Whatcom Chief
Ferry serving Lummi Island, Washington, US
The Whatcom Chief is a ferry in Washington state, United States. The ferry carries both pedestrians and vehicles to Lummi Island from Gooseberry Point west of Bellingham, Washington.
The Gooseberry Point terminal is situated on land belonging to the Lummi Nation.
A 35-year lease was agreed between Whatcom County and the Lummi Nation in September 2011. John Stark, writing in The Bellingham Herald, criticized Whatcom County for the cost of the lease, and for failing to push the Lummi Nation to take it to court by interpreting some Federal precedents that may have allowed access to the ferry terminal without a leasing fee.
Normally the voyage takes eight minutes.
The ferry can accommodate 20 vehicles and 100 pedestrian passengers.
The ferry service is occasionally disrupted due to bad weather as well as propane deliveries as the fuel truck must ride across on the ferry alone.
Vessel
The Whatcom Chief was built in 1962 by the T. J. Larsen Steel Company in Bellingham, Washington. It is 93.5 feet (28.5 m) long and can carry up to 20 vehicles and 100 passengers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Whatcom Chief” as ferry serving Lummi Island, Washington, US. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as ferry serving Lummi Island, Washington, US. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7991678. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whatcom Chief” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.