CORRECTION: Group of 20+ Lopez Youth WSF Walk-ons Took 7 (not 5) Hours to Get from Friday Harbor to Lopez Friday
UPDATED Saturday, June 1, 2024 at 1:36 p.m.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect that the Lopez students arrived at the Lopez dock at 11:21 p.m., not approximately 9:00 p.m. as previously reported. The trip took more than seven hours, not five.
Friday was a very challenging day for many people who rely on Washington State Ferries in the San Juans.
The M/V Yakima was pulled from service early Friday morning due to a mechanical issue. That resulted in the cancelation of six sailings from approximately 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. There would be more.
Orcas-based Community Water Taxi stayed busy ferrying walk-on passengers between the islands.
Terminal workers — being the frontline public-facing WSF contract employees who bear the brunt of customer frustration during waves of cancelations — did their best to keep up with rolling changes in the schedule through the entire day. Sailings were still being canceled into the evening.
One group of customers caught up in the chaos was a group of approximately 20 to 25 school-aged youth (elementary to high school) from Lopez Island who were returning home from school on San Juan Island.
At approximately 4:00 p.m., the group arrived at the Friday Harbor terminal intending to catch the 4:15 p.m. boat to Lopez, normally a half-hour trip.
On days when there are mass cancelations, terminal workers, WSF dispatch, and ship captains improvise and make route modifications on the fly. On a normal day, the San Juan routes are complicated. During a day of improvising like Friday, the complications are compounded.
Due to either a misunderstanding or a captain’s last minute deviation from an improvised plan, the 20-plus unaccompanied minors were advised to get on a boat that in fact ended up passing the Lopez terminal and sailing straight to Anacortes. Once in Anacortes, the departure of their connecting trip back to Lopez was greatly delayed.
All told, seven hours passed between their arrival at the Friday Harbor terminal and their arrival on Lopez Island.
Parents were angry. Terminal workers were frustrated. And this is just one story of the hundreds of customers impacted in one day.
If you have a story about how Friday’s WSF service in the San Juans affected you, you’re invited to share it with CNL2. Email Jeff.Noedel (at) CNL2 (dot) com.
It is hard to be in a thankful mood for terminal agents on a day like Friday. But gratitude is exactly the appropriate response, because on days like Friday the terminal workers become advocates — true agents — for the customer, communicating needs of the customers and virtually negotiating with captains and fellow terminal agents to try to make custom adjustments to keep people are vehicles moving. If they seem abrupt in their demeanor, it may be because they are extremely busy in their effort to make the system work, from the bottom of the organization chart.
And the captains aren’t necessarily to blame, either. In addition to all their safety and operational imperatives, they are required to be mindful of crew overtime. Coast guard rules are firm. And if a captain causes a crew to go into too much overtime during periods of improvised schedules, it could cause a crew to be unavailable the next day.
Clearly, terminal agents didn’t cause the mechanical issue that took the 57-year-old M/V Yakima out of service. Terminal workers and captains and the customer service employees who answer the phones, like WSF customers, and even the unsung hero engineers tasked with keeping the old boats running, all have to adapt to the consequences of the quality of Washington State Government’s stewardship of the ferry fleet, now down to eight boats deemed by WSDOT to be in good working condition.
Years of failings in WSF management at the top of Washington State government (the Governor and Secretary of Transportation, and the State legislature, particularly the party in the majority) make life at the bottom of WSF very hard.
One thing is obvious: the crisis at WSF is not over. The worst days are not yet behind us.
At what point is the state going to pull there head out and start realizing that the San Juan route needs to be a priority, this is ridiculous I have rode this route for twenty years and they just keep getting worse, wake up
All the Island routes are a priority not just the San Juan routes. I, too, live on an Island in the Puget Sound that is only accessible by ferry. Why should the service to the Island I live on not be prioritized?
Question why should these students be treated any separately from all of us? In other words, there’s no discrimination on the service here. We’re all subject to the same problem. We have to realize this is not an airli’m. And somebody within the last 20 years forgot that we might need new fairies. And there’s nobody to pin the tail on the donkey on this one.
Because as residents they have no choice available to just cancel plans and drive home. Also, as students, they rely on the ferry almost daily unlike most other residents. The jackass in Olympia is the one who needs the pin.
The 40 crew members who were fired for NOT taking the experimental injection would have made much better decisions! Critical thinkers were punished by being fired though, and now we suffer the consequences of an overreaching, over regulating, over taxing government that thinks it knows better than us. The ferry system needs competition some how. Medical freedom! Elect those who won’t tax and spend us to death with little service in return!
That’s ridiculous! You that was years ago and by all information those employees for the most part were the bottom of the barrel and had the most write ups in their files.
Tim Eyeman is a major part of this disastrous failing.
Stop making sense!!!
WSF, in the San Juan archipelago, remind us that the drinking age should be lowered to 18.