As Washington state shows, BC Ferries not alone in navigating mariner shortage challenges

If you use BC Ferries regularly, there’s a good chance you’ve been caught up in one of many cancellations in recent months.

But this is hardly a B.C.-specific issue, with Washington state similarly enduring the reality of what has been described as a global mariner shortage.

While BC Ferries has been forced into last-minute cancellations more than once due to its staffing challenges, Washington state’s system has tried to adapt by simply operating fewer sailings.

“What we did was slash our service on a lot of routes by about 50 per cent back in the fall when we first really had this cancellation problem,” Ian Sterling with Washington State Ferries told CityNews.

#ICYMI: Our summer sailing schedule began 6/19, with several timetable changes. We resumed the 1230a from #Clinton & 105a from #Mukilteo daily (suspended early in the pandemic). However, we’re not ready to restore the 130a & 2a summer weekend sailings. pic.twitter.com/nkvUUWGvPz

— Washington State Ferries (@wsferries) June 21, 2022

“We had, at one point I think, hundreds of cancellations in one day throughout the system, and so that’s not something you want to see. And so to address that and give folks some reliability, we cut back on the schedule, so the number of sailings dropped significantly.”

 

While making this adjustment to run fewer sailings has led to more reliability, that hasn’t necessarily meant an entirely smooth experience for passengers using Washington state’s government-run service.

“It’s definitely led to very long wait times,” Sterling acknowledged.

“We carry about 50 per cent more people in the summer than we do in the winter time, just all the tourist traffic and everything. Folks are finding three and four hour waits sometimes trying to get back to the Seattle area from the Olympic Peninsula or wherever they may have been. So the product is not real great right now. We know that, but as I say, we’re aggressively recruiting and training.”

But with a mariner shortage globally, ferry services are struggling to attract and keep workers.

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Read more:

• Unvaccinated BC Ferries workers not to blame for ongoing cancellations, union says

• Travellers warned of BC Ferries Tsawwassen/Swartz Bay sailing cancellations

• BC Ferries passengers left confused after cancellations were cancelled

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Eric McNeely, the president of the BC Ferry & Marine Workers’ Union, says a major issue is that commercial operators transporting goods rather than people often pay more.

“For a deck hand at BC Ferries, you’re looking at probably a base salary of $50,000 to $55,000, and a potential income of $70,000 to $80,000 depending on overtime and where you work differentials and stuff like that,” McNeely told CityNews. “Seaspan, for example, is roughly $15,000 more a year base salary, to $20,000 depending on where you are, and then opportunities for overtime increase that difference by about $30,000.”

Washington State Ferries is similarly scrambling to find people, and is changing how it recruits.

“We moved to a full time recruitment effort,” Sterling said. “We used to hire more seasonally, now we’re just hiring all the time. We’ve hired an outside firm to come in and help us reach populations that we may not have recruited from before. We’ll go across the United States and hit our premier maritime schools, you know Kings Point or Kal Maritime, that type of a thing. Those are obvious places to look for merchant mariners, but we’re also trying to reach beyond that to populations we haven’t talked to before, that maybe don’t even know that the maritimes are a possible career choice for them.”

Meanwhile, in B.C., the ferry system still has significant gaps but is trying to give itself at least some partial relief through recalling unvaccinated workers who had previously been on unpaid leave.