Guemes Island Ferry

The Guemes Island ferry leaves from the Anacortes Ferry Terminal at 500 I Avenue. Its boat is the M/V Guemes, a diesel ferry that carries 21 vehicles and 99 passengers. Nickum & Spaulding designed it, and Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding built it in Somerset, Massachusetts. SkagitTalk puts it at 91 tons. The crossing is over Guemes Channel. SkagitTalk gives the channel’s width as three-quarters of a mile, and a 2023 MarineLink account calls the route half a mile. A one-way trip usually takes just over five minutes, and the boat usually sails every half hour. No road reaches the island. The county says the ferry runs 365 days a year and carries roughly 200,000 vehicles and 400,000 passengers annually.

The day on the I Avenue run

The first boat leaves at 6:30 a.m. on weekdays and Saturdays and at 8 a.m. on Sundays. After the 11:15 a.m. sailing the crew breaks for lunch until 1 p.m. A second 11:15 run may follow, but only at the on-duty captain’s discretion. The county says the midday pause gives the crew their required lunch breaks and time for safety drills and maintenance, and it asks riders not to count on the extra run. On certain Tuesdays, listed in the county’s published fueling schedule, the boat takes on fuel between 11:45 a.m. and 12:45 p.m., and there is no second 11:15 run on those days. On Wednesdays the 9:15 a.m. run out to the island and the 2:00 p.m. run back carry hazardous materials only, with no other passengers or vehicles aboard. The last boat leaves at 8:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday in both seasons. On Fridays and Saturdays it leaves at 11 p.m.

The non-peak season runs from October 1 to May 19. In that season an adult passenger pays $6.75, against $8.50 from May 20 through September 30. Riders 18 and younger travel free. Since August 1, 2018, every fare has included a surcharge set aside for replacing the vessel. The county’s schedule page posts an alert for passenger-only service October 19 to 23, during a project to replace the ferry’s aprons and flaps. SkagitTalk reports that the ferry is available around the clock for emergency responders. During annual maintenance the passenger-only Straight Arrow fills in, and the vehicle-capable M/V San Juan Enterprise sails as needed.

SkagitTalk says the island’s name is usually pronounced “GWAY-mus” or “GWEE-mus.” Lieut. Juan Francisco de Eliza gave the name in 1791 for the Viceroy of Mexico, Don Juan Vincente de Guemes. In 1841 Cmdr. Charles Wilkes charted the island as Lawrence Island. In 1853 it was called Dog Island after wild dogs raided the camp of Russell Peabody and Capt. Roeder and ate their food. Ken Hansen, the late chairman of the Samish Tribal Council, said the Indian name for the island also translates as Dog Island.

Canoe, tug, and Sunny Jim

The Samish crossed from Fidalgo to Guemes by canoe. The island newsletter LineTime says they used canoes on the channel until the early 1900s. The first known ferry service dates to 1890, and the two accounts of it differ. LineTime’s timeline names the steam tugboat Iola, under Captain M. B. Clark, making twelve round trips a day from Ocean Dock to North Anacortes on Guemes Island. SkagitTalk calls the tug the Lola, names its captain as M.B. Miller, and credits a man named W.C. Pyle with establishing the service. A passenger rowboat, the Glide, also worked the crossing in the 1890s.

Harry Rickaby was born in England in the late 1860s and came to Fidalgo Island in 1882. He built boats, and by 1902 he kept a boat house and ran the Sunny Jim to Guemes. In 1912 he put the 40-foot Elk into service. It made five trips a day, carried 35 people, and charged 5¢ each way. LineTime records that Rickaby was paid $105 a month. In January 1914, the Anacortes American reported, he raised service “between the island suburb and Anacortes from six to eight trips daily,” citing the growing population of the island. The Elk II, built to carry up to 60 passengers, followed in 1915.

Horses, milk cans, and the first cars

Rickaby and his partner Frank Taylor also bottled Cypress Island mineral water for sale in Anacortes. LineTime dates their order with Keesling Ship Yards in Anacortes to 1914. The yard built them a boat nearly 50 feet long and weighing 86 tons, and named it the Guemes. It entered service in 1917. That same year Sloan Shipyards opened on the island to build navy vessels, but it opened so late in the war that only four boats were launched there before it closed. SkagitTalk says the Guemes, with automobiles spreading through the area, was the first ferry to haul cars. The Anacortes American of December 13, 1917, recorded another kind of first: “John Brand had the honor of bringing across the first horses. He brought two teams to have them shod and then loaded a set of wagon scales and took them back with him.” A photograph from July 4, 1918, shows a brass band aboard.

