Rochester's superfast ferry now awaits repairs in a Venezuelan shipyard

The cursed vessel has been trailed by financial failures, fraud investigations and embezzlement

Its departure from Rochester generated considerable acrimony for local politicians

It is estimated it would take $5 million to return the ferry to service

Updated Friday, March 29 at 1:30 p.m. with new information about an attempt to sell the ferry.

The high-speed ferry that brought pride and then heartbreak to Rochester like nothing else in memory now rests, neglected and unusable, at a shipyard in the Venezuelan city of Puerto Cabello.

And there, it could help topple a government.

The Rochester-based Spirit of Ontario I, once the fastest vessel of its kind in the world, carried passengers across Lake Ontario to Toronto and back during portions of 2004 and 2005.

It would be difficult for someone who wasn’t here then to understand just how big a deal it was. And when it left, it's hard to overstate how much ill will toward local political leaders was bobbing in its wake.

It was nothing like what was to come, however.

An improbable journey

The luxurious vessel’s improbable journey led it through three separate financial failures, a fraud investigation on two continents, an embezzlement accusation, an international arrest warrant and a mechanical collapse.

It ran for years between Spain and Morocco without major incident, but failed abjectly in a very brief sojourn in Denmark.

Finally, after three name changes and 15 years, it arrived in the strangest position of all: Our old ferry is evidence in the case against Nicolás Maduro, the embattled socialist president of Venezuela.

Maduro has been accused of many sins, but chief among them may be mismanagement of the Venezuelan economy, which has suffered shortages of food and consumer goods, runaway inflation and infrastructure breakdowns.

And then there were the ferries.

In 2013, Maduro’s transport minister, Ma. Gen. Hebert García Plaza, personally engineered the purchase of three large ferries for an announced price of $69 million to improve service to Margarita, a large and popular island off the Venezuelan coast.

One of them was our old ferry, which the Venezuelan government renamed the Virgen de Coromoto.

This did not go well. In the spring of 2015, García Plaza, who had been sanctioned by the U.S. government for human-rights violations, was indicted on embezzlement charges in connection with the purchase of the three ferries, including ours.

García Plaza fled the country. Interpol issued an international arrest warrant but he evaded capture and never answered the charges. (He did not respond to a request for comment for this report.)

Worse for Venezuelans, by mid-2015 Rochester’s old ferry and nearly every other passenger vessel serving Margarita had broken down. Several of them sank in a port that a critic dubbed the country's “ferry cemetery.”

Ferry at center of national scandal

The demise of the government-owned ferry company was a nationwide scandal. The ferry service had been swamped by “apathy, abandonment and corruption,” one newspaper reported.

Another published a list of seven signs that “Venezuela is falling apart.” The ferry debacle was No. 2 on the list.

The collapse of the ferry company clearly fueled popular anger against Maduro, anger that has bolstered a bid for power by Juan Guaidó, the head of the National Assembly. The United States is among dozens of nations that recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader.

More:The full Monty: A timeline of our fast ferry’s checkered past

And what of the Virgen de Coromoto? It was towed into the government-owned DIANCA shipyard in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela about 18 months ago, and remains there today.

The hull is intact and the vessel’s afloat, but two of its four engines failed years ago, according to Jose Dominguez, who has managed the ferry at the DIANCA shipyard.

"The ferry needs a lot of maintenance work on the entire propulsion system, water jets, power generation systems and auxiliary equipment. Also, maintenance and repairs must be done in all the fire safety and security systems, evacuation equipment, etc.," Dominguez told the newspaper in an email.

He estimated it would take $5 million to return the ferry to service. The Maduro government does not have the money to pay for the work, however, he said.

“It is not known what the future of this ship will be," Dominguez said. "I think that, in the end, the option of sale will be the one that is realized."

In fact, Rochester's old ferry and the other two vessels that Venezuela purchased in 2013 were listed for sale by a broker, Unlimited Maritime Solutions, in the summer of 2017. The combined asking price was $9 million, a big discount compared to the $69 million that the government said it paid for them just 5½ years ago.

"We had several buyers for these ferries but with the political turmoil we could not conclude anything. Nobody could make any decisions," said the president of the brokerage, Thomas Wissman. "Seems to be the biggest problem in the country."

So Rochester's old ferry remains in Puerto Cabello, a victim of a political crisis it helped, in its own small way, to create.

Dominguez said he still is hopeful that someone will step forward to buy the vessel and make it great again. He affectionately calls it "this beautiful ferry."

SORR@Gannett.com

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