[elihu]

That's a really long route and the ferries don't carry that many people compared to a road.

(I once took a ferry from Prince Rupert to Skidegate on the Queen Charlotte islands and back. It was an 800 passenger ferry, temporarily replacing a 300 passenger ferry I think on the same route which was taken out of service for maintenance. The ferry in question was the ill-fated Queen of the North, which ran aground on a different route a few years later and sank.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Queen_of_the_North

[Maursault]

Re: MV Queen of the North, a 20 minute ferry ride is thrilling. A couple of hours is too long. The QotN route was 14 hours?! Terrifying ordinarily, then exponentially so on its last voyage.

[elihu]

Prince Rupert to Skidegate (the route we took) is 7 hours, and the reverse trip would have been about the same. I thought it was rather a pleasant ride. Wikipedia says the QotN's regular route from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert was 18 hours. I'd probably get a little bored, though I'm sure the scenery is amazing.

I think most passengers don't expect the ship to scrape it's bottom on a rock at full speed. It sunk in the middle of the night, so probably a lot of the passengers were asleep before they had to scramble to the lifeboats. All but two people got off.

Rupert to Skidegate is mostly open sea, but I could imagine navigating some of those narrow fjords could be a little nerve-wracking. I think they have to time their routes to account for the huge tidal changes they get there, which cause some pretty strong currents.

Incidently, the QotN was the only ship in the Canadian ferry fleet that didn't have a double hull. Not sure it would have made a difference in this case.