What a rom-com title that could be! Is this blog post to be about a starry-eyed encounter with some unsuspecting hunk of a guy on a ferry? How could he know he would find himself intrigued by our heroine’s windswept hair and her distantly horizon-focused eyes as she gazes out to sea standing at the ship’s s rail! Well, that would be charming, could this be the start of my next novel? No dear reader, the love affair, mine, in this case, is not really on the ferry but rather with the ferry.
And I can narrow down which ferry I have very much in mind. It is one I take most often: the Vancouver to Vancouver Island one. It has so many things going for it: first of all, I am usually setting out for a holiday and a visit with family and dear friends, second, it has wonderful seascapes and thirdly, at an hour and a half, it is a comfortable duration allowing a good look at the sea, explore the ship and if it is morning, time to get breakfast.
This ferry route and its fleet of ships are a hardworking business operation with sailings most daylight and evening hours. The cars, buses and trucks are loaded on with efficiency and speed and the foot passengers are ushered on board pronto. And once on that ship, you sail off into the blue open waters across the Straight of Georgia, actually crossing a bit of US territorial waters where it does a pointy thing into Canadian waters. Then the ferry weaves between the coastal islands, soon going through the dramatic Active passage (OK, detour coming up: I thought it was a Sound, as in a channel between two islands, but even the geography nerds seem dithery on this: and then there is a Strait, which also connects two bodies of water. Well, they do agree a Channel is a whole lot bigger than a Strait, so how about my favourite: the Sound, seems it can be a narrow passage, the narrow part of a Straight, part of a fjord…There is the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar, and then there is the Puget Sound. So you know what I am going to say: “Go figure and take your pick!”)
This ferry route is not cheap. It can carry 2,100 passengers, and 258 cars, though that space is also for trucks and busses. I think this route helps BC Ferry pay for all those other routes which probably run at a loss. But for seafaring -boaty me it is worth every cent. I thrill when through the Active passage the tide swirls and challenges the boat, and the captain sounds the ship’s horn – two short blasts as we take a sharp turn between Mayne and Galiano islands as another ferry comes through the other way: that’s nautical talk for “leaving you on my starboard side!”
I love being on this ferry: I get to go to sea but no swilling the decks, scraping varnish or painting! The boats are beautiful, they are ferries but they look like real ships. Unlike so many cruise ships that look like floating apartment blocks.
Such is my enchantment, that I did some ferry-inspired doodly art work. As usual. all kinds of style mixed up. Here it is.
