Three former B.C. Ferries’ vessels now in Egypt are being marketed on Facebook in a last-ditch effort to prevent them from being scrapped.
B.C.-based international trade broker Robert Arthurs said he was contacted recently by an Egyptian consultant, Ehab El Nemr from Scrap Masr Ltd., who was charged with turning the three catamarans into scrap after their owner — the Egyptian government — decided it had no use for them.
However, El Nemr felt the ferries could still be operated and, after learning about the vessels’ B.C. history, reached out to Arthurs to see if he could find a buyer.
Arthurs said that each vessel was worth about $20 million in scrap because the price of aluminum was so high and the vessels’ engines were still viable. Therefore, the consultant wants $20 million each.
On Jan. 11, the two parties signed an agreement giving Arthurs two weeks to find a party interested in the vessels. Interested parties would then need to travel to Egypt to inspect the ships, making Arthurs the middleman.
“The consultant feels they are nowhere near their end of life. He’s given me a week or two to market these things or Egypt will dismantle them and take the motors out and sell the aluminum for scrap,” Arthurs said.
“I’ve got them on Facebook, I’ve got them on LinkedIn, I’ve got them on two other marketplaces.”
Formerly known as the Pacificat Explorer, Discovery and Voyager, the three aluminum ferries were built in B.C. in the late 1990s but did not meet expectations and were pulled out of service. The Explorer and Discovery plied the Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo run for a few months, while the Voyager was never used.
The total cost of the three ferries was close to $475 million, with the project plagued by cost overruns, construction delays and political interference. It was subsequently dubbed “the fast ferry fiasco.”
The ferries were kept in Richmond until 2003 when all three were sold for $20 million to the North Vancouver-based Washington Marine Group that helped build them in the first place.
“The last thing we would ever want to see, just on the emotional factor, is for them just to go to scrap,” the company’s Kyle Washington said at the time.
In 2009, the Washington Marine Group sold the trio to a United Arab Emirates-based builder of luxury yachts. In 2014, they became the property of the Egyptian government.
In September 2022, Postmedia reported the vessels were in port at Alexandria in Egypt and, according to a reader who spotted the vessels, they were in bad shape, having been there for over three years.
Arthurs has posted photos of the vessels taken recently by El Nemr that show the interior of one vessel completely unchanged since its B.C. Ferries days. The outsides of two vessels appear to have damaged bridge decks and are in need of paint, still sporting their original red, blue and white B.C. Ferries colours and names.
