Wind, rain and ferries don’t always mix well. Ferry-goers travelling to and from Vancouver Island should brace for sailing cancellations this time of year.
So says BC Ferries spokesperson Deborah Marshall, as communities recover from Thursday’s strong winds and the recent cancellations that came along with the adverse weather conditions.
“We are heading into stormy weather season, so we did see some cancellations yesterday (Thursday) on our route between Port McNeill, Alert Bay and Sointula,” Marshall says.
“Also, north in Haida Gwaii, we saw some cancellations up there due to the high winds,” she tells Vista Radio.
On Wednesday, Environment Canada issued a wind warning for various communities on and surrounding Vancouver Island, giving locals some time to prepare.
Winds over coastal regions were expected to rise to southeast 70 km/hr late Thursday afternoon before easing sometime this morning. The North Island got it even worse, with winds gusting to 110 km/hr.
But it seems another storm is brewing.
“I know that Environment Canada is also predicting a storm to hit us on Sunday evening and into Monday,” Marshall explains, “so we will be closely monitoring the weather systems as they come through, because we may have some impacts if the forecast comes through as predicted.”
With this in mind, Marshall encourages customers to follow BC Ferries on Twitter. That way, they’ll be able to keep updated with the latest sailing statuses and cancellations.
“I know that our social media team was tweeting out the status of different sailings and if we were having service interruptions with the weather,” Marshall adds.
BCFerries.com crashes:
In fact, BC Ferries relied on Twitter more than ever on Thursday, due to a website crash. According to Marshall, BCFerries.com was down all day for customers trying to access scheduling or other types of information.
“Unfortunately, we did have some issues with our website yesterday. They were internal technical issues, and it took us all day to fix it. It was about 10:30 last night when it came back online. We do apologize to customers when these sorts of things happen,” Marshall says.
She continues, “Following us on Twitter is a great way to get information if we do have these unfortunate service interruptions with our website.”
