The members of the Society of American Travel Writers duly take notes, though without any apparent enthusiasm. They have had a busy week, after all, shunting back and forth between local attractions like the lift bridge. And earlier in the day, they themselves had been interviewed by a local TV station about their impressions of Rochester. ("That's when you know you're in a small market," says one of the writers.)

The highlight of their itinerary, though, was meant to take place that evening: a cocktail party on board the fast ferry linking Toronto and Rochester, a.k.a. "The Spirit of Ontario 1," a.k.a. "The Breeze" (circa 2004), which is now scheduled to resume sailing June 30 under a new name ("The Cat") and new ownership (The City of Rochester).

But there is just one problem: The ferry itself is nowhere near Rochester.

It's in dry dock in St. Catharines, where it has suffered another in a seemingly endless string of mishaps. There for a paint job and final inspections, the boat had slipped from its resting blocks as the dry dock area was being drained of water.

This is not, to put it politely, a common occurrence. "That's the only one I can remember," says Doug Stones, vice-president of finance and a 16-year veteran at Canadian Shipbuilding & Engineering Ltd. in St. Catharines.

There was no damage to the vessel. But in Rochester, where the star-crossed ferry engenders an emotional mix of skepticism, hope and foreboding among the city's 220,000 people, it was front-page news.

A day after the Fairport excursion, the camera crews of the local television stations are ambling into Rochester's city council chambers with the kind of weary disinterest the media likes to reserve for staged events, in this case, yet another announcement about the ferry.

There's "WHAM 13" and "News8Now," not to mention "News10" (slogan: "Digging for Answers. Reporting Them First"), whose cameras were on the scene when the ferry slipped in dry dock, as they were a year earlier when the boat, en route from its Australian shipbuilders, slammed into a pier in New York City, ripping a hole in its side.

"Today is the day the world has been waiting for," says Mayor William A. Johnson, Jr., who, in his twelfth year in office, has staked his legacy on re-launching the ferry after its private-sector operators abruptly tanked last September, leaving a boatload of Rochesterians stranded in Toronto. "It has been a long time coming."

To the mayor's immediate left sits Donald Cormier, vice-president of operations at Bay Ferries Ltd., the P.E.I. firm that will now operate the ferry for $1.1 million (U.S.) annually under a three-year contract with the city. They have come to announce the schedule and fees for the new service.

"For us, this is a significant milestone that we have achieved," says the mayor. He talks of upcoming pre-launch events for the ferry, big enough to carry 774 passengers and 220 cars across the lake in 2.5 hours, shaving an hour or so off the overland route through Niagara Falls. "There is significant and enormous interest in the city of Toronto," he says. "On this side of the lake, there were some travel writers who were in town."

Cormier, a soft-spoken gentle giant, runs through the fees — from $25 to $47 per adult, one way, depending on your age, time of sailing and whether you upgrade to business class — and the seemingly quirky variations in the ferry's schedule, with its "high season" and "shoulder period." (The equivalent fares in Canadian funds have yet to be unveiled.)

Mostly, the ferry will make two round trips a day — except for the first week after the June 30 launch, when it will make only one per day. "People," says Cormier, "want to see that the product is actually operating before purchasing tickets."

It's a telling piece of caution for a venture that, in Rochester, amounts to a huge gamble — a kind of Hail Mary pass aimed at restoring hope to a city ravaged by thousands of layoffs by the hometown likes of Kodak and Xerox.

"I think where we gain is in terms of our reputation," the mayor says in an interview. "This connection, this linkage, between Rochester and Toronto has a valuable benefit for us."

He speaks of the "tremendous, explosive potential" for redeveloping Rochester's waterfront once it becomes a key conduit between upstate New York and southern Ontario, though he knows that, at least initially, most of the tourism benefits will accrue to Toronto, with its big-city sports, galleries and restaurants. "A lot of people here use Toronto like people further east use New York City."

But he's convinced that Rochester, and all of upstate New York, will benefit over time, attracting tourists and businesses, perhaps one day from as far away as China, which he recently visited. "Here's a tremendous catchment area for them to come into, in what I call the Toronto-Rochester metropolitan region."

