Ferry Dangerous?

The ferries in B.C. in the summertime are not much fun. The schedules change so I can never keep track of when they’re leaving; they’re desperately crowded almost all the time; you have to get there two hours early or wait two hours when you come on time and they are already over-loaded. It just doesn’t do much for me.

Nevertheless, once you are on the ferry, there is little excuse for sitting in the car below decks throughout the forty-five minute ride. And yet, that is what we often do. It’s an almost 2-hour drive to get to the ferry and still we stay in the car for another 3/4 hour as if we had been glued there. I am reminded of the old phrase, ‘If you are tired of London, you are tired of life.’ If you are tired of looking out at the incredibly beautiful sights of Howe Sound from the upper ferry deck, you are tired of something, certainly. Mostly, I’m just tired of riding on ferries or, more precisely, of being confined by ferries. Too much an American to be entirely pleased that I cannot leave if the ferry says I can’t..

So there we were, the two of us, lightly drowsing in the car on the 4th deck. (The 4th deck means you are above the water and indeed we could look out the side of the boat and more or less see some water. But it’s not what you’d call a great view and it’s not light enough for me to easily read in the car.) Most of the cars around us—indeed perhaps all the cars around us—were empty, their passengers not yet being tired of life or ferries, or perhaps just in need of food and drink. And then two guys came up fairly near the car and started poking around and talking in such a way that we could easily hear them. One was in his mid-forties; the other younger, maybe 30-ish, with a notebook in which he was busily making notes.

My first impression was that the older guy was a ferry employee who was taking a (younger guy) safety inspector around to check various stuff. At the end, I’m not so sure of that. Ed’s view was that it was an older ferry mechanic taking a new employee around to show him the ropes.

Anyway, what he’s showing him and what the younger guy appears to be writing down is about the rust condition on the boat. The older mechanic is outraged by the amount of visible rust. ‘And,’ he pointed out repeatedly, ‘If you can see this much rust in the open, you gotta know that there’s even more of it behind the walls here where you can’t see it. And even more on the lower decks where you can’t see it.’

Does he think it’s dangerously rusty? I don’t know. Ed and I are looking at each other, rolling our eyes, feeling like we're in some George Clooney thriller. The two guys move around, inspecting more rust, inspecting more deficiencies. Finally, they are standing just ahead of us, looking at the fire door. The older guy points out that in the last refit, all the fire doors were serviced (not the word he used, but I can’t remember it specifically), but that within a few weeks, they were back to their old state. ‘This door,’ he says. ‘This door is not being held open. It’s supposed to go into a magnetic hold, but it’s not anywhere near it.’ He demonstrates this by pushing the door shut without detaching it from the magnetic hold, which it is obviously not attached to; then reopening and finally lifting the door upwards so that it can reach the magnet. ‘This door,’ he says with a very serious tone, ‘is simply holding itself open.’

Something about the despairing way he said this made both Ed and me burst into laughter. The mechanic guy turned, saw us there, winked at us, rolled his eyes, laughed, and guided his younger guy up the stairs.

I can’t decide to be alarmed or relieved. Just a moment on a ferry, of course. But then I asked Ed, ‘Was the mechanic guy wearing a life jacket? All the time during an ordinary ferry crossing on a perfectly calm day?’ ‘Maybe it was a down vest?’ he offered. Maybe, but the temperature that day was 85 degrees, so probably not. Maybe just a guy who knows when to be prepared.