Since June 17, the MV Confederation had been out of service
The ferry between Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia has started running weeks before it was supposed to.
Saturday at 7 a.m., the first boat left from Wood Islands, P.E.I.
On June 17, the service stopped because the MV Confederation had a mechanical problem that needed a new part.
It was thought that the ship wouldn’t be ready to go back into service until mid-July, since the part couldn’t be found anywhere and had to be made from scratch. Germany made the replacement, which was then sent to Canada.
Shortly after the disruption was announced, a Northumberland Ferries employee told CBC that the part was like the vanilla-cream layer in an Oreo cookie, with the ship’s main engine being one chocolate wafer and the equipment that drives the propellers being the other side of the cookie.
Northumberland Ferries said in a statement released on Friday that it “did everything it could to speed up the making and delivery of the new part, and was able to do so with the help of the supplier and all supporting agencies.”
Because of a problem, travelers didn’t have many choices
As of Friday, the MV Confederation had not been running for almost two weeks. This meant that there was no ferry service for cars or people between eastern Prince Edward Island and the mainland at the start of the busy summer tourist season.
Islanders, truckers, and business travelers who needed to get from Borden-Carleton, P.E.I., to New Brunswick had only two choices: take the Confederation Bridge, which connects P.E.I. to New Brunswick, or fly.
After the MV Holiday Island was sent to a scrapyard after a fire on board in July 2022, the ferry problem showed how dangerous it was to have only one working boat for the service.
Northumberland Ferries was able to find and rent a good car ferry from the Quebec ferry agency later in 2022, but company officials knew it could be pulled back at any time to replace a boat on a St. Lawrence River route.
The replacement ship, the MV Saaremaa I, will be back on the route between Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia by the middle of July.
The legal owner of the boats used by Northumberland Ferries is the federal government.
It has set aside money for a new ferry to replace the MV Holiday Island, but the ship is still being designed and won’t be ready until at least 2028.