It was either November 6th or 8th, 2014. We had gone to SeaTac to pick up my sister-in-law and niece who flew in from Spokane to see my daughter's performance as the lead in Meet Me in Saint Louise. They had a horrifying landing and then I had the bright idea to take the ferry.
They canceled the next 4-5 sailings after that one until the storm settled down.
The wind was SSW at +50 knots with gusts in the 60's according to NOAA and the boat could not travel broadside to the wind. As soon as we cleared the pier, we turned down wind and headed towards Everett at a really good clip. Then the boat when full-astern, stopped and reversed course almost directly upwind. The section heading SW is then the big rolls began. I think that the photo series was taken from the ferry landing when the boat was at about the "O". If you look carefully you can see that the cars at the "bow" of the boat are taillights, not headlights because we were "backing" to the SW. This section was impressive but not even close to what happened at the other end of the SW run.
I had never before heard a ferry's engine running much about a fast idle before but that section the engines were roaring. When we got over toward the Whidbey shore at the “X” the engines when to idle and we quickly slowed in preparation for going back forward to the Clinton dock. As it turned out, we should have done that about 30 seconds sooner. Just as we were coming to a stop, we rolled over a huge wave crest and from my position, standing at the front observation windows on the bow of the upper deck, the water dropped away and I could not see the bottom of the trough. I said to the one other guy out there with me “This is gonna hurt” and we both retreated back inside the cabin doors.
The boat just slowly pushed out over this big hole and then tipped forward and landed with a huge crash, stuffing the bow deep into the back of the next wave. The resulting splash put a wall of green water on the upper level windows we had been standing behind and flooded the whole observation deck 6” to 12” deep through the opening at each end. We even had some water come under the closed doors into the main cabin. It made the splash at 14 seconds on the video look like a walk in the park.
When we went down to our cars, alarms were sounding all over the boat and you could see that the wave had traveled the full length of the boat car deck and some of the cars at the back of the line (upwind) had been pushed out of line by the flood. Our Suburban was about 1/3 of the way from the stern (closest to the wave) and the side panels of the car were wet. We stopped at the carwash in Oak Harbor and got a chassis clean to remove the salt water!
It gave me a great appreciation of the strength and stability of those WA ferries!
gcaptain.com
