Before roads and automobiles were commonplace, daily travel by ferry — on smaller boats that covered shorter distances than today’s Washington State Ferries routes — was prevalent on Puget Sound.
An Anacortes company, Bieker Boats, is preparing to design a modern, high-tech ferry that could restore passenger-only routes to parts of the region and possibly support increased use of over-water commutes around the world. The local company is working on the design in partnership with Glosten, a Seattle-based naval architecture and marine engineering firm.
Design of the boat, called a foil or hydrofoil ferry, is expected to be complete in 2021.
The work was made possible as a Washington Maritime Blue Joint Innovation Project that netted grant funding and support from the Port of Anacortes, Port of Skagit and Port of Bellingham, as well as the Economic Development Alliance of Skagit County and Kitsap Transit, which serves an area between Seattle and Olympia.
“It really is a regional focus … It’s really the whole Puget Sound, from North to South, which is great,” Port of Skagit spokesperson Linda Tyler said.
Using still emerging technology called foiling, Bieker and Glosten aim to design an approximately 100-foot boat that could ferry about 150 passengers at high speeds — 35 knots being the target — and with low environmental impacts.
“That’s almost twice the speed of today’s state ferries. It’s very fast,” Washington Maritime Blue Board Chair Joshua Berger said. “Going fast and doing it with low to zero emissions, that’s the trick here.”
Berger and Tyler describe foiling as using fins similar to those seen on the base of surfboards to enable boats to essentially fly above the water at high speeds. Bieker Boats owner Paul Bieker, who previously traveled the world designing sailboats for races including America’s Cup, calls the underwater apparatuses wings.
“What a hydrofoil boat does is it carries the weight of the boat on wings instead of carrying the weight of the boat on a hull, and the wings have a lot less surface area than a hull, so the boat has a lot less friction, a lot less resistance,” Bieker said.
Less resistance means less power, which ultimately requires less fuel. Hydrofoiling has been shown to reduce a boat’s drag, horsepower and fuel demand up to 50%, Bieker said.
The reduced demand combined with renewable energy-powered batteries could make future commuter boats operate with zero carbon emissions.
“That’s the goal,” Berger said.
Bieker and Glosten previously developed a conceptual design of the foil-fast ferry. The upcoming work will dig into details to make it construction ready.
“It is a really cool concept,” said Dan Worra, executive director of the Port of Anacortes.
The potential for the foil-fast ferry to be designed, built and even operated here also meets several goals outlined in the Anacortes Maritime Strategic Plan published in 2018 by the port, city of Anacortes and EDASC.
“Our interest, for the Port of Anacortes, is this is maritime jobs in our area … Bieker’s business is here in our district,” Worra said. “We are hoping that this takes off and helps him advance.”
Worra also said the project is timely as a means to address economic, transportation and environmental needs as the global economy works its way out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are looking for ways to spur the economy, and hopefully this is one of them … designing and building a new ferry that is good for the environment and can help out our commuters,” he said.
Bieker said he’s excited about his company’s role in the project, as well as the potential for other local companies he worked with while building America’s Cup boats — such as Jim Betts Enterprises and Janicki Industries — to become involved in eventual construction.
“I think if we establish a good design for the foil ferry and an efficient way to build them, we could be building them up here for quite a while,” he said. “The economic benefits to the local area could be significant.”
Berger said the project partners are also looking at technology to use on the foil-fast ferries to help protect the region’s endangered Southern Resident orcas.
“We know that it’s quieter and cleaner, but we need to make sure it’s safer, too,” he said. “It’s important to do marine mammal detection to avoid vessel strikes.”
Project partners will also evaluate potential routes and other operational details. While the first is likely to serve an area in the densely populated south Puget Sound, there is also interest in potential routes in the north.
“Maybe in the future, we would hope that it would run from the Anacortes Ferry Terminal to the San Juan Islands. Wouldn’t that be cool?” Worra said. “Or maybe even a trial route between Bellingham, Anacortes and the islands.”
Berger said it’s possible the first foil-fast ferry could hit the water by 2023 and begin alleviating freeway congestion.
“We know the passenger ferries we have now do not meet the demand across the entire region,” he said. “There’s a level of confidence that this could be a vessel that operates all over Puget Sound, if not nationally and internationally.”
Berger, Worra and others credit Paul Bieker for dreaming up the foil-fast ferry concept upon returning to Western Washington with his boat-building expertise and witnessing the bumper-to-bumper traffic jams common in the greater Seattle area.
“When I came back to Seattle and looked out at all the congestion and looked out at the sound and saw very few vessels out there, it struck me that hydrofoiling would be a way to transport people at a pretty high speed on the water without using a ton of energy,” Bieker said of the idea, which he then presented to Washington Maritime Blue.
Washington Maritime Blue is a nonprofit, strategic alliance formed by the state to accelerate innovation and sustainability in the maritime industries. It was awarded a $600,000 Industry Challenge grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and U.S. Department of Energy for development of the foil-fast ferry.
Several state and local project partners have invested additional funding in the project, including $25,000 from the Port of Anacortes and $25,000 from the Port of Skagit.
