"We can't live in the past forever," Seymour Beek told CBS Los Angeles in February, standing near the dock his family has operated since Woodrow Wilson was president.
It is a strange thing to hear from the man fighting hardest to keep his ferry looking, running, and feeling like it did in 1919. But that contradiction is the whole story. After three years of wondering whether a state clean-air mandate would end the Balboa Island Ferry's century-long run, the Beek family has an answer, and it is not the one most people expected. The ferry is not disappearing. It is not being redesigned into something sleeker or more modern. It is being rebuilt, boat by boat, to look almost exactly like it does today, only with batteries where the diesel engines used to be.
If you ride this ferry to get groceries, walk your dog, or shuttle kids across the channel before school, the important news isn't that the boats are changing. It's how hard the people who run this ferry worked to make sure you won't notice.
What Almost Happened
In March 2023, the Beek family announced that California's zero-emission mandate for short-run harbor craft could force the ferry to shut down. The state's rule required conversion to electric engines by the end of 2025, a deadline built for an industry of much larger, better-funded operators. Beek's early estimate to electrify all three boats ran to roughly $10 to 13 million, a number that grew as engineers looked closer at what the conversion would actually require.
For a business that still charges $1.50 per car and fifty cents for a bike or a walk-on passenger, that is not a rounding error. It's close to the entire enterprise.
A community campaign and public pressure on state regulators followed. By spring 2024, the effort had produced a partial win: a roughly $7.9 to 8.3 million demonstration grant, along with a delay that pushed the deadline for two of the three vessels to the end of 2026. Even that timeline, Beek said at the time, would be "hard to meet."
The Names on the Water
Ask most Newport Beach residents how many ferries actually cross the channel and you'll get a shrug. There are three: the Admiral, the Captain, and the Commodore, double-ended wooden vessels built in the 1950s that each carry either 98 passengers and two crew, or 73 passengers plus three cars. On a busy summer evening, all three run at once, shuttling back and forth across roughly 800 feet of water between the island and the Balboa Peninsula.
These are not generic ferries. They are the same three boats that have carried three generations of Newport Beach families, and even their names carry that continuity. A photo in the ferry's own archive shows a boat running under the name Commodore as far back as 1933, decades before the current wooden hull was built. That kind of naming lineage is exactly what regulators, engineers, and a state grant program had to figure out how to preserve rather than erase.
Who Actually Made This Work
The rescue took more than money. It took two elected officials willing to spend political capital on a three-boat, family-run business most of their constituents never think twice about.
Assemblymember Diane Dixon introduced AB 3153, legislation aimed at giving small ferry operators like Balboa Island Ferry a longer runway to comply with electrification rules rather than an all-or-nothing deadline built for large commercial fleets. OC Supervisor Katrina Foley convened a working group in 2023 specifically to find funding pathways, eventually helping secure the SHIFT program grant through the California Air Resources Board and California Climate Investments, administered locally by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. In February 2026, Foley's office noted that the ferry cuts more than 12 million vehicle miles traveled each year around the island and peninsula, the kind of quiet daily math that rarely shows up in a headline but was central to the funding case.
By February 2026, the Beek family, CARB, and South Coast AQMD had fully executed contract agreements to convert all three boats to battery-electric power, along with new shoreside charging infrastructure. When finished, it will be the first fully electric ferry fleet in California, according to trade publication WorkBoat.
Why the New Boats Won't Feel New
Here is the detail that separates this project from every other electrification story in California's harbor-craft world. Designers working with the Beek family, based in San Diego, are not building a modernized ferry. They are building a replica.
The new electric vessels are being engineered to keep the same three-car capacity, the same passenger benches, and even the same smokestack silhouette that has defined the boats for decades. Beek was blunt about the goal in his February interview: "Most people, they aren't going to know the difference." There is no firm completion date yet. Conversion is happening one boat at a time, specifically so two boats can keep running while the third is out of service, meaning the daily crossing schedule should hold steady throughout the multi-year process.
That is a deliberate choice, not an accident of budget. A state mandate built to modernize commercial fleets is instead funding the preservation of a specific look and feel, because the people negotiating on the ferry's behalf understood that what residents value here isn't efficiency. It's continuity.
What Changes and What Doesn't
For anyone who crosses this channel on a regular Tuesday, the practical picture looks like this:
- Stays the same: Hours of 6:30 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. The most recently posted fares, $1.50 per car and fifty cents for bikes and pedestrians, with reduced rates for kids and free passage for riders 75 and older. Three-car capacity per crossing. The visual profile of the boats, benches and smokestack included.
- Changes over time: Diesel engines replaced with battery-electric propulsion, boat by boat, with no announced completion date. New charging infrastructure installed on shore to support daily operation without interrupting service.
- Already resolved: The threat of closure that hung over the ferry from 2023 through early 2026 is off the table now that contracts are executed and funding is secured.
If you've never noticed the ferry line backing up past Balboa Island Market, you will once you start looking for it. Market owner Christina Strangio told CBS LA that the wait "sometimes will be all the way down the street," and that customers use those minutes to duck in for groceries before their turn to board. It's a small, specific rhythm of island life that has nothing to do with real estate and everything to do with what it actually feels like to live three streets from a working harbor crossing.
A Century-Old Fixture, Renewed Rather Than Replaced
What makes this story worth knowing isn't the electrification itself. Ferries convert to cleaner power all the time. What makes it worth knowing is that a regulation built to modernize an industry ended up funding the opposite instinct here: keep it exactly as it was, just quieter under the hood.
That is a rare outcome in a state where compliance usually means change you can see. For residents on Balboa Island and across the bridge on the Peninsula, the ferry that carries you to dinner, to the Fun Zone, or home from a day at the beach is about to get a new engine without losing the boat you already know.
If you live near the water here, or you're weighing what a home close to this kind of neighborhood fixture is actually worth, Kathy Samuel has spent decades reading Newport Beach block by block, harbor crossing included. Request a Private Home Valuation and get a read on your property from someone who already knows exactly what the ferry line outside your door is worth to a buyer.
