then the trucks will come on, and then they're usually given a lane and a half for each one lane of commercial vehicle, which are also loaded in a block loading fashion. Think of it as a game of tetris.

[lmtengs]

When I did my little trip over to Quadra and Cortéz Islands this summer, I took note that at both terminals serving Tenaka's route, where only one lane is present for loading, a different procedure is used. Before the ferry loads, the crew walks up the line and selectively picks out certain types of vehicles, then gets them to shimmy out of the line-up so they can board before the other vehicles. These were mostly the heavy vehicles that got priority loading that way. I think that they do the same kind of thing at all the other major terminals with multiple loading lanes, but we just don't notice it as much because they let an entire lane go instead of pulling 6 or 7 cars out of one lane. It was a neat little thing to see. At first, I thought the terminal attendance were playing favorites, letting their friends onto the boat, until I looked for the obvious pattern.