Alongside the docks at the foot of Yonge St. early one afternoon this week, Syd Soer wears sunglasses and a short-sleeved captain’s shirt with barred epaulettes on the shoulders. He’s calling out to those standing on the sidewalk considering a gyro from Alexandro’s snack shack.

“Water taxi! Water taxi?”

His brand new boat — just delivered this week — is docked just a few metres away. It says “W’Otter Taxi” on the side. It is not paying for itself there at the dock. The shiny new boat is empty, waiting for passengers.

Soer says when the city told them it was retiring its largest ferry this year, and the water taxi operators would have to pick up the slack, they decided to invest. His company has seven more of the new boats on the way. “Everybody went all in,” he says. Then the city jacked up the fees it charges the taxi services, and they paid.

Then: an ongoing nightmare.

The city said it wasn’t so much retiring that big old ferry as refurbishing it. Then the city said that because of flooding that has sunk some of the Toronto islands, they would be closed to everyone except residents until the end of June. Then, when the flooding got worse, they postponed the opening until the end of July. At least.

The water taxis’ whole trade is running people over to the islands and back. “We’ve lost about 80-90 per cent of our business,” he says. “Nobody’s getting rich, I can tell you that.”

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Soer wanders out onto the sidewalk on Queens Quay. “Water taxi!” he calls.

Just down the dock is Sean Stewart, the CEO of Infinity Water Taxi Tours. He just got into the business this spring, apparently at the worst possible time. But he’s grinning and bouncing, upbeat. When I first meet him, he’s saying he thinks in a way it’s good — maybe better — for him that the islands have been shut down. It has led him to focus on trying to build a different side to the business.

“My main thought was to run a taxi business and make good money,” he says. “But I discovered that there’s peace and tranquility and beauty out there on the water, just a few minutes from downtown. And I want to give people that experience, that same energy and enjoyment I feel from it. I’m learning I love it out on the water, here in my floating office.”

So on weekdays, he offers tours of the harbour and the waterways around the islands — breakfast, lunch and dinner-hour tours, and what he calls “skyline” tours at night. He charges about $35 per person for a 45-minute trip, $300 for corporate groups of 10-12. People can bring a bag lunch if they like, or he’ll provide a meal for an extra charge.

Stewart has spent the past few years working in sales and marketing in the hotel business, and his hospitality skills and salesmanship are on full display on the docks. He’s working to sell his tours as an added amenity to hotel guests. And he makes his pitch to walk ups, too — locals and tourists alike.

Pointing to the rust-coloured carpet on the floor of his boat, he explains it is off-cut from the Rogers Centre turf, arranged for him by a former hotel client. Seated onboard are Layla and Antonio Sanchez, tourists from Paris, France.

Stewart, a DJ in his spare time, cranks up a mix he made himself on a speaker near his captain’s chair. “Baybeee, please have merceee on me,” Shawn Mendes’ voice croons as we pull away from the dock. Stewart hands an airhorn to Layla and asks her to give it a single blast as we enter the channel.

“A lot of people don’t know what’s on the other side, on the islands,” he says. “People go to Muskoka, Algonquin, they drive for hours to experience peace and relaxation. And they don’t even know they can come down here and have that same experience in a few minutes from our vibrant downtown.”

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As Drake might say, his tour is all about views. Breathtaking, Instagrammable, unfamiliar views of both the eerily quiet islands as seen from the water and of the city seen from new angles.

Along the way, he shows his passengers the skyline from the east, and framed by trees at various points between the islands. There’s the tranquility of the channel near the houses on Ward’s Island. A swan roosting on her nest across from the silent stillness of the closed Centreville amusement park. Children in swim trunks leaping off the roof of the regatta spectator stands 20 feet down into the water. The flooded parkland.

There are stretches where you can forget you are in the city at all, surrounded by trees and placid water, watching the ducks and geese swim. Then you drift to a clearing in the woods and see the CN Tower and its surrounding skyscrapers poking through. A few times we stop and play an interesting game of contrasts, looking at a scenic postcard of serenity facing north — the rustic cabins and houseboats in among the weeping willows — then turning to see the defining urban glass and concrete of the Toronto skyline 180 degrees behind.

Periodically Stewart offers to take photos of his passengers while they pose in the frames he has arranged his boat to provide.

“It’s about seeing things you haven’t really seen before, in your own city, that’s only five minutes away in the downtown core,” he says.

On the way back towards the mainland, he navigates his boat to a spot in front of the island airport runway. He points east, where a plane is approaching for a landing — it appears it might be heading right for the tiny boat, until it passes directly overhead. It seems close enough you could reach up and touch its undercarriage. Stewart lets out a long, loud laugh.

“This is FANTASTIC,” Layla shouts.

The boat passes Harbourfront, where letters facing the lake on the brickwork of the Power Plant smokestack read, “More than enough.”

On the boat’s booming soundtrack, LL Cool J shouts “Don’t call it a comeback!” just as we are coming back, driving alongside the parkland near the empty ferry docks. Office workers out for lunch along the water stop and look at us, and wave. “They’re out here every day, these people, they’re instinctively drawn to the water. I tell them, come out onto the water, you have no idea how much better it is,” Stewart says. He’s grinning and waving back to them, but in a kind of “come here” gesture.

When we’re back on the dock, Layla Sanchez from Paris, France sounds ecstatic, thanking Stewart for the trip. “This is my best time in Toronto,” she says, “My best experience.”

Sean just smiles and repeats after her.

“Best experience in the city, bar none.” That’s his business plan. At least until demand for quick trips to the island pick up again. And to hear him tell it with the evangelical zeal of a recent convert, for a long time after that, too.