Loyse Vin­cent

The APT James made its first com­mer­cial sail­ing to To­ba­go this morn­ing for­mal­is­ing its sta­tus as the lat­est pas­sen­ger ves­sel to join the fleet of ves­sels on the in­ter­is­land route.

The APT James left Trinidad at around 7:00 am and ar­rived at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 10 am with 348 pas­sen­gers and 134 ve­hi­cles on board.

While they were among the first few to en­joy lux­u­ry seat­ing in the first-class sec­tion or the spa­cious econ­o­my sec­tion, pa­trons al­so re­port­ed that all ser­vices were up and run­ning in­clud­ing the con­ces­sion and bar area as well as the in­for­ma­tion desk. Sev­er­al peo­ple al­so rat­ed the ves­sel’s abil­i­ty to han­dle rough wa­ters.

One pas­sen­ger In­grid Beck­les from Trinidad, said she trav­els to To­ba­go of­ten on the fer­ries and this sail­ing was much smoother when com­pared to the oth­er fer­ries.

“Ac­tu­al­ly it was good you know al­though the sea was rough it was a lot smoother than I ex­pe­ri­enced two weeks ago when I was very sick on the same trip so yeah it was a good sail­ing.”

An­oth­er trav­eller Al­win La Fluer of Tu­na­puna Trinidad de­scribed the APT James ex­pe­ri­ence as “very good” al­though the wa­ter was a lit­tle chop­py.

Clay­ton Clarke from To­ba­go was al­so among the pas­sen­gers to dis­em­bark the ves­sel. He fac­tored in the sea­son­al con­di­tions in­to his as­sess­ment.

“This time of year is known for rough seas so that has to be tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion so the ride was a lit­tle rough, but oth­er than that every­thing was good.”

The ves­sel was com­mis­sioned on Jan­u­ary 21, and dur­ing the for­mal com­mis­sion­ing cer­e­mo­ny, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley urged the per­sons em­ployed on the APT James to each play their role to pro­tect and main­tain the ves­sel. He al­so asked that se­cu­ri­ty be in­creased to “pre­vent at­tempts to sab­o­tage the ves­sel.”

Pas­sen­gers were al­so asked to say what stood out for them the most dur­ing the ex­pe­ri­ence for some it was the am­bi­ence, oth­er’s how­ev­er rat­ed the cus­tomer ser­vice on the ves­sel. One of those per­sons was Christo­pher Roberts, orig­i­nal­ly from Trinidad.

“The work­ers on the boat...they were very po­lite they were very well spo­ken well-man­nered is the first time I’m trav­el­ling on this boat to To­ba­go and it was a very great ex­pe­ri­ence I will say the tax­pay­ers dol­lars were well spent.”

The oth­er pas­sen­ger ves­sel the Buc­coo Reef was sched­uled the join the APT James on the route at the end of Feb­ru­ary, how­ev­er on Jan­u­ary 26, the fer­ry was forced to re­turn to Aus­tralia af­ter alarms were trig­gered on the ves­sel.

Guardian Me­dia tried to reach out to the NID­CO Chair­man Her­bert George for an up­date on the sta­tus of the Buc­coo Reef, how­ev­er, calls to his mo­bile went unan­swered.