A BOAT TRIP for visitors and residents bound for the country’s prime tourist destination, Boracay Island, normally takes only 10 to 15 minutes. Nowadays, travel consumes three hours, mostly spent waiting for motorboats at the jetty port in Malay town, Aklan province.
“The start of the week and weekends are a nightmare,” said Nenette Aguirre-Graft, vice chair for external affairs of Boracay Foundation Inc., a group of business operators on the island.
The lack of berthing stations at the jetty port in Barangay Caticlan in Malay has been causing delays in the travel to Boracay, said Godofredo Sadiasa, chair of Caticlan-Boracay Transport Multi-Purpose Cooperative.
Sadiasa said the existing berthing areas needed dredging to allow motorboats to dock. Fewer boats are also able to ply their route when the water conditions are rough, he said.
Outrigger motorboats are the main form of transportation between the mainland and the 1,032-hectare island. The boats cater to the island’s 28,000 residents, and carry 2,000 to 4,000 tourists daily.
Tourists arrivals reached a new record of more than 1.5 million last year.
The delays have been causing inconvenience not only to tourists but to Boracay residents, Graft told the Inquirer.
“Again, absolute loss of control,” David Goldberg, an expatriate and co-owner of Heidiland Deli, said in an interview in Boracay.
Sadiasa said his cooperative had a total of 68 boats, with at least 30 boats operating daily. But only boats with steel or fiberglass hulls are allowed to travel from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for safety reasons.
The longer waiting time usually happens at nighttime when tourists from international flights arrive, he said. Moreover, the cooperative has only three boats with steel or fiberglass hulls.
The waiting time becomes even longer because of the Coast Guard’s strict enforcement of a policy that requires travelers to sign the passenger manifesto before they are allowed to board waiting motorboats.
Sadiasa said the cooperative was working to deploy more boats at nighttime. It has asked the provincial government to already dredge the berthing areas to allow more boats to dock at a time, he said. With a report from Ito Pagaduan, contributor