Some Powell River businesses are not pleased with the new modified schedule on the Saltery Bay-Earls Cove route.
Bob Davey, owner of Encore Toner Exchange, travels to the Sea to Sky area up to Pemberton generally every week. He was on the first sailing of the new schedule on Wednesday, October 2, which leaves Saltery Bay at 4:15 am. He was five minutes from the Langdale terminal when the 6:20 am ferry to Horseshoe Bay left and he had to wait two hours for the next sailing.
BC Ferries modified the Saltery Bay-Earls Cove schedule because of the slower speed of the replacement vessel, the Queen of Chilliwack, on the route. According to the company, the schedule has been aligned with the Horseshoe Bay-Langdale schedule to “promote more reliable connections for customers travelling between the Northern Sunshine Coast and Metro Vancouver.”
Davey said he understands the 4:15 am was not designed to connect to the 6:20 am. “The reasonable amount of wait time is a whole ferry run,” he pointed out.
If he takes the 6:35 am from Saltery Bay, he’s not doing business until noon, Davey said. “That’s half a day gone.”
He prefers taking the first ferry of the day because he doesn’t have to spend an additional night away from home, even though the 4:15 am time is “horrid,” he said. “It just makes me mad when you have to get up before you go to bed so you can catch a ferry and it ends up a whole work day just to get to Horseshoe Bay.”
Davey said he doesn’t know what the answer is, because “I’m not the guy getting a million dollars a year to make those decisions. But any business—yours, mine, theirs—is only there because of the customers. You’re not there because of the board of directors, you’re not there because of anything else. The only reason the business is there is for the customer. That’s who they need to look after.”
Karen Skadsheim, founder of Townsite Brewing Inc., said the new schedule is like the summer schedule, which puts the company’s delivery truck into downtown Vancouver at noon, when traffic is getting to be at its worst and loading zone parking becomes non-existent. “Summer is awful and now they’ve effectively done the same thing to the winter,” she said. “If they changed it and made the first sailing 4 am, at least you’d connect to the 6:20.”
Skadsheim said she’s surprised there haven’t been more accidents on the Lower Sunshine Coast highway, with people rushing to make connections. “People are going to try to make that 6:20, I bet, and race down the highway,” she said. “It’s going to be sleepy drivers on a windy, wet highway in the dark, trying to make that 6:20.”
Darin Guenette, BC Ferries public affairs manager, said the company is not willing to change the modified schedule, because it would stretch the day and cost even more money. “The vessel is working well, the engineers are happy, we’re hitting the on-time performance,” he said. “Yes, it’s not an ideal schedule, it’s costing us money, it stretches the day, the times don’t match perfectly, but we’re hitting the same six sailings at Langdale that people could hit before.”
The new schedule wasn’t designed to allow a connection with the 6:20 am from Langdale, Guenette added. “Depending on how long the drive takes down the coast, sometimes they’re there quite a while, but they’re making the same ferries that they made before,” he said. “If we moved the schedule to earlier or later sailings either way, you’re changing all the potential connections. This is the only way that the schedule will meet all the same sailings that they were meeting before.”
Every few minutes that a ferry leaves earlier stretches the day into more overtime for the crew, Guenette added. “Everything costs us more if we move the schedule earlier, so it’s just not a consideration that we would want to do.”
When they first created the modified schedule, Guenette said, they wondered if they should even put in the 4:15 am and the 11:15 pm from Earls Cove, because they are costing the company a lot of money. But the Northern Sunshine Coast Ferry Advisory Committee recommended those sailings should be in the schedule, he added. “The community said, through our stakeholders, yes, let’s keep them,” he said. “We said, okay, let’s watch them for a few weeks at least and see what they look like.”
Since the modified schedule was put into place, the Queen of Chilliwack has been sailing on time, Guenette said. “The good news so far is that we haven’t had a single late sailing,” he said.