This is not, as yet, a dream backed up by any scientific investigations of the likely economic benefits for Rochester. Nor are there any reports on the number of Torontonians who stayed in Rochester last summer, as opposed to driving through en route to the Finger Lakes, say, or Boston.

"I'm not sure any of those studies exist," admits Ben Douglas, the councillor heading up the city-owned Rochester Ferry Co. "I think we intuitively accepted the fact if you have commerce coming through here, or have at least traffic coming through here, there's an opportunity for commerce."

The boat plied Lake Ontario for just 11 weeks last summer before its private-sector owners, Canadian American Transportation Systems (CATS), were swamped by debt.

The miscues were legion.

The ferry had been flagged in the Bahamas, rather than Canada or the United States. That's common practice for ocean-going ships, but it had unfortunate consequences on the Great Lakes, where it was deemed a foreign vessel. This meant that, under the laws on both sides of the border, the ship's captain had to be accompanied by a designated Great Lakes pilot, at a cost of $6,000 a day.

There were hassles over annual Canada Customs fees of $1.2 million (Cdn.), and problems getting U.S. approvals for the ferry's hoped-for truck traffic.

And while American authorities spent more than $35 million (U.S.) sprucing up Rochester's port — including a new terminal in what had been a dilapidated warehouse — enthusiasm on the Canadian side was somewhat harder to discern.

Passengers disembarking in Toronto were greeted by a system of wooden ramps leading to a makeshift terminal — really a kind of high-school portable — that had been cobbled together at Cherry Beach.

The whole thing seemed fated to failure, even if CATS somehow managed to carry 140,000 passengers across the lake that summer — an astonishing 13,000 or so every week.

The end came on Labour Day, in an afternoon Johnson can recall in such vivid detail that it forms, in his mind, a kind of tragic trinity along with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

He'd been on vacation and then gone directly to give a Rotary Club speech before returning to his office, only to find a series of increasingly urgent phone messages from the CATS people, about how the service would have to be shut down.

Johnson and the deputy mayor were soon on the speaker phone in the mayor's office, pleading for another outcome. And all the while, Johnson was skimming through his emails, reading newspaper articles from just the previous week about how successful the ferry was. "You know, they carried this many people, it was a great week, it was a great month."

After two hours on the phone, Johnson pulled out his trump card. For months, the city had been negotiating with the real estate arm of CATS on a land deal that would see the ferry operator pick up about 12 hectares on the waterfront.

Johnson's message was simple — "I would be run out of town if I was gonna give you land after you shut down this ferry" — but to no avail. Later that afternoon, a CATS press release announced the end.

By the day of the U.S. federal election that November, Johnson was secretly flying north to meet with the Toronto Port Authority and Mayor David Miller. Plan B was already in the works.

The Australia Export Finance and Insurance Corp., which had financed the original CATS purchase and now had the biggest claim on the boat, was willing to restructure their deal. But "they kept putting the ball back to us," says Johnson.

He wanted assurances from the Toronto side that there'd be political support, and a proper terminal built, if Rochester itself took over the ferry service. "We were asked one simple question," says Lisa Raitt, the Toronto Port Authority's CEO. "What does the port authority think about the service?"

As it happens, the port authority had already grown sufficiently sanguine about the ferry's prospects that it was just two weeks away from putting up the steel framing for a new $6.5-million terminal when CATS ceased operations.

"It became quite apparent to us that this service will be successful with the right operator in place," says Raitt, "because in 80 days we moved 140,000 passengers, which was more than we expected."

By March, Rochester was forking over $32 million (U.S.) for the boat at auction — about $8 million less than CATS had originally paid — backed by loans from the Australians.

"We knew we were involved with something that had a lot of risk," says Ed Doherty, Rochester's commissioner of environmental services and the former budget chief. "We had to prove to ourselves that we would be throwing good money after previously good money."

The city had quickly cobbled together a business plan, projecting a first-year tally of 385,705 passengers, less than half the number that an outside consultant had projected would be the annual traffic once the service had matured in a year or two. The conservative numbers were a deliberate way of ensuring the service was "comfortably feasible," says councillor Douglas. "Our original intention was to have a successful ferry operation, profitable to the extent that it remained stable."

