I remember riding on her when I was a little boy. At the time it was the nicest ferry on Puget Sound....hate to see her look like this....
yep...she sure was something to look at in her day, but at some point she was no longer safe on the water under any conditions and should have gone to the scrapyard.
A couple of years ago we had a local group buy an ancient 100’ long retired Coast Guard cutter for a song and a dance, with the idea of “restoring” it to it’s former glory when it was built for the War. They moored it for a while on the Columbia River at a public dock here in Vancouver while they worked on it.
Vandals went down one night and cut her loose, and she floated free downstream, crossed the navigation channel, and grounded on some pilings on the Oregon side of the river. The pilings punched holes in the paper-thin hull plating, and they played merry hell refloating it so it could be towed away and disposed of.
This is becoming an enormous problem now as the economy continues to sink and the owners of these hulls abandon them on public waterways, or get themselves in so deep over their heads that they do not have the means to do anything with the vessel. They are loaded with hazmat and oily bilge residue that’s a real oil slick hazard when the vessel finally sinks.
There are at least 10 of these kind of potential disasters all through the waterways in Washington.