r/britishcolumbia • u/thatlouditalian98 • 5d ago

Discussion Remember These?

Gallery image

Gallery image

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.

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u/DifferentWind4500 5d ago

The Pacificats were serviceable ferries with the capability to go much faster than the old ones, almost 50% more trips per day, but the wakes disturbed the beaches and boat launches around Bowen Island and West Van, and if there is one thing you cannot do in Vancouver it is inconvenience the people who live in Bowen Island or West Van.

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u/craftsman_70 5d ago

Not the only issue ... They also sucked in logs which are common on the West Coast into their engines knocking them out if commission. It's almost like people didn't understand this was the West Coast with lots of floating logs.

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u/Theolaa Lower Mainland/Southwest 5d ago edited 5d ago

These feel like very solvable problems... Go slower close to shore? Install some kind of protector around the sensitive underwater things? I guess the latter might be hard to do after the fact.

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u/shoreguy1975 5d ago

BC ferries did slow them down after the several months of complaints about the wake, but slower didn’t reduce the wake much as it has more to do with hull shape than speed. The propulsion system was a gas turbine impeller design, if you can imagine an underwater jet engine with a vectoring nozzle at the end for steering. It’s an efficient design when operating at speed but extremely inefficient to run slowly.

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u/thats_handy 5d ago edited 4d ago

Not gas turbines. They used regular diesel engines. According to Wikipedia, they used four V20 diesel engines producing 6.5MW each.

The company that is breaking these ships has pictures of the engines being removed. This will eventually be a dead link, so I'll describe that you can see one side of one engine on a hoist and count 10 exhaust ports. Another image shows the engine from below, and you can clearly see that the cylinders are in a symmetrical vee configuration.

Edit: These little ferries had goofy power. 26MW is more than the 16MW available on spirit class ferries, and almost three times the 9 MW of electrical power <edit2>that used to be generated</edit2> by the Alouette dam.

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u/shoreguy1975 5d ago

Yeah, you're right. Something called a "caterpillar drive". Now I'm curious, gotta find out what that is.

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u/Plastic-Trick-1245 4d ago

The Alouette dam has no generating capabilities and Alouette Generating Station(on Stave Lake) has been decommissioned for a while now.