Got a cool $4.5Mil laying around?
Then head to eBay my friend, the State of Washington has a deal for you!
The state plans to put its two mothballed passenger ferries on the online auction site eBay at the end of the month, hoping to fetch nearly $9 million for the two boats, the Chinook and the Snohomish.
The vessels, now sitting at the Washington State Ferry Eagle Harbor maintenance yard on Bainbridge Island, haven’t operated since 2003.
Ferry director Mike Anderson said there will not be a buy-it-now option on the sale and if no one buys them on eBay the state will hire a marine broker to sell them.
I’ve seen uglier houseboats and most of those don’t even move.
I used to ride similar ferries from Vallejo to SF as part of my daily commute. The fantasy of turning one into a houseboat is pretty hard to avoid, especially as these particular ferries had a decent bar that would work well as a galley too.
The geniuses in the WA State Ferry system who had these white elephants designed and approved the designs never took into accout the wakes from them. The boats were never allowed to operate at design speed because of wake damage to property on the shorelines bordering the ferry routes. This was not “discovered” until the boats had been accepted, put into service and lawsuits and injunctions by injured property owners filed. Of course instead of canning their sorry asses, they were promoted and given raises.
Can we play “Name The Party” now?
Yeah, but they still use the old ones from Whidbey Island! NAS Whidbey guy, 79-82 & 89-93. In fact the former XO of NAS Whidbey in 91-92, Joe Nortz got hired as the state ferries ops boss!
Gerry, aren’t these boats essentially the same hull design as the Victoria Express? That boat wends it’s way through the Sound and the San Juans to Victoria without having to reduce speed much.
Ditto the “Bellingham Express, which operates in even more restricted waters between Bellingham and Victoria. I was almost run down by her once while boating from Roche Harbor to Sidney, and she crossed right in front of me. The wake was a doozy! I was in a 20-foot cuddy cruiser. She crossed my path (I had the right of way except for the “big is right” argument) at somewhere upward of 30kt. Taking that wake was like riding a large storm swell breaking diagonally across a set of narrow entrance jaws on a coastal bar, dicey to say the least.
My take on it is that these vessels can do most of their routes at speed, but careful consideration has to be taken of wake effects in really restricted waters, like harbor mouths, etc. Lots of test runs are necessary to get it right.
The crunch point for this type of planing catamaran comes in fuel usage. The boats typically have a pair of huge turbo’d v-12 diesels that gulp fuel. If they’re not carrying close to a full load, they can’t break even at today’s fuel prices, and certainly not at tomorrow’s.
RD,
It’s not the boats. It’s the route the boats were required to take. The route passes within a quarter mile of the South end of Bainbridge Island turning through Rich Passage and Port Orchard which are less than half a mile wide for about about eight miles with high end beach residences lining both sides. Crossing Puget Sound was no problem but the remaining half of the trip had to be made at less than eight knots resulting in no time or fuel saved. Twenty minutes spent examining a chart would have saved the waste of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. But, what the hell, it’s only money and they meant well.
People wonder why I am so derisive of “engineers”. It’s because too many of them are not quite as useful as pimples.