The CAT is gone, and not just the ferry service between Yarmouth, N.S. and the Maine ports of Bar Harbor and Portland. The high-speed catamaran, which for months has been tied up to the Bay Ferries terminal in Bar Harbor, has disappeared - and Bay Ferries won't say where it went.The company's ferry service across the Gulf of Maine was canceled at the end of 2009 after the provincial government in Nova Scotia decided it could no longer afford what had become an annual multi-million dollar subsidy to Bay Ferries, which owned and operated the boat. Bay Ferries said it could not make a profit without the subsidy and so ended more than 50 years of ferry service between Bar Harbor and Yarmouth. From the mid-1950's through 1997, ferry service along the 100-plus-mile route between the two ports was offered on the slower, monohull vessel Bluenose.
Since the service was canceled at the end of 2009, tourism and economic development officials on both sides of the Gulf of Maine have been wringing their hands over the economic impact the lack of ferry service would have on the port communities served by the ferry, especially Yarmouth. Officials have hoped to find a way to restore the ferry service - either with Bay Ferries, with another boat that can carry large trucks and that uses less fuel, or maybe even with another operator altogether.
But the CAT, it seems, is out of whatever future there might be for restoring such service. According to a Jan. 29 letter to the editor in the Bangor Daily News, the ship has left Bar Harbor for good. But the company won't comment on the CAT's departure. Bay Ferries VP Don Cormier has refused to tell local media what has become of the ship.
More than one person who has dealt closely with the CAT's operations in Bar Harbor over the years, however, has said off the record that the boat was sold to a buyer in China. It left Bar Harbor Jan. 23 for South Carolina, they have said, where it is being worked on before it heads to Honolulu and then China, they have said. Who the buyer is they said they did not know.
Not everyone in the area will miss the boat, which was criticized early in its Bar Harbor career for being an alleged menace to whales and to fishermen. In 1998, its first year of operation, the boat struck and killed Yarmouth fisherman Clifford Hood Jr. when it ran over his boat in Yarmouth's harbor (according to this CBC article).
Local criticism of the boat seemed to fade over the years as it avoided further high-profile mishaps and became a routine part of the seascape in Frenchman Bay. Some speculate that a September 2008 bomb threat against the boat may have been made by an irate local fisherman, but no one was ever charged in that incident.
The CAT's economic impact in Bar Harbor certainly was appreciated by local merchants and hoteliers, but now its legacy will include the economic loss left in the wake of the ferry service's cancellation. Approximately 120 full- and part-time Bay Ferries employees lost their jobs when the route was scrapped (according to the BDN), and now 20 more people are losing their jobs with today's closure of the Rodd Colony Harbour Inn in Yarmouth. Mark Rodd, head of the firm that owns the hotel, said the lack of cross-gulf ferry service out of Yarmouth is the main reason for the hotel's closure.
