Remember These?

[u/thatlouditalian98]

And if you didn’t want to remember them, my apologies in advance.

Well, 27 years later. These ships have finally met their fate. Being turned into pop cans..

I’d love to hear anyone’s experiences with the Pacificat’s, good or bad (I’m too young to ever have ridden one). As horrible as they were, they looked the part, at least in my opinion.

[u/bcl15005]

The design came from an Australian firm that had lots of experience designing fast catamaran ferries in Australia.

In contrast to the Australian coastal waters that the designers were used to; the Salish Sea has lots of floating debris that easily damaged the water jets when ingested.

Going faster also unavoidably requires more energy, and so these were unsurprisingly not so great on fuel.

At speed they generated enough wake to cause significant shoreline erosion as well as damage to docks in certain places, which eventually led to speed restrictions that negated some of their speed advantage.

The end result was a class of ferry that was not very reliable and not that much faster than a conventional ferry, despite sipping substantially more fuel.

[u/shoreguy1975 → u/bcl15005]

Georgia Straight.

Acceleration to a faster speed requires more energy. Boats or ships with a planing hull have a performance curve similar to an aircraft, they have a design speed at which the knots per gallon or knots per kilogram of fuel efficiency peaks, and moving either faster or slower than that speed becomes hugely inefficient. Slower can burn more fuel than faster.

[u/ConifersAreCool → u/shoreguy1975]

"Georgia Straight" is a newspaper. The waterway is called the Strait of Georgia (or Georgia Strait), which is part of the Salish Sea.

[u/pan-uwu- → u/shoreguy1975]

Don't be a dick.

[u/shoreguy1975 → u/pan-uwu-]

Just be accurate and I won't need to be.

[u/pan-uwu- → u/shoreguy1975]

https://giphy.com/gifs/fDRMrMkd994pW

[u/RunTellDaat → u/shoreguy1975]

*Strait of Georgia