B.C. Ferries passengers travelling with vehicles from Vancouver to Vancouver Island faced possible sailing waits on Saturday if they didn’t have reservation, and reservations for several sailings were sold out.
For today, reservations are sold out for most trips between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, but there could still be space for travellers who haven’t booked and for walk-on passengers.
The July long weekend is typically the second busiest for B.C. Ferries, the busiest being the August long weekend.
Friday saw waits of several sailings on some routes from the mainland for people without a booking. The heavy traffic led to some delays. Several sailings on the main and minor routes were delayed because of the time needed to load and unload full vessels.
On top of it all, B.C. Ferries’ website, bcferries.com, was up and down throughout the day due to what the corporation called a “technical issue.” It was restored shortly after 2:30 p.m.
Sailing information is also available through B.C. Ferries on Twitter.
The reservation system has been experiencing outages for the past three days for a total of six outages in all, the company said in a statement. Most were between 30 and 90 minutes long.
The corporation said that at peak times, nearly 15,000 customers were viewing up to 80,000 pages per hour. “We have staff monitoring the website performance and our booking system to ensure issues are caught and resolved as quickly as possible,” B.C. Ferries said in a statement. “Error messages will occur from time to time while using our schedule pages or when making a booking.”
B.C. Ferries is down one vessel this weekend leading to the cancellation of eight sailings between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. Repair work on Coastal Celebration is taking longer than expected.
About 6,000 bookings were transferred to Spirit of Vancouver Island and Spirit of British Columbia — the largest vessels in the fleet — and Queen of New Westminster to accommodate those with reservations.
Coastal Celebration had been expected to be back in service by June 15. Its return date depends on repairs being completed smoothly and successful ship trials.
Coastal Celebration is at Vancouver Drydock in North Vancouver. The Seaspan-owned facility was the only bidder for the work.
On Thursday, the ferry corporation reported that it carried about 5,300 vehicles and 20,000 passengers between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen.
On Friday, it reported traffic volume of about 6,500 vehicles and 24,000 passengers between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen, about 4,200 vehicles and 13,000 passengers on the route between Departure Bay and Horseshoe Bay, and about 4,200 vehicles and 11,500 passengers between Tsawwassen and Duke Point.
