Overall: 3 stars, Captain's View: 2 stars.
Basic, at times amazingly pleasant and at times unempoweredly rude ("that's just the way it works") ferry service from Hyannis to Nantucket. Frankly, since I think you don't have many options (perhaps Steamship Authority), I'll primarily review Captain's View here.
The best part of this service seems to be the Bloody Mary's and the hilariously detailed bar rules they have (no doubles, one drink/person/visit) which seem to indicate that people party hard on this trip. On our 11am outbound plenty of folks were drinking the Bloodies, which looked pretty good, and a bunch of beers as well.
On Captain's View, first I think it's -- unless you're booking really early -- available only when you don't need it, so if you're booking with a short lead-time and it's available, it's almost definitional that you don't need either the early boarding or the nicer seat.
On our trip back, the rest of the ferry was no more than half full and Captain's View was packed. Adding a little to that was an off-duty crewman who sat in Captain's View only to be visited by his on-duty buddies having fun looking at SnapChat pictures or such. Adding the ambiance, I suppose, but not in the way you wanted.
Captain's View provides two benefits: a nicer seat in the front part of the upper deck which affords, well, the Captain's view (which is nice) and early/priority boarding. The former is nice anytime, the latter can be valuable or useless or, in our particular case, useless when it would have been valuable.
We had a party of 3. One person missed the outbound and took a later ferry. Rather than have him deal with that at the time of the outbound, they bounced **all three of us** at the "priority boarding" for Captain's View, requiring us to go back to the ticket office, pay them $5 for a no-show on one of three outbound tickets -- when he had addressed that with them (and they had to notice they were letting him on a later ferry). This bothered me considerably, not even letting, say, the two of us who didn't no-show board on time and defeating half the point of Captain's view. read more