Bay Ferries Great Lakes Limited

Bay Ferries Great Lakes

Type	Private Company
Industry	Transportation
Founded	Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (2005)
Headquarters	Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada
Area served	Lake Ontario (Rochester, New York and Toronto, Ontario)
Key people	Mark MacDonald, President & CEO
Products	Ferry service
Revenue	N/A CAN
Number of employees	N/A (2005)
Website	N/A

Bay Ferries Great Lakes was a marketing name used by Bay Ferries Management Limited, a subsidiary of Northumberland Ferries Limited (NFL).

In February 2005 Rochester Ferry Company LLC, a subsidiary of the City of Rochester, New York purchased the high speed catamaran ferry Spirit of Ontario I in a bankruptcy auction after previous owner Canadian American Transportation Systems (CATS) shut down the inaugural service in summer 2004 after it operated for 11 weeks.

In April 2005, Rochester Ferry Company LLC selected NFL as the operator of the ferry service using Spirit of Ontario I between Rochester and Toronto, Ontario. NFL had established Great Lakes Ferries Limited on March 31 but the name was subsequently changed only days later to Bay Ferries Management Limited on April 13.[1] The company was registered in the State of New York (Monroe County) on June 29 of that year [2].

The company began using the name Bay Ferries Great Lakes, borrowing from the name of NFL's other high speed ferry subsidiary Bay Ferries Limited, to refer to its contracted operation on Lake Ontario on behalf of the Rochester Ferry Company LLC.

Bay Ferries Great Lakes announced that the service using Spirit of Ontario I would no longer use the CATS marketing name "The Breeze"; instead the service would be known as "The Cat", similar to the high speed ferry service operated by its sister company Bay Ferries Ltd. between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Bar Harbor, Maine since 1998.

Ferry operation resumed June 30, 2005. The fall 2005 season saw very light traffic using the ferry service and coupled with rising costs from record fuel prices, BFGL announced on December 8 that the vessel would stop service for the season effective December 12. BFGL committed to trying to find a winter charter for the vessel in the Caribbean to help off-set the high summer operating costs following the 2006 operating season.