Clipper Navigation, Inc., was founded in 1986 with the original Victoria Clipper on the Seattle/Victoria route. The Victoria Clipper II was actually two different boats that ran to the San Juan Islands. Then the Victoria Clipper III was purchased. The service between Seattle and Friday Harbor provides orca and graywhale watching out of that port and has been in operation since 1991 daily from mid-May through September. As Clipper Navigation grew, it launched Clipper Vacations. Clipper Vacations provides hotel and tour packages, not just in Victoria, but also in Seattle, Vancouver, Friday Harbor, Portland, Oregon, Whistler, British Columbia, the Canadian Rockies, Kelowna, and many spas and fishing resorts on Vancouver Island. The Victoria Clipper IV, with a LOA of and a beam of, was added to the fleet in the mid-1990s and holds approximately 324 passengers. While the Clipper IV is capable of reaching an overall faster top speed, both vessels cruise at between Seattle and Victoria. The Clipper IV is also one of the fastest passenger vessels in the western hemisphere. The Clipper fleet currently consists of four high speed catamarans, the Victoria Clipper I, Victoria Clipper III, and Victoria Clipper IV, Victoria Clipper V, that serve Seattle, Victoria, and Friday Harbor. Clipper Navigation was also responsible for operating the Princess Marguerite III, a car ferry between Seattle and Victoria. Its operation was discontinued a decade ago due to the extremely high costs associated with the six-hour trip between ports. Currently, there is no car service between Seattle and Victoria. The primary choice for passengers with cars is either the Coho ferry out of Port Angeles or the Washington State Ferry from Anacortes, Washington to Sidney, British Columbia about 30 minutes from Victoria. Clipper Vacations can book passengers who wish to take the Coho in conjunction with a hotel stay. Between 2005 and 2006, Clipper Navigation also operated the Mosquito Fleet out of Everett, Washington. This boat was the primary whale watching service in Friday Harbor. Its operation was ceased at the end of 2006, however. Gray and orca whale watching is still available with the Victoria Clipper out of Seattle. The Victoria Clipper IV was stolen on December 1, 2013 from its dock in Seattle by a sex offender who removed a GPS monitoring device from his ankle and climbed the fence around the dock area, then came aboard and drove the boat away, ripping a cleat from the moor. The boat was adrift in ferry lanes during a 2 hour standoff with police, after which the suspect was arrested and subsequently charged with several crimes, that were "not only a public spectacle, but were spectacularly reckless and deadly perilous," according to the prosecutor. The first person to notice the boat was missing was Darrell Bryan, President and CEO of Clipper Navigation. In 2016, Clipper Navigation was acquired by Förde Reederei Seetouristik of Flensburg, Germany. FRS announced plans to expand the company's service to include routes between Victoria and Vancouver and between Florida and Cuba. FRS announced plans to replace the current Heligoland ferry in 2018 and transport it by barge from Hamburg to Seattle, to be operated by Clipper Navigation.
