Cowes chain ferry now working

I was going by the reports of Medinaview who lives there now and seems to keep close tabs on the ferries, the foot pax service didn't sound very reliable and unless I completely misunderstood, a joke at evenings or weekends, even ' important but difficult to staff ' times like over Christmas & New Year.
 
Sadly our experience was that the water taxi service was called upon to support the small boats which had replaced ferry as no one had thought that these oats might have to cope with strong tides and Jenny lea was nowhere to be seen . As those waiting grew we heard Same story from others in line as we waited for about an hour to cross. You would have thought that buying a Gosport ferry might have worked better if FB5 could not be repaired . Plenty of space on each side to build proper pontoons for landing after all .
 
To be fair they may have seriously improved, but we had given up with the idea of water taxis between East Cowes and Cowes earlier in the year, as we had also had the hours waiting time, as the taxi is more than often at the Folly now and not in Cowes, most of the people we had spoken to in the queue had said the same thing about the last year being very poor compared to previous years.

Strangely the one time we took our boat up to the Folly this year, we couldn't get a taxi across to the pub either as apparently they were having to cover the chain ferry and they only had one boat as their other one had broken down.
 
Presumably the customer satisfaction rate is 99.9 percent as all the ones who couldn't travel were never customers and so weren't asked. I am looking forward to a near perfect service at Easter but haven't checked the tides as yet to see when it will be resting on its chains. Hopefully the water taxi will then not be hijacked though .
 
That's correct. I wonder where they got their 99.9% from as it seemed last year with the new all river service, you can no longer get water taxis in Cowes.

Thank godness CHC have seen sense and put it out for tender, we are certainly looking forward to seeing a new service after last years debacle.
 
And the ferry is off again. According to the bloke running the Folly Taxi, it has broken a chain. An unlike them not to expect it to ever be reliable.

I struggled not to laugh.
 
Saw a post on an online newspaper site from an engineer who volunteered his services to carry out some testing. He helpfully pointed out in his comment ( and after all the council need all the help they can with FB6 ) that they were not testing at extremes of tide and flow. Maybe he can help them with the prow chains given he has volunteered his services for free and is a test engineer Given the lack of service is this another failing in FB6 but maybe the prow chains only have 6 months active service life with the treatment they have been receiving crashing into the posts?
 
Giblets said:
View attachment 68904

Looks like they have the new crew boarding arrangements in hand.
Click to expand...

I just saw someone try to use it. He got to the point where he had to let go of the hand rail and then gave up!

It looks as though they have removed the other chain sometime during the day. unless that broke as well. Normally during maintenance work they fit temporary chains to support the prow but they don't seem to have done that this time so it's stuck where it is I guess

It's all rather odd because they did something to those chains just before it returned to service in December. They seemed to change part of them....... Perhaps they bought dodgy chain joining links off eBay
 
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