Ride the Vashon ferries? You’d best start believing in ghost stories.

An unscheduled third boat — often referred to colloquially as the ‘ghost boat’ — will make runs on weekdays throughout the summer when crews and a vessel are available, Washington State Ferries (WSF) announced this month.

The news was just one takeaway from a roundtable discussion of island and ferry leaders on June 12, held as part of a gathering to thank WSF crews for their work and to brainstorm ways to improve island ferry service.

Talking ferries

The crowd included leaders of island emergency and healthcare services, ferry-connected organizations and the school district, joined by state legislators Joe Nguyen and Emily Alvarado, WSF Director of Planning John Vezina, and Deputy Director of Planning Hadley Rodero.

The event was hosted by Islanders for Ferry Action, the Chamber of Commerce group helmed by former Chamber director Amy Drayer, who kicked it off with shared messages of gratitude for the workers who keep the boats afloat and running — hoping to create some positivity around transportation service which frequently provokes strong negative emotions for islanders.

“There’s a lot of heat around it, feelings … and change,” Drayer said. “And we’ve been living in change for many years.”

The ferry workers are essential to rapidly transporting patients, Vashon Island Fire & Rescue (VIFR) Chief Matt Vinci said: “Close to 500 basic life support (BLS) transports go by ground annually. … We’re incredibly grateful for their work.”

Improved inter-agency communication means that VIFR can now reliably count on having a boat late at night to rush patients to Seattle, Vinci said.

Vashon Island School District Superintendent Slade McSheehy thanked WSF for their work last year when a student went overboard, and crews rescued that student “with integrity (and) great care.”

“It made us feel that the ferry system can handle any emergency,” he said.

One challenge for restoring ferry service while WSF waits for its new boats is the Triangle’s two-boat schedule itself, which WSF officials have acknowledged doesn’t work.

The legislature gave WSF funds this year to hire a second “service planner,” and WSF said it planned to update the much-maligned two-boat schedule linking Vashon with Fauntleroy and Southworth.

WSF must recruit, hire and train the new service planner — a process that usually takes a few months.

But in a “really frustrating” turn of events, Vezina said, a qualified candidate who recently accepted the job decided to decline just as WSF’s other planning manager started a period of paid family leave until Labor Day.

In other words: “We have no planner (for now),” Vezina said.

That led him and WSF Deputy Director of Planning Hadley Rodero to pursue a creative solution, Vezina said: WSF will be submitting an RFP (request for proposals) to hire a consultant to finish the current Triangle route schedule rewrite.

Return of the Ghost Boat

It’s no “Pirates of The Caribbean” sequel. Triangle route riders may have already seen or taken a ride on the ghost boat making trips across Puget Sound.

That vessel, currently the MV Salish, should help the schedule keep the notoriously unreliable 10:40 a.m. sailing. It will sail around the other two scheduled vessels and pick up the slack in the ferry schedule so that the two-boat schedule stays on time.

There’s no guarantee the boat will operate on any given day: “Our hope is that weekdays during the summer, for one watch, we will have the third boat available,” Vezina said.

WSF also plans to run the ghost boat the weekend of Strawberry Festival (July 19-21), the busiest weekend of the year for Vashon and the island’s peak weekend for tourism. When possible, WSF may also run the ghost boat on other busy weekends — again, when crewing and a vessel are available.

“We’re going to give you as much service as we possibly can,” Vezina said. “At the moment, that’s an unscheduled third boat for a watch on weekdays. But if we see that the crewing is stable and reliable, and we can stretch it to weekends, absolutely.”

Also helping out: July 1 will see the start of new weekday sailings for the King County Water Taxi, a win championed by King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda and State Rep. Emily Alvarado.

The Beachcomber first reported the tentative water taxi sailing times in March, and those remain the same as of June 18. The tentative schedule calls for new trips to leave Vashon at 9:25 a.m., noon, 1:30 p.m. and 3:45 p.m.; and for new sailings to depart Seattle at 8:50 a.m., 11:25 a.m., 12:45 p.m. and 3 p.m. (The water taxi currently runs only during morning and afternoon commute hours.)

The new unscheduled ferry service coincides with WSF’s summer schedule, which started Sunday, June 16. It includes an added roundtrip sailing between Vashon and Fauntleroy at midday on Fridays.

Visit online for more details. Ferry riders can use WSF’s real-time map at wsdot.com to track all our ferries in service.