Casco Bay Lines: The Ferry Service That's Both a Lifeline and a Bucket-List Experience

Scheduled service since 1870, a 1981 bankruptcy the islands refused to accept, and a fleet that now includes one of the first hybrid-electric passenger ferries in the country. How a public ferry system carries seven island communities through every February and still gives visitors one of the best days out in Maine.

I was born outside Seattle, and some of my happiest childhood memories are from the decks of ferries in the Pacific Northwest: the bellowing horn, the smell of the water, that feeling of being somewhere between two places at once. That memory sat dormant until I moved to Maine, where Casco Bay Lines brought it right back. I'm lucky to enjoy trips on their ferries as a local, for dining, paddling, biking, and hiking out on the islands, and I've ridden nearly every route they run. One of my favorites for a full day on the water? The Bailey Island route. Even as a local, I still learn something new along the way every time.

The photograph that sent me down this road is a steamer named Maquoit, tied up in Portland around 1907, sitting in the Maine Memory Network archive. The mail boat I ride today carries the same name, and I wanted to know what happened between those two boats. The answer includes a bankruptcy, a bake sale, and an act of the Maine Legislature.

The image people know

The yellow hulls with their black waterlines, white decks, and red trim are as much a part of Portland's working waterfront as the lobster boats. For island residents, these ferries are simply how you get anywhere, groceries, school runs, doctor's appointments, all of it. For visitors, the same boats are one of the best-loved things to do, everything from a quick island-hopping ferry ride to a two-hour cruise down the bay with a captain narrating island history the entire way. It's genuinely both things at once, a rare quality for a public transportation system to hold onto.

An identity built, not accidental

The name itself carries a small piece of brand history most people miss. When the Casco Bay Steamboat Company merged with its rival, the Harpswell Line, in 1907, two lines became one, which is why it's Casco Bay Lines, plural, to this day. The black, yellow, white, and red color scheme on the boats is recognizable across the harbor the way a good logo is recognizable on a page. And the word the company reaches for to describe itself, "lifeline," shows up everywhere from the general manager's own mouth in 2018 to the About page today, not a marketing tagline but a description that holds up because it's true. That kind of consistency is why a 150-year-old public ferry service can still lend its name and identity to other Maine makers; Benoit's Design Co., a family-owned design shop in Westbrook, built a small Casco Bay Lines collection around the ferries' look, and the ferry line's first-ever online store launched in 2024 in partnership with them. A brand doesn't get borrowed like that unless the identity underneath it was built with real intention.

steamer Maquoit ca 1907

The steamer Maquoit on Casco Bay around 1907, the year the two rival lines merged. Today's Maquoit II mail boat carries the same name. (The steamer Maquoit, Portland, ca. 1907, circa 1907, Item 10000, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, Maine. www.mainememory.net/artifact/10000)

Where it actually began

Scheduled ferry service on Casco Bay dates back to 1870, when wooden, coal-fired steamboats started carrying visitors out to island cottages and hotels, some of those early boats held up to a thousand passengers at a time. The company that ran it merged with its main rival, the Harpswell Line, in 1907, becoming the Casco Bay and Harpswell Steamboat Company, survived a shutdown in 1919 when the economic aftermath of World War I and mounting repair bills on the wooden boats caught up with it, and kept going for decades after that under private ownership.

steamer Merryconeag, ca. 1900

The steamer Merryconeag, ca. 1900

The real origin story, though, is what happened in 1981. The original Casco Bay Lines went bankrupt, and for a stretch, the actual lifeline connecting thousands of islanders to the mainland was in real jeopardy. Islanders raised money themselves, through contributions and literal bake sales, to help fund a down payment, and the state stepped in with emergency legislation to create the Casco Bay Island Transit District, a non-profit, quasi-municipal public agency, to take over the boats and keep them running. The first sailing under that new structure left the dock on March 27, 1982. In other words, the ferry system Mainers rely on today doesn't exist because a company decided to keep operating, it exists because the community it served refused to let it disappear.

Who keeps it running: six boats, eleven captains, one relay since 1870

This isn't a story with one founder to point to; it's closer to a relay that's been running since 1870. Today's fleet is made up of six vessels, each with a job.

The Machigonne II, built in 1987, is the Peaks Island car ferry, running roughly 15 round trips a day with up to 399 passengers and 12 vehicles aboard. The Maquoit II, built in East Boothbay in 1994, is the freight workhorse and the mail boat. Fitted with a heavy-duty crane, it runs nearly 50 miles a day down the bay, 365 days a year.

The Wabanaki (2013) and the Aucocisco III (2005) carry the rest of the down bay passenger schedule. The Aucocisco also runs the seasonal Bailey Island trip I love. The Bay Mist, the oldest boat in the fleet at 1985, is the spare and the charter boat.

And as of this fall, there's a sixth. The Battery Steele is a 164-foot,

5 million hybrid-electric ferry built in Rhode Island that carries 599 passengers and 15 vehicles, one of the first diesel-electric hybrid public passenger ferries in the country. It's replacing the Machigonne on the Peaks run and is expected to cut roughly 800 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

The mail boat route itself is the longest continuously operating mail boat service in the country. It has been in service since the 1870s and still leaves Portland three times a day, year-round, carrying essentials like mail, groceries, freight, pets, and people to island communities.

