Last Friday, the new SeaBus—the Burrard Pacific Breeze—had its official christening at the Victoria Shipyards!

Owing to tradition, a woman had to christen the SeaBus, so Maureen Hayes, the longest-serving female SeaBus employee stepped up.

Maureen’s worked at SeaBus since 1983 — and her husband Stephen was one of the original SeaBus crewmembers, sailing on the first two SeaBuses when they came to Vancouver from Victoria in 1977!

All the event photos are posted at the Buzzer’s Flickr account, so have a look if you’re interested. There’s a SeaBus cake and a picture of the special belt buckle produced by Victoria Shipyards for the employees who worked on the new SeaBus!

Our media relations guy Drew Snider was also at the event, and he wrote about the ceremony on his blog. There’s also audio from the event posted at the TransLinkInfo YouTube account: video 1, video 2, and video 3.

For more info on the christening, check out the official press release, which includes an in-depth SeaBus backgrounder.

FYI, the basic ship is complete, but the interiors need to be finished, plus ship testing and staff training still needs to be done. The Burrard Pacific Breeze will come to Vancouver and start serving the North Shore probably around the end of 2009.

(And super neat factoid: as part of the training, the crew has to be able to find their way around the vessel in the dark, in case they have to deal with emergencies involving fire, smoke or a power outage at night!)