A permanent foot ferry connection between Bremerton and Silverdale is still up in the air, but organizers of the pop-up route for this year’s Blackberry Festival say their success is something to be considered by Kitsap Transit.
It was admittedly a gamble—the cost around $25,000 to use the Port of Silverdale, reserve the historic mosquito fleet ferry Carlisle II for the route and security costs, among others.
“Anecdotally, we weren’t sure if there were going to be twenty people that would show up that first day,” said Joshua Johnson, “and like Steve said, an hour and 45 minutes before our first sailing out of Silverdale, we had a couple sitting there waiting.”
Johnson and Steve Sego, two of the minds behind the free Catch the Carlisle II pop-up service, said the success grew from there throughout the Labor Day weekend. The following 9 a.m. sailing was completely booked out, and by the time the festival ended, roughly 2,300 passengers had been transported between the two destinations.
Sego said the uniqueness of the route proved to be a benefit to the festival. Several people taking the Carlisle, he reported, had decided to attend the annual festival simply because the route was there. He even reported that there were some using the connection to catch the next ferry to Seattle from Bremerton.
“The comment we heard so often in line was: ‘We couldn’t go unless we could do this. We don’t want to drive and try to find parking,” Sego said, later adding for other commuters, “A lot of people had never been on that route, underneath the bridges and past Tracyton, so we had a lot of people who just took the round-trip.”
The feedback comes during a time of monumental success for KT’s ferry routes. Passenger data released this year shows three consecutive months of 100,000+ ridership from July to September, including a record-setting August on both the Kitsap Fast Ferries (81,871) and local foot ferries (33,419).
Sego said he hopes the pop-up route turns into regular conversations about starting a foot ferry route through the Dyes Inlet. However, there is plenty left to troubleshoot, especially the varying timeliness of the ancient Carlisle ferry.
“You had either 35 minutes or 55 minutes,” he said of each crossing, “and I laugh because we said it was going to be an hour turnaround. Sometimes we were there pretty quick, and sometimes as the Carlisle is passing the boat shed, it’s going backward almost.”
Even so, the hope is that newer boats, as they are being built, will make the trip more time-efficient for scheduling and crossing speeds. “The Carlisle does 11 knots, and that 18 or 20 knots (from a newer boat) makes this a much more feasible trip,” he said.
Regardless of how long the wait, organizers are set on bringing the service back for next year’s Blackberry Festival, much to the delight of local leaders like Bremerton Mayor Greg Wheeler. “This is what visionary leadership looks like,” he said, “and we would welcome, here in the city of Bremerton, a chance to be part of a debrief.”
