Taking the Ferry to Newfoundland (and Getting to the Ferry)

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Travel dates: June 2023

If you want the audio version of a lot of this information, I talked ferry on the RV Atlas podcast a few weeks ago, and you can give it a listen here

Back in 2019, we took a ferry from Wales to Ireland, and, despite my general aversion to boats (and most forms of transportation), I found it a really pleasant way to travel. So I was very much looking forward, albeit with some amount of nervousness, to our Marine Atlantic ferry crossing from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. At least up until I found out we’d have to take the overnight crossing AND we couldn’t get a cabin to sleep in.

But let me back up. (I’m going to talk somewhat briefly about how we raced through New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia to get to the ferry. If this it not relevant/interesting to you, you can skip ahead to the ferry stuff –it starts with the bold “booking” heading).

At some point during our time in NYC, I realized that we were at about the halfway point between home and the Newfoundland ferry in North Sydney, Nova Scotia. There are a lot of beautiful places to see in between New York and North Sydney, but we opted to book it right past all of them at a breakneck pace in order to maximize our time in Newfoundland. I can’t say I regret it, because Newfoundland is amazing…but it broke our hearts a little not to be able to stop and see more things, particularly in our beloved Nova Scotia.

After a great deal of fretting and overthinking it and changing things, we settled on making the 850 mile trek in four days, with three overnight stops. Our overnight stops: Wakeda Campground near Portsmouth, NH (we had stayed there a few years ago. Here’s a review). The Houlton/Canadian Border KOA, which, as the name suggests, was right by the border so that we could cross over first thing in the morning and have that part of the long day behind us early. The KOA was perfectly nice, although not luxurious. All grass sites, very buggy when we were there, and, my notes remind me, the showers are TINY. But we took advantage of the evening to do laundry and take tiny, last-in-the-US showers.

And then we drove across New Brunswick without even stopping to peak at the Bay of Fundy and made our last pre-ferry stay at Amherst Shore Provincial Park, close to the New Brunswick border. It occurs to me that I should probably do a separate quickish campground review of Amherst Shore, so…I’ll try to do that. As it relates to our getting to Newfoundland experience, though…it probably wasn’t the best overnight stop. It put us out of the way and off the main road, and we really didn’t spend enough time there to make the detour worthwhile. It’s a very nice park, but in retrospect we should have gone for convenience over…wanting to stay in a Nova Scotia provincial park (our other experience with them, at Mira River, was really lovely, so I wanted MORE!)

But, at any rate, we got up and packed up in the rain (unfortunate timing) and made the long drive across Nova Scotia for the ferry.

And now I shall attempt to give you some organized and helpful information abut taking the ferry to Newfoundland, since that’s what you’ll be doing if you want to take your RV there.

Booking

Here is perhaps my most important tip about taking the ferry to Newfoundland: book it as soon as you can! Particularly if you want a cabin. There’s no penalty for canceling or making changes until 48 hours before your sailing (and even then you can make changes with a $25 fee), so there’s not much downside to booking as soon as you know your dates, even if it’s possible they’ll change.

Marine Atlantic is the only game in town for getting to Newfoundland by ferry, so no decisions to make there! Our experience with them was very positive, though.

You do need to decide which Marine Atlantic ferry crossing to take, however. All the ferries leave from North Sydney in Nova Scotia. The shorter (about seven hour) crossing runs year round and takes you to Port aux Basques on the southwestern tip of Newfoundland (three hours south of Gros Morne National Park, but a full nine hours from the capital of St. John’s). Generally speaking, there are two crossings a day on this route: one that leaves late morning and then an overnight crossing that leaves around 11 at night). Then there’s a longer crossing (around 16 hours) that runs seasonally and takes you to Argentia on the eastern side of the island, an hour and a half drive from St. John’s.

A lot of people take one route on the way there, make their way across the island, and then take the other route back to Nova Scotia. We opted to arrive and leave from Port aux Basques, though, partially because it was a good bit cheaper that way (even taking into account the extra gas we’d need to backtrack across the island), but mostly because we were traveling with two of our dogs and didn’t want to put them through the long crossing (more on traveling with dogs later!) We also had five weeks on Newfoundland, so we weren’t overly concerned about the time we’d lose backtracking.

