The People's Boat

It is 6:35 in the morning at Horseshoe Bay. The mountains are still dark. The water is flat and black and cold. A man in a Helly Hansen jacket is already in his usual seat on the upper deck, coffee in hand, laptop open, the same seat he has occupied on this same sailing for nineteen years. He knows the crew by name. They know his coffee order. This is not a commute. This is a way of life.

Route 3 — the Langdale–Horseshoe Bay crossing — is the shortest and most human of BC Ferries' major routes. At 9.7 nautical miles, it takes roughly 40 minutes to cross Howe Sound between West Vancouver and the Sechelt Peninsula. It runs up to eight sailings a day in each direction. It carries workers, artists, retirees, schoolchildren, contractors, nurses, and the occasional bear that has wandered down to the terminal and needs a ride. It is not glamorous. It is not fast. It is, for several thousand people, the only way home.

How It Started: Black Ball and the Birth of the Sunshine Coast Connection

Before BC Ferries existed, there was Black Ball Transport. The American company began running a ferry between Horseshoe Bay and Gibsons — the small town at the foot of the Sunshine Coast — in 1951. Their vessel, the Quillayute, could carry 48 cars and 600 passengers. It was the first reliable link between the Sunshine Coast and the mainland, and it changed everything. Before it, the Coast was effectively an island. After it, it became a community.

BC Ferries was created by the provincial government in 1960, absorbing the Black Ball routes and expanding them. The Horseshoe Bay–Langdale run — Langdale being the terminal just north of Gibsons — became Route 3, and it has been running ever since. The vessels have changed. The fares have increased. The complaints have multiplied. But the route itself remains what it has always been: the artery that keeps the Sunshine Coast alive.

The Regulars: Nineteen Years and Counting

Ask anyone who commutes regularly on Route 3 and they will tell you the same thing: the ferry is not just transportation. It is a social institution. There are people who have been taking the same sailing, in the same seat, for fifteen, eighteen, twenty years. They have watched each other's children grow up. They have celebrated promotions and mourned losses. They have formed friendships that exist nowhere else — not at work, not in the neighbourhood — but specifically, exclusively, on this boat, crossing this sound, twice a day.

The micro-communities that form on the ferry are one of its most quietly extraordinary features. There are the early-morning regulars who claim the same cluster of seats on the upper deck and barely speak — a companionable silence built over years. There are the afternoon groups who debrief the workday in the cafeteria over coffee and, when the mood is right, something stronger. And then there are the drinking clubs.

The drinking clubs are not official. They are not advertised. They are a natural consequence of putting the same people on the same boat for forty minutes, twice a day, for years. Someone brings a flask. Someone else brings a better flask. A tradition forms. BC Ferries' official policy is clear: personal alcohol is prohibited on vessels and at terminals. The policy is enforced with the same energy that the Sunshine Coast enforces its parking regulations — which is to say, selectively, and usually only when someone makes it impossible to ignore.

"There's a group of us who've been taking the 5:40 from Horseshoe Bay for years. We don't talk about it outside the boat. It's just ours. The mountains, the water, a cold beer in a coffee cup. Best forty minutes of the day."

— A Sunshine Coast commuter, name withheld

The View: Why It Still Stops You

Even after nineteen years, even in the rain, even when the boat is late and the cafeteria is out of everything except a sad muffin — the view across Howe Sound is extraordinary. The Coast Mountains rise directly from the water, snow-capped for most of the year, dark green with Douglas fir and cedar below the snowline. On a clear morning, you can see the peaks of the Tantalus Range to the north, and on a clear evening, the lights of West Vancouver spread across the hillside like a dropped handful of stars.

Howe Sound is a fjord — one of the southernmost in North America — carved by glaciers and filled with cold, deep Pacific water. Orcas pass through. Humpbacks have been spotted. In winter, the mountains catch the low light and glow amber and rose in a way that makes even the most jaded commuter look up from their phone. The route is, objectively, one of the most scenic ferry crossings in the world. This is not marketing copy. This is just what it looks like.

