In November 2007, we removed the 80-year-old steel electric ferries from active ferry service. This continues to affect service and routes throughout the Puget Sound as we approach our peak maintenance season. Many ferries need to go into dry dock in the next few months for required annual inspections and repairs.
We have been working with the U.S. Coast Guard to schedule vessel dry-docking that meets safety requirements and minimizes impacts to our customers. From now through the summer schedule, we anticipate a few adjustments because we must downsize the vessel size on some routes to allow vessels to go in for maintenance and repairs. Customers will experience changes throughout the system, but primarily on the Seattle/Bremerton and Anacortes/San Juan Islands routes.
You can download the following documents for detailed information about vessel status and anticipated service impacts.
Please note that these service scenarios are subject to change at any time based on dry dock availability and emerging maintenance and repair needs. Please check here frequently for updated versions of these documents.
These documents are in Adobe Acrobat portable document format (.pdf). You can download a free copy of Adobe Reader at the Adobe Web site.
Washington State Ferries Vessel Maintenance and Preservation
Washington State Ferries completes more than 99 percent of its trips. This is the actual number of scheduled trips that are completed, not including weather or tidal cancellations; and includes those trips that WSF is able to complete by replacing one vessel with another.
The Life Cycle Model
To keep our service so dependable, WSF’s Vessel Maintenance and Preservation Department plans vessel maintenance and preservation work years in advance. This advanced scheduling system helps us stay ahead of problems and is the reason for WSF’s high trip completion rate.
The Life Cycle Cost Model (LCCM) involves scheduling “vital” equipment and parts for preservation according to their useful lifespan. Vessel systems are classified into two categories – “vital” or “other.” Vital parts are those designated by the U.S. Coast Guard as vital to the protection of people, the environment, and the vessel. Other parts of the vessel may be important, but not “vital” as defined by the Coast Guard.
Every piece of equipment on the vessel has its own defined lifecycle, which is closely tracked and scheduled in advance to either be replaced or preserved according to each part’s lifecycle schedule. By doing this in conjunction with regular vessel inspections and annual maintenance, the ferry system can allocate its resources in a way that makes sense for the entire system and keeps our operation running smoothly.