In its first year, Rochester expects the ferry to post an operating loss of $725,000, although Doherty ascribes about $650,000 of that to one-time start-up costs.

And that is, alas, without deriving any financial benefit from the food court area of the new terminal: Rochester had already leased that to the real estate arm of CATS for $1 a year, for 40 years. "No," says Doherty, "we're not able to evict them."

There were other hiccups. The ferry was initially scheduled to resume traversing the lake May 30, but that plan was scuttled when the need arose for $2.8 million in engine repairs. June 17 became the new launch date — until software woes with the vessel's jet propulsion system pushed that back to June 30.

Cormier, whose Bay Ferries has an option to buy the vessel after two years, insists the boat isn't, well, bewitched. "I've yet to go through any new ship start-up that has not had any sort of growing pains," he says. "They're very high-tech."

"I pray every night: Let it work," says Sally Wood Winslow, education program and fine art director at the Center at High Falls, a kind of gallery-cum-tourism office-cum-souvenir-shop in the original mill-town area of Rochester.

When the ship was running last summer, she says, the daily flow of people through her operation jumped about 25 per cent, for a total of slightly more than 100, though many were Rochesterians on their way to the ferry terminal.

But she admits that, while the city's political elite seems united in support of the ferry, the same is scarcely true of the populace. "Whenever I mention the ferry in social settings in the suburbs, it seems like the naysayers are a little more eager, a little louder."

"There are too many other things our city needs," says one woman on a nearby street who, ironically, wants to remain anonymous because the company she works for is doing business with the ferry service. "They're closing schools, taking nurses out of schools.

"I think it's the mayor's thing," she adds. "Nothing has gone right with it."

As for Canadians coming through town, "I don't see how they're going to spend money here."

Rochester itself is not a naturally eloquent sell to Torontonians and other tourists. For every George Eastman house, with its world-renowned collection of photography, or the lovely Strong Museum for children, there is an offsetting feature, such as Rochester's signature addition to world cuisine.

That would be the "garbage plate," with its heaps of baked beans, hash-brown potatoes, macaroni, ground beef, and cheese, topped off with, depending on your taste, two hamburgers or a couple of hot dogs.

Winslow herself remembers being in the offices of a tour company based in Cape Cod, trying to boost tourism to upstate New York. "They started to nod off when we were describing the beauties of Rochester," she says. Then she referenced the fast ferry to Toronto. "Every one of them woke up."

Even the mayor concedes the difficulty, at least in light of downtown Rochester, with its closed department stores and lack of pedestrian traffic after office hours, a daunting combination for would-be visitors.

"If anybody took off by foot, to walk, they'd turn around and come back because you just don't see any light at the end of the tunnel," he says. "You just look up the street and all you see is, you know, a dark, forlorn, vacant street. You're not going to venture up that street."

"If you ever hope to change that," he says, "you have to start somewhere, try something like the ferry — anything but throw up your hands in despair."

A little before four in the afternoon, Mayor Johnson finds himself standing at the front of Rochester's city council chambers, a former federal courtroom whose ornately carved maple and oak speaks to the grand pride and civic optimism of an earlier century.

He's been giving a local troupe of cub scouts the big tour of city hall, and the cubs are now arrayed in chairs before him.

"I was not a cub scout, but I was a boy scout," says the mayor in his easy, favourite-uncle kind of way. "They say when you've been a boy scout, you're a boy scout for life."

A question comes from a lad at the far side of the room. It's barely audible but seems, in light of the ensuing answer, to be a hardy perennial from school kids: "What exactly do you do?"

"You can go and see a lot of things we've done," the mayor replies. He mentions libraries being restored, streets cleaned up.

"We're trying to keep the city looking good," he says. "I'd like to say I left the city in better shape than I found it in."

The cubs soon decamp and the mayor retreats to his corner office across the atrium.

"It is about my reputation," he says of the ferry, whose fate has now become so entwined with his own legacy. "This is hard work, and my point is that we did it because we believe that it will serve this community well, that we needed a boost, that we needed a jolt, and we needed to refine our reputation."