MS. TRINKO-RUSSELL: My name is Robin Trinko-Russell. Our company, Madeline Island Ferry Line, is a member of Passenger Vessel Association and also Great Lakes Passenger Association. My responsibilities at the ferry line include shoreside operations, ticketing, the island bus tour, computers and financial.
We operate four steel-hulled ferries hauling walk-on passengers or wheel-on passengers, autos, trucks, the local ambulance, UPS, mail, boxes of fish, pies. And our license is to haul up to 149 passengers.
Our route is between Bayfield, Wisconsin, and LaPointe on Madeline Island. That's in Lake Superior, which right now is quite cold. And our route is 2.2 miles in 20 minutes. We make up to 27 round trips during the height of the summer, and right now we're making eight round trips per day.
The island that we service is 14 miles long, three-and-a-half miles wide, year round population of about 200. And, in the summer, we can have up to 4,000 or 5,000 people on the island. We are also the only operator of a car and passenger ferry to the island.
Right now, we're operating in ice. We're probably planning on shutting down this week. There's four-and-a-half inches of ice on the mainland, six inches on the island. And we can operate in up to seven or eight inches of ice. Operating this time of year is more of a challenge. We can only use two of our smaller boats that have V hulls that can break through the ice. And it's also tougher for our cars and our passengers with the icy sidewalks, the icy ramps and boat decks.
We're privately operated, and we have been privately operated and owned since the late 1800s. Our boats vary in age from 1952 up to 1984. The average age of our boat is 35 years.
We receive no government subsidies, and the economy has been fairly poor in our area basically since 9-11 and the collapse of the stock market in 2000. It's difficult to continue to provide the large number of trips and the length of service, you know, because we run from late March until January or February, when the ice gets to seven or eight inches, based on the number of our traffic and the economy.
And considering that a lot of times we operate at a loss -- basically the middle of October until well into June, we operate basically as a public service. We're regulated by the Railroad Commissioner of the state of Wisconsin. That's basically our overseeing agency, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard. And our captains are licensed for 100-ton boats. We have four steel-hull ferries, 65, 75, 90 and 120 feet. They haul between 10, 15, 20, and 25 cars each. Three of our smaller boats are 32, 34, or 35 feet wide. And the maximum width on those boats is so that we can hull them out or pick them up locally in a travel lift.
So, if we ding a propeller or have a problem, we can pull them out and not interrupt service to a great extent. And that hull-out place is less than four or five miles from where we are. Our largest boat, we have to go probably 70 miles to hull it out.
So the width, you know, is quite important because it determines how many lines of traffic, how many cars you can get on there. And anything that would compromise the use of that width would interrupt our ferry. And our boats are drive-on, drive-off, so we need a clear access and easy for customers to get on and off. All of our boats have two decks; the upper one is primarily for passengers, the lower for cars and passengers.
The two smaller boats can operate with two crew members, one licensed captain and one deck hand. The two larger boats require three crew members. And we have recently talked to the Coast Guard, and they allow us to operate with two when we carry less than, say, like 25 people and less than a certain number of cars.
We own our mainland dock and landings and have built a passenger terminal on the mainland that's handicap accessible, and it's pretty nice and very picturesque. And it's on an historic site of a passenger terminal from the late 1800s.
Our island dock is owned by the town of LaPointe, you know, the facility that runs the island, the town of LaPointe. Lake Superior does not vary in lake level like the other Great Lakes, like Lake Michigan can go up and down a couple feet in a short period of time.
Lake Erie -- I may have my facts wrong, but when we went around to meetings on Lake Erie, it was my understanding that their lake level could vary by 12, 13, 14 feet, and they'd have hydraulic lifts with the ramps on the mainland which would meet on the boat. So, for access, you know, it can be kind of a problem.
Ours doesn't vary as much as a couple of feet, and our access ramps are basically timbers, more like big pieces of -- I'm not a boat person, so big timbers. And we manually build them up or take them down based on the lake levels.
But our ramps -- all our boats have ramps at both ends, which are about 10 feet in length, and they come down on the dock, and that's how people board the boat. And we don't have the hydraulic shoreside ramps like the other ferries.
Any questions? I'd like to thank you for allowing me to talk to you today. Any questions?
MS. [JAN] TUCK [BOARD CHAIR]: Thank you very much.