Boats don't run themselves. Casco Bay Lines is a unionized maritime employer on Portland's working waterfront, with eleven captains, deckhands, ticket and freight agents, a maintenance crew, and terminal staff, plus a wave of seasonal hires every spring. Federal transit data puts the labor bill at roughly $4.4 million a year, about half of the entire operating budget.

The larger boats run 16-hour days on two shifts, with three full crew rotations behind them. That's what it takes to keep a schedule that doesn't stop for weather, holidays, or February.

The fleet is also mid-renewal in a way it hasn't been in decades. Beyond the Battery Steele, the board approved preliminary design in January 2026 for a new 111-foot down bay freight and passenger ferry to replace the aging Maquoit II. It comes with roughly

9 million in committed funding, room for 310 passengers, two deck cranes, and more than 50 percent more freight capacity. Service is targeted for around 2029.

The state has been rebuilding island piers, a new Cliff Island terminal is in the works, and the general manager's own memo leaves the door open to smaller, faster boats for Peaks down the line. For a public agency that nearly went under in 1981, that's a lot of building toward 2056.

Casco Bay Lines, by the numbers

What island life actually looks like

It's easy to ride the ferry as a visitor and forget that for a few thousand people, this is the only road home. Peaks Island has a year-round community of over 900, growing to a few thousand in summer. Chebeague has roughly 360 to 400 year-round residents and more than 1,600 in summer.

Long Island has fewer than 300 year-round residents, more than doubling in July. Cliff Island, six miles out and the last stop on the run, has about 60 people in winter, no paved roads, and a one-room school for the elementary grades.

For all of them, the boat is the bridge. Kids in grades six through twelve commute to the mainland for school every day. Groceries, prescriptions, doctor's appointments, jobs on the mainland, the mail, construction lumber, a new refrigerator, all of it moves by ferry.

Chebeague residents route virtually all of their freight through the Portland terminal, and freight alone is roughly a million-dollar-a-year operation across the islands. Peaks gets its water and electricity through lines under the bay, but people and everything they carry still cross on top of it.

The clearest way to see the lifeline is to look at February. That month, Casco Bay Lines carried about 30,500 passengers. In August, it carried nearly 200,000.

Nobody is taking a scenic cruise to Cliff Island in a February northeaster.

Those winter riders are the islanders, the commuters, the students, the nurses and contractors and postal workers, and the boat runs for them whether there are 300 people aboard or 30. General Manager Ben Dinsmore put it plainly in a January 2026 memo to the Casco Bay Lines board, written to justify the size of the next freight ferry. Low winter ridership isn't wasted capacity. It's the service doing exactly what it exists to do.

Infrastructure and tourist attraction, at once

This is the part of Casco Bay Lines that I think is genuinely interesting. On any given day, the same boats and the same crews are doing two completely different jobs.

As infrastructure, the ferries serve seven islands seven days a week: Peaks, Little Diamond, Great Diamond, Diamond Cove, Long, Chebeague, and Cliff. Every year they carry more than a million passengers, roughly 35,000 vehicles, and over 500,000 pieces of freight.

Maine law backs up how essential that role is. Casco Bay Island Transit District holds the only certificate authorizing ferry service between the mainland and those islands, meaning state regulators have decided this route is too critical to leave to open competition.

The federal government has treated it the same way. During the pandemic, Casco Bay Lines received roughly $4.5 million in emergency federal transit funding through the CARES Act just to keep its boats, crews, and terminal running. That money was set aside specifically because the service couldn't be allowed to stop. That's not branding language, that's the federal government deciding this ferry system counts as essential infrastructure worth protecting.

So how much of that million-plus is lifeline and how much is a day out? Casco Bay Lines doesn't publish a resident-versus-visitor split, but its own numbers sketch the shape of it. Ticketed tours are a small slice, roughly 8 to 12 percent of passengers.

The bigger story is seasonal. July and August alone account for more than a third of the year's riders, and the summer surge is overwhelmingly Peaks Island day-trippers, since two-thirds of all tickets sold are single tickets to Peaks.

Take the winter months as the baseline of people who ride because they have to. That steady floor works out to somewhere around a third of the annual total, with the remaining two-thirds arriving with the warm weather. That's my back-of-the-envelope math from their monthly data, not an official figure.

It does match how the agency itself now prices the service. After the 2024 fare change, revenue rose mostly from summer visitors while islanders and workers switched to discounted passes.

Every visitor who spends a summer afternoon on the water is quietly helping keep the year-round service running for the islanders who welcome them ashore.

As a tourist draw, that same system runs sunrise, sunset, and moonlight cruises, live music nights on the water, private charters, lobster bakes on Peaks Island, and the narrated Bailey Island Day Cruise that first hooked me, a two-hour ride out past forts, lighthouses, and small granite islands, a stretch on land at Bailey Island, and a two-hour ride home in time for happy hour. Most transportation systems have to choose one identity. Casco Bay Lines has just always been both.

What it built

More than 150 years of ferry service to these islands, through a post-war shutdown and a bankruptcy that could have ended it for good, and it's still standing because the communities who depend on it stepped up when it counted. What they saved has kept growing: a hybrid-electric ferry on the Peaks run this fall, a new freight boat on the drawing board for 2029, rebuilt piers, and a mail run that still leaves three times a day whether it's August or February. The working-boat identity has never been traded away for the tourist trade; the two have simply learned to share a deck.

Casco Bay Lines, Portland Maine, Kristel Hayes (2017)

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