Washington Fixed the Ferry Crew. The Boats Still Cost $714 Million.

Washington State Ferries is the largest ferry system in the United States, carrying commuters, freight and tourists across 21 vessels in the Salish Sea.▸ For three years it ran two overlapping crises at once: not enough licensed mariners to crew the boats it had, and not enough money lined up to replace the ones wearing out. In 2026 those two crises are no longer the same size. One is closing. The other just got a $714.5 million bill.

For years, a missing deckhand or engineer could cancel a sailing outright — Coast Guard rules set a minimum crew for every vessel class, and if even one licensed position goes unfilled, the boat cannot legally leave the dock.▸ WSF's own service planning document called the resulting shortage "unprecedented in its 74-year history," driven by a mariner shortfall the document put at roughly 21,000 people worldwide — a shortage the Jones Act makes worse for U.S. operators, since unlike BC Ferries or other international lines, WSF cannot hire crew from outside the country.

That gap is closing.▸ Deck crew grew from 656 employees in 2022 to 817 in 2026; engine-room crew grew from 370 to 462 — both increases of roughly a quarter — according to figures WSF Deputy Secretary Steve Nevey presented at the agency's May 26, 2026 community meeting. Retirement risk fell alongside the hiring: the share of captains within five years of retirement dropped from 53% to 40%, and chief engineers from 34% to 23%, over the same span.

The effect shows up directly in WSF's own cancellation accounting.▸ In the quarter ending September 2023, 60% of the system's 1,069 canceled sailings were attributed to crew shortages. By the quarter ending December 2024, cancellations had fallen to 538 — and only 18% of those were crew-caused, with mechanical issues (30%) and weather (28%) now the larger factors, per the same WSF planning document. The staffing crisis that defined WSF's service reliability for half a decade is, for now, receding.

The boats themselves are a separate machine, and it is not fixed.▸ On July 1, 2025, Governor Bob Ferguson announced that Florida-based Eastern Shipbuilding Group had won a $714.5 million contract to build three new 160-vehicle hybrid-electric ferries — the first time in roughly 50 years a WSF vessel contract has gone to a shipyard outside Washington, after Seattle's Vigor Marine, which had built every state ferry since the late 1970s, chose not to bid. Eastern's price was 6% below WSF's own engineer's estimate. It is still enormous: once owner-furnished propulsion equipment, construction management, crew training and contingencies are added in, the governor's office put the all-in cost of the first vessel alone at roughly $405 million, the second at $360 million and the third at $325 million — a combined $1.09 billion for three boats.

That price has been climbing for years before the ink dried.▸ The Legislature's independent audit arm, JLARC, found that WSF's own cost estimate for the first hybrid-electric Olympic-class vessel rose from $188 million in September 2018 to $249 million by December 2022 — and criticized WSF for budget requests that don't clearly explain how much of each increase is inflation versus design changes versus uncertainty the agency simply hadn't priced in.

Three boats do not replace a fleet.▸ WSF's system electrification plan calls for 16 new hybrid-electric vessels and electrified charging at up to 16 terminals by 2040, at a total estimated cost of $6 billion. As of mid-2026, WSF has secured $1.68 billion of that — from the state's Move Ahead Washington package, the Climate Commitment Act, and smaller federal grants — leaving roughly $4.3 billion of the plan unfunded, per WSDOT's own public accounting of the project. Riders are already absorbing part of the gap: the Washington State Transportation Commission approved fare increases in August 2025 to help meet a legislatively set $408.8 million fare-revenue target for the two-year period ending June 2027 — vehicle and passenger fares both rose 3% in October 2025 and will rise another 3% in May 2026.

Crew and cancellation figures span WSF fiscal quarters and community meetings reported at different times in 2025 and 2026; vessel cost figures combine a legislative audit's account of WSF's own budget-request history with the state's actual 2025 contract terms, so the three data points are not drawn from a single uniform methodology.