The Tacoma was only 5 years old when this photo was taken. Now at 29 years of age, in most places she’d be considered at the end of her service life. The legislature in their “wisdom” has saddled WSF with a completely impractical 60 year life cycle for their vessels. Read more
It’s been a lovely autumn to start (and the 14th was about as gorgeous of a day on Puget Sound as you can get) but as the month has progressed, it’s gotten progressively wetter and stormier. As I write this, a good-sized “atmospheric river” is headed toward the PacNW with Read more
Labor Day has always signaled the end of summer. Kids head back to school, travel season winds down, traffic starts to return to normal levels. (Or did back in the day. For the Puget Sound region, traffic is generally awful the year round anymore.) For the ferry system, summer schedule Read more
And we have a shipyard! Yesterday,(about the time I thought he would) Governor Ferguson announced that the yard had been chosen to build the Wishkah and her as yet unnamed sister ferries. The winner: Eastern Shipbuilding out of Florida. Good luck, and now let us start cutting some steel! To Read more
Back when I had a blog on forgotten things in the Pacific Northwest, this was one of the more popular stories. Here it. The Top of the Ocean: The restaurant ship that wasn’t a ship Every so often, I get an inquiry about the strange looking “ferry” in postcards parked Read more
From ferry to building… Not looking too different, at least not yet, the Elwha at the Everett Shipyard undergoing conversion to offices and floating warehouse. The long-lived Ballard… Whether she was the Golden Anchors of the Four Winds, the old ferry Ballard was a popular venue in Seattle, right up Read more
Captain Peabody had pulled the same trick nearly twenty years earlier: taking the hull of a vessel, stripping it down, and completely rebuilding it into a completely new ferry. When he did this in 1935 the vessel that emerged was the Kalakala, a vessel whose function as a ferry had Read more
They have run the gamut, from elegant dining rooms that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner (the pocket liners operated by Canadian Pacific) to the galleys fitted out with surplus plastic fast food restaurant fittings (the original Issaquah Class galleys.) Black Ball ran all over Read more
The Elwha pulling into San Francisco on her journey northward in 1968. Note the lower car deck windows are boarded up and the false bow (left end of photo) to break waves. Author’s photo. Going nowhere fast Debacle–noun– A sudden, disastrous collapse, downfall, or defeat; a rout; A total, often Read more