We booked in February for our June-July trip, and we thought this would be plenty early (we weren’t even able to book campgrounds that early in a lot of cases)…but it turns out earlier would have been better. The Port aux Basques ferry usually runs twice a day, but there are some variations, and we ran up against all of them when trying to book. Our first choice was a day when there just randomly wasn’t a daytime crossing scheduled. Our second choice was already full because it was a “dangerous goods” crossing (!) with decreased passenger capacity. This left us looking at overnight crossings, which we hadn’t anticipated.

“No problem!” we thought, “we’ll just get a cabin and sleep on the way over!”

Only the cabins were totally full already (this was, remember, 4 months in advance). They did put us on the waitlist for a cabin, though. And we got an e-mail not long after that we’d made it off the waitlist and had a cabin. Yay! Then we got another e-mail, shortly before our departure date, with the ominous subject line, “Loss of Cabin.” The vessel had changed and, consequently, we were relegated to the waitlist again. Boo!

There is a happy ending in our case; we got off the waitlist when we boarded the ship–for a pet-friendly cabin, even!–and managed to get in a full-ish night of sleep on our overnight crossing. But the weeks leading up to our ferry crossing would have been a lot less stressful if we’d just booked further out and known from the outset that we’d have a cabin.

Okay, this is already a lot about booking. Price-wise, it’s going to vary so much according to how many people, what kind of vehicle, whether you get a cabin or not, etc., that it’s hard to make generalizations. We paid around $800USD round trip for 4 people on the way there, 5 on the way back, a cabin one way, and a total length of just under 50′. And that was with a 25% discount on the way there. Another tip: get on the e-mail list so you’ll know about any discounts (I gather they’re common in the off season and shoulder season, less so in July and August).

Arrival and Boarding

You’re required to arrive two hours prior to departure. It did not look to me like they would actually turn people away if they got there an hour in advance, but we didn’t take any chances. We were actually some of the first people to get there for our crossing to Newfoundland. Part of this was because it left at eleven at night, so we had an awful lot of time to fill in between leaving our campground that morning and getting to the ferry. We filled some of it with driving and the rest of it with hanging out at the Wal-mart a few minutes away from the ferry. When you check in, they measure you to be sure you’re the length you said you were (they actually didn’t measure us on the way there, just the way back, but they definitely might measure you, at any rate) and then direct you to a place in line.

There’s a building you can go into here with bathrooms and maybe a gift shop/snack stand (we didn’t notice one in North Sydney, but it’s possible we just didn’t see it. Definitely snacks and gifts in Port aux Basques!), but otherwise you’re mostly just hanging out in a parking lot. You’ll probably be able to hang out in your RV at this point, but there’s a chance you’ll be packed in tight enough that you won’t be able to get your steps out (assuming you have a trailer and not a motorhome of course)…so best to get everything you’ll need for the ferry out beforehand just in case. As you can see in the picture here, there was a lot of space between rows at least where we were in North Sydney, but that was not the case on the way back in Port aux Basques.

On the way over, we ended up waiting a long time. The ferry left a couple of hours late, and we didn’t get any information about why or how long the delay would be (we didn’t ask anyone, though). I assume it was weather, as it was fairly windy that night, but I don’t know for sure. On the way back, it boarded and left right on time.

I’d watched a lot of YouTube videos about the ferry and was slightly nervous about how tightly they pack you in, and they do. But Dave wasn’t nervous at all, and the people directing you know what they’re doing and give you very, very specific guidance so that you’re parked perfectly and don’t hit anyone. And then we squeezed through the narrow aisles between cars and RVs and made our way upstairs!

On the ferry

We had two very different experiences with this since we had one overnight crossing and one daytime crossing. On the way there, it was well past time to go to sleep by the time we boarded, so we immediately went to our cabin (well, after finding out we’d gotten off the waitlist and had a cabin and going back down to the van to get the dogs that is).

There are 4 berth and 2 berth cabins…the 4 berths are two sets of bunkbeds, and the top bunk folds up when not in use. Luckily, Milo was off doing a music program when we were on the way over, so we had exactly 4 people with us. The cabins were tiny but nice, with comfortable enough beds, windows, and private bathrooms. The only alternative for sleeping at night is chairs in a big open room that recline only a little; I don’t think we’d have gotten much if any sleep there. You can also reserve seats in a different part of the ferry, but my understanding is that they’re exactly the same as the non-reserved ones. We didn’t have any trouble either way finding plenty of seats together, so we were glad we didn’t pay for reserved seats. Anyway, we loved having the cabin, and three of the four of us went right to sleep and stayed that way until we were almost to Newfoundland (I didn’t sleep well, but I tend not to on…transportation).

