Dear Sir,

I see that management at the Department of Marine & Ports has removed the one and only ferry supervisor from Dockyard, Dennis Outerbridge, one of our best Bermuda ambassadors, and transferred him to another area. He is a big miss up there with the tourists and locals.

To add insult to injury, they haven’t replaced him, so now you have thousands of our cruise ship passengers using the ferries every day with no one to supervise them.

Although you have the Bermuda Tourism Authority ambassadors there, and they do a good job helping our tourists, they are only there for two hours a day. Also, the ferry pilots and deckhands do a good job with helping our tourists, but they can only do so much.

There needs to be at least one person on the dock all day to supervise the many ferry passengers who catch the ferries every day.

The person or persons who decided not to have someone working there every day didn’t take into consideration that passes have to be punched. I know there was someone on the Bermudian ferry who was punching passes, but there was no one punching passes on the fast ferries, so tourists were buying one-day passes and using them for three days. I know this because I am up there at the dock five days a week and I use the ferries three times a week.

The Government was losing revenue every day and may be still losing revenue. The cruise ships didn’t come here last week, so I don’t know if this issue has been addressed as yet.

Another problem that occurs with not having a ferry supervisor there every day is that a lot of the cruise ship workers are sitting on the benches all day, and also sitting where people stand to get on the ferry because of the free wi-fi and shade.

As a result, there is nowhere for the ferry passengers to sit — and many of these people are seniors.

When Mr Outerbridge was working there, he would make them move. I saw him do that on many occasions. Some tourists are missing the ferry now and also getting on the wrong ferry. I have stopped many tourists from getting on the wrong ferry, and I have also seen the ferry deckhands stop tourists and locals from getting on the wrong ferry.

I hear the island lost $1.6 million last week because no cruise ships came here owing to the hurricane, so because of all the inconvenience that is happening to our cruise ship passengers now by not having a ferry supervisor in Dockyard, maybe the cruise lines need to send their cruise ships somewhere else for a month in April to get the Government to put a ferry supervisor back in Dockyard.

Maybe I will have to contact them myself.

The Government will have to put someone back on the dock sooner or later. When it does, I hope it knows that you can’t just put anyone back up there; it has to be a people person, someone who has a lot of patience.

On another matter, I see that the new cycle parking area that West End Development Corporation designed has been turned into a car parking area, I wonder why?

DEREK MADEIROS

Southampton