How a sailing actually gets cancelled

When a ferry does not go, a planner shows a timetable that turned out to be wrong. The more useful question is who decided, and by what rule. In the 145 service_status entries in our data we tried to write down not just the season but the person and the trigger, because a rule you can name is a rule you can plan around. Four of them are worth reading in full.

In northern Palawan the port authority does not cancel a sailing. A Philippine Coast Guard No Sail policy does, and it prohibits departure outright; after that the shipping lines may stand down voluntarily to stay inside their MARINA certificates. What is banned is set by vessel size. On 5 August 2026 it was everything of 35 gross tons and under, plus the island-hopping tours; on 18 August 2026 it was 15 gross tons and under, and one of the named casualties was MV Bunso Ferry 2 from San Jose. That threshold is what decides whether your island-hopping bangka sails while the El Nido fast craft still runs.1

Across the country the same machinery shows up with local variations. At Puerto Galera the public wooden bangkas were banned in 2018 and Sabang's own pier has been out of scheduled use since at least 2019, so what is left to cancel is the RORO and fastcraft to Balatero; when the Coast Guard issues a no-sail policy every vessel is automatically grounded, and the fastest place to see it is the running cancellation feed at pamasahe.com.2 On Bohol three different things stop a boat and three different people decide them: PAGASA's gale warning, which grounds the fleet; the tide at Getafe, where OceanJet cancelled evening sailings in March, April, May, June, July and August 2026 because negative sea levels made the new berth unsafe; and preventive maintenance, announced a few days ahead. All of it is published on the operator's Facebook page first.3 Coast Guard Station Siquijor issues its own route-by-route advisories, most heavily in the Habagat months and around Holy Week.4

There is a hole in this, and we would rather show it than paper over it. Our brief asked for the Coast Guard's no-sail rules by gross tonnage as written. We could not read them.

Sagar Island has no bridge yet, and the vessel from Lot No. 8 at Harwood Point across the Muriganga to Kachuberia runs roughly every hour through the day but stops outright when the tide is too low to clear the jetty. It is not on a fixed timetable independent of the water. Wikivoyage records the closure for the Makar Sankranti period as no service from 4AM to 9AM and again from 4PM to 8PM.6 The fare it gives is ₹8 a head, with no year attached, and our entry says plainly that the year recorded is when the page was read, not when the fare was set.

The vehicle barge alongside it is tide-bound to the point of having one sailing each way a day, at 6AM from either side, and the only fare anyone has written down is ₹250 for a light vehicle in 2005. We carry it with that year on it so nobody mistakes it for a price.7 The reason all of this is still true is a bridge that does not exist: a 4.75 km, four-lane Gangasagar Setu whose foundation stone was laid on 5 January 2026 with a two-to-three-year build. By July 2026 the government that started it had been replaced, and no source we checked says whether construction has continued.8

Some cancellations are not of the sailing but of your right to the fare. Atlantic Airways' scheduled helicopter is a government-subsidised island bus that rotates through Mykines, Skúvoy, Stóra Dímun, Suðuroy and the northern islands on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Seats are sold through the national transport body, there is no counter, and the fare calculator's first question is whether you are registered as resident in the Faroe Islands. If you are not, the widget multiplies the base fare by three. Vágar to Mykines is 145 DKK for a resident and 435 DKK for you; Tórshavn to Klaksvík is 215 against 645.9

There are other rules stacked on top. You cannot book a return on a scheduled rotation, only a one-way with departure on the day, so islanders and visitors alike fly out and come back by ferry and bus. Bookings open seven days ahead, or only two for Froðba and Skúvoy. The Mykines leg is not flown in June, July and August, when the ferry runs instead. And winter gales cancel ferries and flights at a few hours' notice, which the operator posts on its front page and sends by free SMS on 740 740.10 Wikivoyage says non-residents pay about thrice as much. It is exactly three, and we know because we read the operator's own widget in an archived copy, since the live site refuses automated visitors.

The Berbice River Bridge still floats, and it still swings open for shipping once a day. Each opening lasts an hour and a half, and because the time is tidal it slides roughly 35 to 45 minutes later each day and then wraps round: in the second half of September 2026 it ran from 06:20 on the 15th through to 15:55 on the 26th. The bridge company publishes the coming month on its website, and it is the one thing to check before committing to a Corentyne run, because ninety minutes stopped on the approach ruins a connection to the Suriname ferry.12 Crossings have been free since 1 August 2025, although the company's site still shows its old toll table.

The Demerara is the opposite story, and a reminder that a rule can simply end. The old floating harbour bridge used to retract on a published daily schedule and stop road traffic for an hour or more; on 5 October 2025 a four-lane cable-stayed bridge was commissioned alongside it, ships pass underneath around the clock, and the old bridge has been left permanently retracted with its spans earmarked for another river. Everything travellers were told about the Demerara Harbour Bridge is now history.13 The Suriname ferry itself is the fragile end of the chain: the MV Canawaima was suspended for six days from 22 August 2026 over fire-safety and radar shortcomings, was running on a provisional licence to 28 September, and Guyana formally reopened the small-boat backtrack from Springlands to Nickerie as the fallback.14

Our schema has one kind for all of it: service_status, one value for anything that decides whether travel happens at all, on land, water or in the air. It was called road_status until 22 September 2026; the word was too narrow the moment it met a ferry. The instruction to the researcher is short: name who decides and what the trigger is, not just the season. The planner does not yet model gross tonnage or a tide table, and we will not pretend it does. What it can do is show you, on the place page, that the rule exists, who holds it and where they publish it, with the date we last checked.