If it’s not the middle of the night, on the other hand, there’s a good bit of time to explore all the ferry offerings. I was unreasonably excited about eating at the sit down restaurant, for example, and we did on our way back. In retrospect, I probably should have guessed that ferry cuisine was going to be overpriced and low quality. Oh well. Cannot recommend the restaurant. But there’s also a bar where we grabbed a beer and a snack bar/coffee shop where we grabbed….snacks and coffee. I recommend either packing food or maybe buying sandwiches here. Mostly we settled in to a spot with a couple of tables and read and played games. There was a coloring contest that Abe entered as well.

And, of course, going up on the deck to watch the ocean is also an option. It was extremely windy every time we attempted this, however, so we didn’t spend a lot of time up there.

Bringing Dogs

And the last very long thing I will talk about is bringing your dogs on the ferry! Which we did twice, in two different ways. I think a lot of people spend a lot of time fretting in advance about how their dogs will do on the ferry–I definitely did. So I’ll say first that we had very good experiences and no issues at all with our two dogs (dog #3, Fiesta the Beagle, had stayed home with Ari). Our dogs are seasoned travelers, but they’re not seasoned boat travelers, so we had no idea how it would go.

There are three options for traveling with dogs on the Marine Atlantic ferry (and I believe most everything applies to cats as well): leaving your dogs in your car or RV, leaving them in crates in the kennel area, or renting a pet-friendly cabin. There are pros and cons to each.

On the way over, we went with the pet-friendly cabin (after getting off the waitlist at the last second), and I think our dogs would tell you this was their favorite way to do things. The pros here are clear: you can keep your dogs with you so you know they’re okay, and dogs like being with their humans. Cons are price and the difficulty of booking a pet friendly cabin. Again–plan ahead! One unexpected con here was that our dogs didn’t really grasp the rules around going potty on the ferry. Dogs can only be out of the cabin when you’re taking them to or from your car and then to go to the deck with the dog relief area. We thought the only place for this was a patch of gravel inside the kennel area on one of the decks. But our dogs didn’t understand what the gravel was for at all. The closest we came to teaching them was getting Fergus to obediently hop onto the gravel then sit down and look at us expectantly, like, “is this what you want? Seems weird, but okay!” It turns out there was an outside patch of astroturf right around the corner from the kennel, which we didn’t see until several weeks later on our return trip (when our dogs were down in our van). It’s possible they would have liked this better, since it was outside, but as it was we couldn’t get them to go at all and spent a lot of time worrying they’d have an inside accident (they did not, but I’m sure they have things you can borrow to clean up with if this does happen).

Option number two is reserving a space in the kennel. There’s a nominal fee for this, and you have to bring your own crate–one of those hard-sided, airline-approved crates. I had considered this option for Fergus the anxious terrier (before I knew we’d end up in a cabin), but didn’t realize until we were about to get on the ferry that we needed to bring a crate. But after seeing the kennel area, I’m glad we didn’t plan on it. It’s a sad, unheated little space where there may or may not be other anxious dogs to get your dog more upset. And, while you can check on your dog at any time there, it’s not a comfortable place to hang out. I think most dogs would be happier and feel more secure in their own vehicles than in this unfamiliar space.

Option number three is leaving your dog in your vehicle or RV. This is what we did on our return trip, and we returned to dogs who were happy to see us but showed no signs of having been in distress. A couple of things to note here: you won’t be able to return to your vehicle to check on your pet once the ferry is underway. They do give you a sign to put in your window indicating that pets are on board and there are employees down there monitoring that area. And, as I mentioned up above, if you have a trailer it’s quite likely you won’t be able to get the steps out after you’re parked as other vehicles will be just a few inches away on either side. I.e. don’t count on being able to get in there to put your dog in your trailer once you’re parked. We’d have preferred to have the dogs in the trailer since they’re more used to hanging out in there, but, because of this, we left them in crates in our van. And, again, they did fine. You know your dog best, but I think most dogs without severe separation anxiety issues would do fine this way (on the shorter crossing at least!)

And there are your nearly 3000 words about taking the ferry to Newfoundland! Unless I think of something else and come back to edit. I know that I had a lot of questions about logistics before we left, so I wanted to cover as much as possible and give people a good idea of what to expect.