I came down the ramp at Neutral Bay one evening in June, four minutes after my boat had gone. Twenty five minutes until the next one and a southerly coming straight up the harbour, so I spent most of them walking back up to the shops for a coffee I didn't really want just to be out of the wind. Knowing when to leave work to catch the ferry is a small question on a route with a boat every few minutes. On one where the next departure is half an hour off it's the whole evening. The only people it's ever easy for are the ones who finish at the same time every day and I have never once been one of them.
That gap is bigger on the water than almost anywhere else in this city. The lower North Shore commuter runs off the Quay like F5 Neutral Bay and F6 Mosman Bay leave twenty or thirty minutes between departures through the week and a fair few routes are worse again once the evening gets on. Go and read your own before you trust any of this. Guessing wrong out here isn't a small correction you absorb on the way home. It's the difference between being on your way and standing still in the weather.
Why a boat you miss costs so much more
Find the two departures either side of when you normally leave and look at the gap between them. That number is what a bad guess costs you and it helps to know it as a figure rather than a feeling. On the half hourly runs it works out to most of an episode of something, spent outdoors on concrete with the wind doing whatever it wants. Even the Manly run doesn't come often enough for a miss to cost you nothing. I've done the fuller version of that against the rails in my comparison of a harbour commute and a rail one.
So the value of a heads up isn't a fixed thing. It scales with how far apart your departures are. Ten minutes of warning on something that turns up every four minutes just means a calmer walk down. On a route running every thirty it's the difference between getting on and not, so the same ten minutes is worth a great deal more out here. I reckon that's the biggest thing separating a boat commute from anything else in Sydney.
Picking a boat before you've opened your laptop is a guess
Open the alerting in any of these apps and the first thing it wants from you is the same. Which boat? Name it and we'll remind you about it. TripView does that as neatly as anyone and on a day with a firm shape it works properly. Being asked at all is the problem. You're standing there at half eight in the morning committing to your 5:40, about an evening that hasn't happened yet.
Whichever way that guess falls, the repair is opening the app again in the afternoon to fix it, which is the exact habit you were trying to get out of. Out here there's a second cost sitting on top, because the boat you guessed at is often the only one for the next half hour, so a wrong guess doesn't just annoy you. It sets your whole evening back. TripView's alarms also live in the paid app rather than the free Lite one and you build them one trip at a time. I've been through what each Sydney ferry app will and won't alert you about.
Set the window you finish inside, not the boat you hope to make
So I stopped trying to pick a boat. What I hand over now is the part of the evening I might get up in and the boats sort themselves out from there. Weekdays, a start time, an end time and the wharf I leave from. Every departure inside that gets me a short message a chosen number of minutes before it goes and I take whichever boat is next once I'm ready to move.
What ferry alert works if I never finish work at the same time?
The one that starts from your finish rather than from a departure. Nothing here ever asks which boat you want, because you don't know yet. It asks roughly when you might be getting out of your chair, which is a question you can answer months ahead!
How many messages does an hour actually send on a ferry route?
Two most evenings and three at the outside. A half hourly timetable only has so many departures in it, which is the one place a sparse route does you a favour. Every sailing that falls inside the hours you gave it earns its own short message and an hour on the water simply doesn't hold many sailings. Tap I'm on board on the way down the ramp and the rest of the evening goes quiet until the next day you travel.
How do I get notified when my ferry is coming, late boat and all?
You give it your wharf once and it handles the rest. Every alert hangs off the live estimate rather than the printed timetable, so if the boat is sitting six minutes behind your message arrives six minutes behind with it and you still get the same walk down you always had. There's no number to read and the word delayed doesn't turn up anywhere in it. You never have to do any sums with it either. When your phone goes, that's your cue to pack up.
When to leave work to catch the ferry, in two numbers
The first is the window and it caps at four hours. Here's the bit I didn't expect about setting one on a ferry route though. Widening it barely changes anything, because a half hourly timetable only has so many boats to hand you, so going from an hour to ninety minutes buys you one extra message and not much else. Where the window starts is what actually matters. Put it at the first moment you could realistically be out of your chair, because the evenings this lets you down are the ones where you finished early and it hadn't opened yet.
The second is your notice, which is how far ahead of the departure the message lands. There are presets to tap and a box to type your own into, anything up to an hour. On a half hourly route I wouldn't go under ten whatever your walk looks like. Leaving your desk a few minutes earlier than you strictly needed to is a cheap mistake out here. Getting there after the gangway has gone takes half an hour off your evening. In my experience the gangway starts moving before the printed time rather than on it too, so ten minutes is where I'd start on the water!
How to find out whether your route is running at all
None of this helps if there's no boat. A big southerly can push a route onto a different timetable or hand it to buses. Works can close a wharf for a weekend. So keep the Transport for NSW travel alerts page within reach. You can narrow it by mode and save your own routes as favourites. The planned service change email is the other one to be on, since it lands days ahead of a closure.
There's one thing this can't do for you. Alerts are built from live departures, so when your wharf is shut and buses are doing the run there's nothing for me to work with and nothing goes out. So an official source belongs beside this rather than underneath it. I've written up every official Sydney ferry delay notification and what it covers.
Setting one up
How do I get an alert for the next ferry from my wharf?
The thing I've been describing is Ferry Alerts and I built it for this exact evening. It's free, there's no account and there's nothing to install, so head into the alert builder and choose your wharf. Add a direction if it helps, then set your notice, your days and the window you finish inside. There's a fortnightly option too if your roster alternates!
Two small things on the way in. An email alert only starts once you click the confirmation link in your inbox and that link lives for 24 hours. On iPhone, push needs the site on your home screen first, which is one trip through Safari's share sheet and Add to Home Screen. Email skips that step completely if you'd rather not bother with the home screen.
Two things about the messages themselves. Each one carries the next couple of departures in behind the one it names, so a boat you can't make turns up with the fallback already attached. Each one also carries a link that's yours alone and one tap on it shuts the whole subscription down. That link is the only key there is, so it's worth hanging onto a message. Nothing else about you is stored anywhere, because nothing else would be any use to it.
The direction filter deserves a word before you lean on it. It reads the line and the headsign only, so a direction of Manly keeps the Parramatta boats out of your messages. Two limits come with that. If your destination is an intermediate stop that no headsign ever names, the filter gives up and shows you every departure rather than nothing, which is the safer of the two failures. The other is that it doesn't read the operator, so a Manly direction picks up the Manly Fast Ferry alongside the F1. The fast ferry does take an Opal card on that run, though the fare behind it and the benefits attached to it are a lot less settled than you'd hope. I've pulled that apart in what a harbour crossing really costs. Either way the alert is telling you a boat to Manly is leaving rather than which one. The two gates it could be leaving from are covered in the guide to catching a ferry to Manly.
The tip I'd leave you with is about the far end of the evening rather than the start of it. Look up the last two departures on your route tonight and put those times somewhere you'll actually see them. The last boat is earlier than most people assume and the night work runs badly over is the night that number saves you.
If you're on one of the North Shore runs I'd genuinely like to know what notice you end up landing on, because I've got a feeling ten minutes is the floor rather than the answer. Happy commuting!