Residents of Denman Island were venting their frustration on Thursday with the latest breakdown of a cable ferry serving the island.
Mechanical issues sidelined the Baynes Sound Connector, which links Denman Island and Vancouver Island on Thursday morning.
“Extremely frustrated,” Denman Island resident Ricia Hollinger told Global News upon finding herself stranded on Vancouver Island Thursday morning.
“My car is full of stuff that has to get into the refrigerator. My meds are at home which I really need. I was not planning on spending this whole day here.”
Denman Islanders Claire Deebleu and Natalie Mathis were among nine residents who banded together to spend more than $450 on a water taxi to get them to the mainland.
Both were rushing to make flights.
“The worker told us there was going to be no ferry before midday and there was no replacement, that’s it,” Deebleu said.
Mathis added that the cable ferry has been “reliably unreliable.”
“This ferry breaks down so much that we already have ferry anxiety on the island,” she said.
“I was considering spending the night in Comox last night but I thought, no, your flight is not until 11, calm down, you are being a hysterical islander, and this is exactly why.”
BC Ferries spokesperson Jeff Groot said crews were doing regular overnight maintenance on the ferry when they ran into mechanical issues and had to take the vessel out of service for most of the day.
“We recognize we are one of the only ways on and off the island and providing that service is really important to us,” Groot said, adding that the situation was “obviously not ideal.”
Groot said BC Ferries was able to move a replacement vessel to serve the island by late morning and would supplement it with a water taxi service if the outage lasted longer than expected.
“What we have actually seen is a little bit of improvement year-over-year with the Baynes Sound Connector; we’ve seen a decrease of about 40 per cent in the number of cancellations,” he said.
“At the end of the day, though, that doesn’t make a difference to the people who are stranded there today.”
Since April of last year, 83 sailings on the route have been cancelled, a rate of 0.6 per cent.
NDP MLA Josie Osborne, who represents the area, said that’s not good enough.
“We all want to see the responsiveness, we want to see contingency plans — but we want to see the long-term solution for this ferry that just seems to be plagued with problems,” she said.
Islanders, meanwhile, want to see the cable ferry retired and replaced with a traditional vessel.
“There have been so many repetitive problems with the cable ferry. We fought against it hugely, we told them no, we have never had so many issues with ferries in our whole history on the island,” Hollinger said.
“It’s just one disaster after another.”