The Workers: The Other Side of the Crossing

The crew of Route 3 are, in many ways, the most interesting regulars of all. BC Ferries employs over 5,000 people, and many of them have been with the company for decades. The deck hands, the cafeteria staff, the officers on the bridge — they know the regulars by face, by seat preference, by coffee order. They have watched the same people age. They have been there for the good days and the bad ones.

The relationship between BC Ferries management and its workers has not always been warm. Under CEO Nicolas Jimenez, the company has been accused by the BC Ferry and Marine Workers Union of waging what union president Eric McNeely described as "psychological warfare" on employees — including, in one memorable episode, removing kettles and coffee pots from vessels. The workers who have served the same communities for twenty years, who know every face on the morning sailing, who take pride in a job that is genuinely essential — they have watched their wages stagnate while executive salaries climbed.

Between 2022 and 2025, BC Ferries executives received salary increases of 28.95%. The arbitrated wage award for frontline workers in the same period was 1.65%. The kettles were removed. The coffee pots were taken away. The workers kept showing up.

The Numbers: What the CEO Earns

BC Ferries is a peculiar entity. It is not a Crown corporation — it was privatised in 2003 under Premier Gordon Campbell — but it is not a private company either. It is wholly owned by the BC Ferry Authority, a non-share capital corporation created by the province. It receives substantial public subsidy. It provides an essential public service. And it operates with the executive compensation structure of a mid-sized private corporation, without the accountability of either a Crown corporation or a publicly traded company.

The current CEO, Nicolas Jimenez — who came from ICBC and has no background in marine transportation — earned total compensation of just over $550,000 in 2024. His projected "no-fault" exit package, if he were terminated today, would be approximately $1.4 million, plus a potential $600,000 bridge pension. The BC Premier earns $209,000. The CEO of Washington State Ferries — which operates a comparable system — earned $165,943 when BC Ferries' CEO at the time was earning $563,000. The numbers are not a rounding error. They are a policy choice.

"Despite the Comptroller General characterising BC Ferries as a 'culture of secrecy and enrichment' in 2009, executives continue receiving secret 'no-fault' million-dollar exit payouts that violate the Coastal Ferry Act."

— The Islands Grapevine, March 2026

The Cancellations: When the Boat Doesn't Come

For all its beauty and community, Route 3 has a reliability problem. The fleet is aging. The vessels are expensive to maintain. The company has been buying new ships from foreign shipyards — including a controversial contract for Chinese-built vessels — while deferring maintenance on existing ones. In July 2022, under CEO Mark Collins, the Horseshoe Bay–Langdale route experienced 173 sailing cancellations in 28 days. Not delays. Cancellations. People missed medical appointments. Workers lost shifts. Children missed school. The ferry is not a luxury for Sunshine Coast residents. It is the only way in and out.

BC Ferries reports a 99.9% service metric. The company counts breakdowns as "delays" rather than cancellations, which produces a number that is technically accurate and practically meaningless. A more honest metric — one that counts any sailing that does not depart within a reasonable window of its scheduled time — produces a figure closer to 83.3%. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between what BC Ferries tells the public and what the public experiences.

When 35 coastal leaders representing the Union of BC Municipalities met with Premier David Eby to demand accountability, he told them the province was "at arm's length" from a corporation it created, wholly owns, and subsidises. When they met with CEO Jimenez, he told them he was "out of options." The Ferry Advisory Committees — 30 years of volunteer community oversight — were disbanded in 2024. The kettles were already gone.

Why It Still Matters

None of this — the cancellations, the executive pay, the removed kettles, the disbanded advisory committees — changes what Route 3 actually is to the people who depend on it. It is still the most beautiful commute in Canada. It is still the place where friendships are made and maintained over years of shared crossings. It is still the boat that carries the nurse to her shift, the contractor to his job site, the artist back to her studio, the child home from school.

The man in the Helly Hansen jacket with his coffee and his laptop has been on the 6:35 sailing for nineteen years. He has watched the mountains change colour through every season. He has seen the orcas. He has made friends he would not have made anywhere else. He has, on occasion, shared a drink from a flask with people whose names he knows better than some of his neighbours. He has been stranded at Horseshoe Bay when the boat broke down, and he has been late for things that mattered, and he has been furious about it.

And he will be on the 6:35 tomorrow morning.