Hooray! Hooray! Today is the day! August 5th, 2026, steel is cut for the Wishkah. WSF’s new ferries are officially under construction! And about time too. We’ve got three boats on borrowed time and/or life support. Governor Ferguson has forged ahead and exercised the option for the third boat because really, it was never an “option.” You can’t build two boats and just expect them to cover for three that need to be retired. Even Read more
The End of the Kalama Thanks to Ryan Smith, we have the last chapter of the the Kalama written! Doing some sleuthing on Google Earth given her last location, Mr. Smith was tracked the former WSF passenger only boat to a beach further down from her last known location. Using the the time-advance feature on Google Earth, you can clearly see in the third and last photo snapped by the satellite on 9 April 2025 Read more
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. And we’re off… …to a rip-roaring start, with three major vessels knocked off line to greet the New Year. First, the Walla Walla sheered off 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 winds in the lowlands gusting up to 50 MPH. At Washington State Ferries… It’s been a busy time. The Wenatchee returned to service after ironing 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 used to end with Labor Day weekend, marking the end of extra service boats, and as the 60’s drew to a close, a number of 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 be clear, no one is going to be happy with this decision It was Hobson’s choice, and one I don’t envy our governor for having 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 on the Tacoma waterfront. Where did it sail, people ask, and what was it doing in Tacoma? The answer is, it never sailed anywhere. The 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 until the time she sank. Unfortunately, this seems to be the fate of most floating restaurants, the Princess Louise in Los Angeles being a notable Read more
Oh, where does one start… How about the Wenatchee conversion fiasco? Yes, fiasco, because the 8-9 month project will take 22 by the time it is over with, and when it comes back into service, there won’t be anything to plug it into, anyway. Oh, and did I mention it cost way more than they figured to do the work? Like $36 million more? Surprise! Said no one, ever, when it comes to retrofitting one 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 always been secondary to its use as the symbolic flagship/excursion vessel–though up until the 60’s, she worked pretty well as a ferryboat as well. In Read more