Premier W. A. C. Bennett founded British Columbia's public ferry service in 1960, after a coastal labour dispute severed the mainland from Vancouver Island for weeks. Two vessels, the Sidney and the Tsawwassen, made the first sailings on 15 June 1960. The mainland terminal had to be pushed almost three kilometres into the Strait of Georgia on a rock causeway, because the seabed off Delta was too shallow to berth a ship of that draught. The route those engineers drew is the one that Victoria to Vancouver by Bus and Ferry tours still follow. Sixty-six years on, it remains the busiest saltwater corridor in the province. The crossing measures roughly twenty-four nautical miles and runs about one hour and thirty-five minutes. Its defining passage is Active Pass, a narrow dogleg between Galiano and Mayne Islands where the vessel slows, turns twice, and passes within a few hundred metres of forested bluffs. Bald eagles nest along that shoreline. Orca sightings are logged most summers. The Gulf Islands on either side were scoured by glaciers and long inhabited by Coast Salish peoples, whose canoe routes threaded the same channels centuries before Swartz Bay had a name or a ramp. Captain George Vancouver charted the strait in 1792; the Salish Sea took its modern name only in 2010. The land legs carry as much history as the water. Pacific Coach Lines ran the through-coach service for decades until 2017, when the schedule passed to the BC Ferries Connector. From Swartz Bay the road drops thirty-two kilometres down the Saanich Peninsula on Highway 17, past farmland and the turnoff for Butchart Gardens, planted by Jennie Butchart in a spent limestone quarry from 1904. Douglas Street delivers coaches to the Inner Harbour, beneath the Parliament Buildings of 1898 and the ivied face of the Fairmont Empress, opened in 1908. Victoria has been the provincial capital since 1868, and the harbour it faces was Fort Victoria, a Hudson's Bay Company post founded in 1843. Two vessels built in the early 1990s, the Spirit of British Columbia and the Spirit of Vancouver Island, carry most of the traffic on the Tsawwassen–Swartz Bay run. Each is rated for more than two thousand passengers and some three hundred and fifty vehicles, and both were lengthened and converted to liquefied natural gas in the late 2010s. The corridor is not a scenic diversion. It is the province's marine highway, the only regular fixed link between the island and the lower mainland, used by commuters, freight and holidaymakers in the same queue. That is what a Victoria to Vancouver by Bus and Ferry tour ultimately compresses into one day: a colonial capital, a glacier-cut archipelago, and a working deep-water port, joined by a wake that has been ploughed continuously since 1960.