On a Saturday in July, a family lines up at Gate 2 of Blaine Harbor Marina. A kid gets handed the wheel for a stretch of open water and walks away with an Honorary Captain Certificate, the kind Blaine parents have been collecting for their own kids since the 1990s. Everything about the scene looks like it always has. The 1944 wooden hull, the two-person crew, the short hop out onto Semiahmoo Bay.
What that family probably doesn't know is that the boat they just rode isn't doing the same job it did last summer. The Plover that carried generations of Blaine kids across Drayton Harbor to Semiahmoo for lunch stopped running that route this year. What's operating now is a different version of the same vessel, and the reason has less to do with sentiment than with a spreadsheet.
The Route Changed Before the Boat Did
For most of its working life, the Plover was actual transportation. It ferried cannery workers from Blaine to the Alaska Packers Association plant on Semiahmoo Spit until 1964, then spent decades afterward as a genuine shortcut: park at Blaine Harbor, cross in 11 minutes, eat lunch at Semiahmoo, ride the 23-minute return. As recently as the 2025 season, tickets were sold as one-way fares at $6 for adults, and the boat departed on the hour from Blaine's Visitor's Dock and on the half-hour from the wharf at Semiahmoo Resort.
That stopped this year. The 2026 season runs as a round trip only, departing and returning to Gate 2 at Blaine Harbor Marina, with no stop at the Semiahmoo dock at all. Adult fare is now $9, and the ride itself runs about 30 minutes, a loop rather than a crossing.
The cause is a docking dispute between the City of Blaine, which owns the Plover, and Drayton Harbor Maritime, the nonprofit holding a 50-year lease on the Semiahmoo slip where the boat used to tie up. The two sides couldn't agree on terms, so the city pulled the route rather than the boat. If you've been assuming the Plover still gets you to Semiahmoo the way it used to, that assumption is out of date.
Ridership Was Never the Problem
It would be easy to read a shrinking route as a sign nobody rides the thing anymore. The numbers say otherwise. In the 2025 season, the Plover carried 4,280 passengers over just 15 weekends of operation. People show up.
What doesn't work is the math underneath it. That same season cost the city roughly $135,000 to run and brought in about $22,000 in ticket revenue. For 2026, the council budgeted only $40,000, a fraction of what a full season has historically cost, which is why Blaine's finance director warned the boat wouldn't be able to sail as often as it has in past years.
Insurance is the other half of the squeeze. The city paid $15,500 to insure the Plover for the 2026 season, and city manager Mike Harmon has said that even Lloyd's of London, the insurance market known for covering offshore oil rigs and opera singers' vocal cords, declined to take on the vessel. Coverage tops out around $1 million, and anything above that comes straight out of Blaine's general fund. This is a 17-passenger, 32-foot wooden boat with a two-person crew. The liability math around it looks nothing like its size.
2027 Is the Year That Actually Decides This
Harmon has been direct about where this is heading:
"When you look at the liability that it imposes on the city and, therefore vis a vis taxpayers, it's just probably a financially good business decision to unfortunately end operations at the end of this year."
The options on the table, according to Harmon, range from handing operations to a private party without tax support, to donating the boat to a historical museum, to putting it on permanent display in a park. None of those decisions has been made. The Blaine City Council is expected to take up the question in 2027, which means this season is running under a kind of suspended status: fully seaworthy, still selling tickets, but without a guaranteed next chapter.
That's a different situation than "the Plover might go away someday," which is the version of this story Blaine has told itself for years. There's now a specific decision point on the calendar, tied to a specific budget conversation, with specific dollar figures attached. If you care how this turns out, 2027 is when it gets decided, not some vague future.
What This Means If You Want to Ride It
The Plover is running this season out of the Blaine Boating Center at 235 Marine Drive, Friday through Sunday, with hourly departures. Fares are $9 for adults, $4 for kids ages 3 through 12, and free for children under 2. Because the route no longer crosses to Semiahmoo, pairing it with a visit to the Alaska Packers Association Museum on Semiahmoo Spit now means two separate stops instead of one boat ride connecting them. The museum is open Thursday through Sunday through Labor Day if that's part of your plan.
Schedules can shift depending on staffing and demand, so it's worth checking Blaine by the Sea's ferry page before you go rather than assuming the hours from last year still hold.
The Small Landmarks Change First
Towns don't usually announce that something is ending. They quietly change how it operates, adjust the budget line by a few thousand dollars, lose a dock lease, raise a fare, and only later does someone connect the dots into a story with a headline. The Plover's 2026 season is a good example of that pattern in real time. Nothing about it screamed crisis from the outside. The boat still runs, kids still steer it, certificates still get handed out at the dock. But the version of the ferry that Blaine grew up with, the one that got you across the water for a meal, already stopped operating, and the version that replaced it is running on a budget and an insurance arrangement that the city itself describes as unsustainable.
Paying attention to changes like this is part of actually knowing a place, not just living near it. Jacob Petz has spent more than two decades watching how Whatcom County towns manage exactly this kind of slow-motion decision, from waterfront leases to small-town budget fights that shape what a community keeps and what it eventually lets go. If you're the kind of Blaine resident who wants a local's read on where this town is headed next, not just this summer's ferry schedule, Let's Connect.
