Orcasional Musings | Early ferries? From where, to where, with what?

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

In 1922, Captain Harry Crosby converted the Harvester King from kelp collector to front-ramp automobile ferry. At last it was easy to drive on, and then drive off again. But Crosby soon found that the need for a vacationers’ ferry was just too seasonal to be sustainable, so he sold out to the Puget Sound Navigation Company in 1924.

Charles Peabody and his partner, Joshua Greene, had founded their passenger-and-freight steamship business in 1898, and by the time that Crosby sold out to them, PSNC had cornered just about all of the revenue-producing traffic in Puget Sound. Mrs. Greene had designed a pretty flag in red, white, and blue for the ships, but when the Greenes sold their half of the line to Peabody, his new flag featured a black disc on a red field. People started calling it the “Black Ball Line.”

Even though the Black Ball Line had a near monopoly on ‘cross-Puget-Sound shipping, there were other ferries. From 1936 through the early 1940s, a couple of Orcasians ran a scheduled boat from Obstruction Pass to Chuckanut, on the mainland just south of Bellingham. And there were small, individual front-ramp boats for hire which could, without a fuss, drop your car or truck on an Orcas beach at the Lieber Haven Resort.

Labor troubles, rising costs, and maybe even the expense of operating the beautiful and luxurious ferry Kalakala, caused the Black Ball Line itself to founder and to sell out, in 1951, to Washington State’s Department of Transportation. The Black Ball Ferry Line, made famous by Bing Crosby’s song, became plain old Washington State Ferries. But the ferry boats kept chugging right along, bringing hundreds of cars and thousands of people to and from Orcas and all of the other islands, year in and year out.

There’s a schedule of Washington State Ferry fares from the 1973—1974 season in the files of the Orcas Island Historical Museum. In it, we find that the one-way tariff for a car and its driver, Anacortes to or from Orcas, was just $2.55. When this amount is translated into today’s vastly inflated Monopoly money, we learn that our ’round-tip fare should be about $36.00. Well, actually you’ll pay about $46.00, during the Orcasian “off season.” That’s pretty close, since that extra $10.00 works out to only 72¢, each way, in 1974’s money. Pretty close? Yeah. Right.

“The Black Ball Ferry Line,” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters:

Read Part 1 here: https://theorcasonian.com/early-ferries-from-where-to-where-with-what/

Read Part 2 here: https://theorcasonian.com/early-ferries-from-where-to-where-with-what-2/