Following three days of cancelled sailings due to a damaged dock, the Queen of Capilano returned to service on Thursday night.
"Our operations team is on track to complete repairs this evening, and we are optimistic that ferry service will resume by tomorrow morning," said BC Ferries senior communications advisor Shiryn Sayani in an email on Thursday afternoon. Later in the day, a BC Ferries notice said "repairs to the floating dock at Snug Cove are progressing well," and that the ferry would be making a trial run to Bowen early Thursday evening. The trial successful, the Queen of Capilano set sail from the island at 6:30 pm, carrying its first passengers since Monday night.
Travellers between Bowen Island and Horseshoe Bay have been using water taxis for their voyage since Tuesday after the Snug Cove Ferry Terminal suffered a series of damages during an overnight storm. Repair crews have been on-site fixing the dock and ramp with the goal of returning the ferry to service on Friday, February 7. Their efforts resulted in the work being completed ahead of schedule.
Bowen Island mayor Andrew Leonard said early on Thursday he was optimistic repairs would be complete by the end of the day “so that residents and the community can get back to their regularly scheduled lifestyles.”
The mayor added he was pleased with the coordination with BC Ferries during the three-day stretch of cancellations. “I feel like we’ve had more communication with them - both at my level as well as our staff level - than we have in a long time. When the ferries did go out on Tuesday I was immediately in contact with them and immediately in contact with our staff,” said the mayor.
“We had a few meetings back and forth throughout the day, even at the end of the day hashing things out like water taxis – when they would run, the type of capacity, the needs of our residents from students to commuters to folks looking to get to medical appointments. Overall they’ve been very responsive and have certainly listened to all the concerns that we’ve brought forward to them,” added the mayor.
Leonard says that as difficult as losing the island’s means of transportation can be, Bowen residents have shown themselves quite capable of handling adverse situations.
“I think us Islanders are resilient by nature. We see that resiliency when we have power outages for multiple days and neighbours checking on neighbours… We saw some really strong resiliency during the pandemic when neighbourhoods and Islanders were helping each other out. I feel like this is much the same,” he said.
Still, the mayor offered perspective on the overall situation. “The reality is that it’s also only been a few days. If a disruption of service like this were to extend into the next week or a couple of weeks, I think then it would be much more serious as we start to deal with medical concerns and food and fuel supply on the island,” he pointed out.
“But for short-term disruptions like this I think our community can really rally together and really come together to help each other out,” said Leonard.
