20 BC Ferries vessels undergoing retrofits this year, company says

A BC Ferries vessel passes Bowen Island while traveling on Howe Sound from Horseshoe Bay to Langdale, B.C., on Friday, April 23, 2021. (Darryl Dyck/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

BC Ferries says its fleet maintenance plan for 2024 aims to keep as many vessels online for the peak summer travel period as possible.

“I think the strategy today is frankly best practice,” says Jeff Groot, executive director of communications. “The goal today is to help everyone learn more about all the planning that goes into this – that this is a very strategic, thoughtful process.”

Twenty ships are scheduled for refit this year. BC Ferries says that’s when major work, such as engineer repair, is performed.

“Refits are important. They’re complex. They’re expensive. And they need lots of planning but they’re absolutely critical so that we can deliver the kind of customer experience that we want to,” says BC Ferries engineering vice-president Stephen Jones.

This year, the corporation says it’s trying to squeeze in as much of the work as possible ahead of summer.

“They have many moving pieces with very tight tolerances and it’s possible that not everything goes according to plan all the time,” says Brian Anderson, the strategy and planning vice-president. “If we are faced with unexpected repairs, our service recovery teams do whatever they can to minimize or eliminate that disruption to our customers.”

Leading into 2023’s summer travel season, the Coastal Renaissance was taken offline due to a rotor system failure, causing major disruptions to service. BC Ferries says all three coastal-class vessels will have the systems replaced in time to serve the major routes as peak season returns.

The work will also address an issue that shortened the lifespan of the part.

“We had a pretty serious vibration issue caused by running the in-shore propeller with the vessel in the dock, and so we made an operational decision pretty soon after these vessels came into service to stop running the in-shore propeller to avoid the noise to our neighbours and to avoid the vibration damage to our terminals,” says Jones. “And what that effectively did is halve the operational life of those vessels.”

During the refit, Jones says new rotors are being installed and a variable speed drive system is being added to remove a starting issue.

“They have a good reliability record over the 17 years and despite the recent issues, we expect them to serve reliably long into the future,” he says.

There are no guarantees the refits will protect travel itineraries. BC Ferries says one of the keys to resiliency is more ships – and it’s working on a plan for that too.