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An essential mode of transportation that offers carefree adventure, too.

When we consider Canada's transportation achievements we usually forget ferries. Instead we stress highways that shoot from coast to coast, epic railway construction, heroic bush pilots and once-mighty airlines. Ferries, however, started where roads and rails ended, and performed services beyond the capacity of any aircraft. No airplane ever delivered to a Newfoundland outport everything its people needed to survive six icebound months, or moved 50,000 tonnes of PEI spuds a year to the mainland.

Ferries still provide essential services in every province, but Atlantic Canada remains peculiarly blessed with little ones that cross rivers, guts and tickles; large ones that serve islands like Grand Manan and the Magdalens; and interprovincial vessels as big as some cruise ships.

The Caribou and Joseph and Clara Smallwood, which link Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, are the biggest ferries in Canada. Each is almost two football fields long. But if they're big, The Cat is big and fast. Indeed, it's the fastest car ferry in North America. A traditional ferry takes six hours to sail between Digby, NS, and Bar Harbor, Maine, but The Cat gets up on its twin hulls and, hurtling along at speeds up to 90 km/h, completes the same crossing in two hours and 45 minutes. It's a rare ferry that can carry 900 passengers and 240 cars across an open stretch of the Atlantic Ocean at highway speeds. En route, The Cat offers full meals in The Café, drinks and snacks at two bars, gifts and souvenirs from a tax-free shop, feature films on large-screen TVs, and the pleasures of a casino. Since the 19th century, when men used reinforced skiffs, modified canoes and glorified dories in daring charges over the booby traps of ice and paralyzingly cold water that lay between PEI and the mainland, down-home ferries have come a long way.

The moment any ferry I'm aboard leaves her dock, I am 12 again. School has shut down two weeks earlier than expected and summer stretches ahead forever. In the railings, in the slats of the wooden benches burnished over the years by a million rumps and, indeed, in everything I touch, I feel the steady, comforting shudder of her engines. I know that, for the next little while, I have nothing at all to do but watch seagulls, whitecaps, a mackerel sky and islands in the stream.

I have never forgotten my first morning aboard the Ambrose Shea. As she pulled out of North Sydney, NS, and into the Cabot Strait-en route to Argentia, NL-she rose and descended among the long, deep and rolling swells of the open ocean to starboard. Had I been mid Atlantic aboard Queen Elizabeth II, the sensation would have been the same. Eighteen hours and 260 nautical miles later, after I'd slept like a top in a cosy cabin all night, I reported to the dining room for a classic Newfoundland breakfast: fish 'n' brewis. Made from salt cod and hard tack, and sprinkled with "scrunchions"-tiny cubes of pork fat fried to golden brown-this dish was the perfect way to begin a sweet summer day on The Rock. As I swallowed the last of my coffee, a commotion of gasps, squeals and cheers came to my ears from a nearby deck.

Approaching Argentia on the Avalon Peninsula, the Shea passed humpback whales cavorting among lumpy little islands that looked like illustrations on an 18th-century nautical chart. The creatures leapt into the air, arched in the sunlight and dove back below the royal blue surface of the sea. In response to standing ovations from me and my fellow passengers, these huge animals seemed happy to perform encore after acrobatic encore.

Since then, I've taken dozens of ferryboat voyages all over Atlantic Canada. They've ranged from an easy glide over Mahone Bay to Tancook Island and then back to Chester, in Nova Scotia, to a 14-hour struggle-through high winds, swirling fog and brawling currents-from Nova Scotia to Maine, long before the high-speed Cat was deployed. On none of these voyages did I suffer a moment's boredom.

By the way, if you run into a first-time visitor to Halifax this summer, recommend a return trip to Dartmouth by ferry. It's the finest way to see one of the world's greatest harbours and, at $2 each way, an unbeatable travel bargain.

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