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In her two years as the Anacortes Town Crier, Julie Nester has proclaimed and oyez, oyez, oyez’d at the community’s Christmas tree lighting, the Fourth of July parade and sister cities golf tournament. But one plum assignment is still missing from her town crier resume: the annual Anacortes to Sidney, British Columbia ferry route reopening ceremony, traditionally held in late March.
That gap persists because the century-old ferry connection between Anacortes, Friday Harbor and Vancouver Island remains suspended for a seventh year by Washington State Ferries. The international route shut down in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The main reason it is still down is the state’s shortage of ferryboats. Washington State Ferries says it is not able to restore the Sidney service until at least 2030. That’s when it expects to receive the first of three new 144-auto hybrid electric ferries on order. The agency emphasized that it hasn’t given up on reviving the route.
Anacortes’ honorary, unpaid town crier has fond memories from her younger years of riding the ferry to Canada. In an interview, Nester said she composes her own “cries” and knows what she would say when the international run returns.
“In my cry, I would highlight the goodwill of our peoples and also the economic stimulus that is so important for both communities and which both communities have really missed,” Nester said, using her unaccented inside voice.
The longing for the return of the long-suspended route extends well beyond the ferry terminal cities. For a group of western Washington travelers, the frustration boiled over into a lawsuit filed last month against the state ferry system.
The lawsuit seeks to have a court declare the international route improperly abandoned and order the service be restored within 90 days. Lead plaintiff Duncan Chalmers filed the case in King County Superior Court in his name and on behalf of an informal advocacy group named Restore Our Ferries. The friends drafted the case together without the help of an attorney.
Chalmers said he formerly used the Sidney ferry service regularly to visit relatives and friends on Vancouver Island and they would make the reverse trip to visit family in suburban Seattle.
“It’s obvious there has been some adverse impact and it’s just not the right direction to be going,” Chalmers said in an interview. “We’re supposed to be building a state, not disassembling it.”
The legal complaint hinges on a decades-old law that says only the Legislature can add or eliminate a ferry route. Chalmers and Restore Our Ferries argued the ferry system circumvented the law.
“It’s completely unreasonable to last a decade or more and call it a suspension,” he said. “It appears unlikely to ever come back.”
‘We’re not trying to get rid of it’
The ferry system’s second-in-command insisted in an interview Friday that WSF has every intention to bring back the Anacortes-Sidney route. John Vezina said the ferry system’s improved crewing situation and shipbuilding progress made him hopeful for the 2030 restoration date.
“It’s a great route. It’s important,” he said. “We get it.”
“We’re not trying to get rid of it,” Vezina said, before adding, “When you have resource constraints, you have to make hard decisions.”
He called the lawsuit “specious” and meritless.
At the moment, the ferry system could not resume sailing to Sidney even if it had a spare boat. That is because it currently lacks a vessel certified to sail internationally. The U.S. Coast Guard imposes tougher lifesaving, fire suppression and crew training requirements on ferries in international service.
The ferry Chelan previously had the needed clearance, but the ferry system let that boat’s international certification lapse a few years into the Anacortes-Sidney route suspension. Vezina said his agency’s vessels department is reviewing whether the Chelan is the right boat to recertify or whether to pursue modifications to a newer ferry.
How else to get across the water
Court petitioner Chalmers said when he needs to go to Vancouver Island these days, he drives a lengthy detour up through the Vancouver suburbs to catch a British Columbia ferry from Tsawwassen. That’s one of three ferry options Washingtonians have today. The other two are the private Black Ball Ferry Line from Port Angeles to Victoria and the FRS Clipper passenger-only high-speed catamaran from Seattle to Victoria’s Inner Harbour.
The state-operated Sidney ferry route formerly operated nine months out of each year, with one daily roundtrip during spring and late fall and two roundtrips daily in the peak summer season.
In recent years, legislators prodded their staff and the ferry system via the state budget to study various options to achieve a quicker restart, including the feasibility of privatizing the run or acquiring a used ferry.
Most interestingly, in 2023, the state Department of Transportation tasked a vessel broker to scour the world for used ferries. The broker identified dozens of car ferries for sale, including 25 in the Greek Islands alone. But upon closer scrutiny, every last one of them was judged to be too slow, or too old, or had the wrong car deck geometry to load and unload at the Salish Sea’s existing state ferry landings.
The recently adjourned 2026 session included offhand mentions of a possible San Juan Islands to Sidney foot ferry during a broader debate about boosting passenger-only ferry options. But nothing came of that.
Restoring the international route sooner than 2030 was a declared priority of the city of Anacortes for years. Mayor Ryan Walters even built a personal website to enumerate all the economic and cultural reasons for bringing back the Anacortes-Sidney route.
But this year, the route restoration dropped off the city council-approved legislative priority list. Walters said the city still wants the run restored as soon as possible, but is now resigned to the fact that it can’t sail without more boats.
“We accept the reality that it’s not going to happen before then,” Walters said. “There’s no magic to make it happen.”
In the meantime, the state continues to pay the Town of Sidney to keep up the lease of the unused ferry landing on the Canadian shore. The cost to Washington taxpayers of the long-term lease, tax, utilities and maintenance is notable. It is averaging around $250,000 per year for a ferry dock that hasn’t been used in years and apparently won’t be for at least half a decade more.
To Chalmers, that seems “like a waste.” To Vezina, the spending is evidence of the ferry system’s commitment to resurrect the international service someday.
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com.
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