In 1920 the ferry was sold at a sheriff’s sale, and a new company hired Bill Bessner to get it running again. In 1921 he bought the company, which Skagit County partly subsidized. Under Bessner, a car and driver paid 50¢, passengers rode free, and milk cans went at 10¢ each. Bessner once lost three toes when rollers moving an engine into the ferry passed over his foot. He sold the ferry in 1948. In 1950 Sandy Bernsen, whom LineTime also calls Sandrup, bought it from the owners of the two years between. At some point the boat was refitted to carry more vehicles, and this version is often called the Guemes II. In 1957 new side walls replaced its windows, which had vibrated loudly.

The Almar and the county boat

In 1959 the Almar replaced the Guemes. LineTime says the Almar was “backyard built” in 1947 on Swan Island in the Columbia River near Cathlamet, Washington, and designed for that river. In 1954 it received the engine of the Marguerite, which ran aground and sank off Lopez Island that September. On the Guemes run the Almar carried up to nine cars. The old Guemes, sold after 42 years, ran aground near Lummi Island almost as soon as it changed hands. A photograph from January 1960 shows Captain Bernsen shaking hands with islanders at the Guemes dock. Around 1961 the Anacortes terminal moved from the foot of Q Avenue to 6th Street and I Avenue. Black Ball Line ferries had sailed from that dock to the San Juan Islands from 1946 to 1951, and Washington State ran its own vessels from there through the 1950s.

Bernsen left as master in 1963. Skagit County bought the Almar, with Al Bacetich as master and Ray Separovich as alternate. SkagitTalk has Separovich captaining the route from 1965 to 1986. The present boat arrived in 1979. LineTime’s timeline calls it “the new 16-car Guemes,” while the county lists its capacity as 21 vehicles. A 1979 photograph shows Bob Leatherwood lowering the ramp on the island. The docks were replaced in 1980. County engineers had found that the Guemes float sank in 1976 and was kept working only by adding foam, and that the span limited the whole system to a 12-ton load. Al Bacetich retired in 1988, and his son Tony served as master until 1991. Since then a series of county managers and skippers has run the boat.

A couple was married aboard in the summer of 1991, and the Anacortes American called the Guemes the “Love Boat.” In 1995 its crew helped rescue the crew of a disabled vessel nearby. On May 3, 2013, the state naming committee renamed Southeast Point on the island Casperson Point, for the ferry captain Gary Casperson. His photograph hangs in the crew break room, captioned: “I was born in Everett where Hefty’s Burgers was a tough place to hang out. With too many enemies I had to hide out on Guemes Island for the next 30 years.”

An electric boat on paper

In 2013, with maintenance costs outrunning fare revenue, the county commissioners asked for a replacement study. In 2017 Public Works engaged the Seattle firm Glosten to design an all-electric ferry. The design is a 160-foot double-ended boat for up to 28 cars, with batteries sized for the round trip because charging would happen only in Anacortes. Bids were opened December 20, 2023, against an engineer’s estimate of $19.5 to $22.2 million and a completion date of March 31, 2026. On January 22, 2024, the commissioners rejected every bid. By August 2024 division manager Rachel Rowe put the cost at $45 million, including shoreline charging. Part of the state money was tied to the Climate Commitment Act, and the project was paused pending the vote on Initiative 2117. In February 2025 the commissioners directed staff to look for ways to cut the design’s cost.

The fares moved in the meantime. In 2010 the county set a goal of covering 65 percent of operating and maintenance costs from fares, and revenue has fallen short of it every year since 2018. After no increase since 2015, fares rose an average 14 percent in 2023, then 30 percent for 2025 and another 30 percent for 2026. In the spring of 2025 two new diesel engines went into the boat during an extended haul-out, and vehicle service stopped for 10 weeks. That year vehicle ridership fell by about 30 percent. On January 15, 2026, San Juan County Superior Court Judge Kathryn Loring overturned the 2025 fare resolutions on an appeal by four islanders. She found the engine installation had been counted improperly as operating cost. The county has since proposed a 14 percent rise for 2027, which would bring a peak adult fare to $9.50. Public Works Director Michael See said the new engines are “bringing increased reliability as well as the savings in fuel.”

A citizen advisory group of six islanders and three other county residents met monthly from November 2025. In July 2026 it unanimously recommended a battery-and-diesel plug-in hybrid by 2039, with design to wait at least five years. Sandy McKean, an island resident of 15 years, chaired the group, and he told the commissioners the 1979 boat is “thicker steel than they use today. We all felt comfortable … that this boat really has a 60-year service life, better than most, because it was so well built to start with.”