Cruisin' with Lin & Maryke!: At the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival

Festival T-shirts

The Wooden Boat Festival is a very unique event in the world of boating! Several other nearby places including Seattle and Victoria, B.C. have an event celebrating wood boats but nothing in the U.S. or maybe even the world is as big a wooden boat event as Port Townsend’s Wooden Boat Festival! What makes it unique is the catalytic combination of hundreds of wood boats, sail and power, an amazing schedule of 105 seminars during the 3 Festival days held in every available venue! There’s a large group of wood boat-type vendors displaying exotic woods used in boats to shipwright schools, woodworking tools, beautiful bronze castings by the Port Townsend Foundry, wood kayak and small boat builders, live hands-on demonstrations of boatbuilding techniques to kids’ nautical plays or toy boatbuilding, sea chantey singers, food vendors and the beer pub at Bar Harbor.

Bar Harbor

Several full day presentations were given by internationally known boating speakers like Lin and Larry Pardey, Steve Callahan and Halsey Herreshoff this year. There is live music on the Bar Harbor stage from noon to 10PM most days. The main course for many visitors is the Open House on almost all of the boats including ours! There are 170 boats crammed into a marina built to dock 70 boats and many other wood boats are anchored outside in the harbor!

As a boat owner and exhibitor, we were on the boat most of the time, talking to visitors and showing them through the boat plus visiting with friends and other boat owners we knew from previous years. Three times this year, we had people come aboard who had worked for American Marine (our boat’s builders in Hong Kong, later to be called Grand Banks Yachts) or the brokerage that imported the boats into the U.S. in Newport Beach, CA. They were impressed that there are still Chanteyman yachts around! Five times we locked up the boat and went off to a seminar that was of interest to us. And we walked around a few times visiting other boats or vendors or just enjoying all the exciting activity around us! Our slip was perfect for viewing most of the fleet and seeing the boats head out on Sunday afternoon for the sailby. And it was a great spot for visitors as we had a lot more people come aboard than previous years when we were rafted in a large mass of boats.

Looking towards our dock

Virginia V and two schooners

Bow of the Virginia V

This year for the first time, the 92 year old historic 125’ steamship Virginia V out of Seattle, the last of the famed Mosquito Fleet that provided transportation around Puget Sound, was moored inside the marina at the central dock and offered tours and went out for the sailby! Her engine is a 1904 triple expansion double acting reciprocating steam engine! Other major vessels offering rides were the 133’ Schooner Adventuress now 101 years old, built in East Boothbay, Maine and a real gem; the 88’ Odyssey, a Sparkman and Stephens designed yawl built by the Nevins yard on City Island, New York City now 76 years old and a Sea Scout training ship in Tacoma and the 112’ Brig Lady Washington, a 1989 recreation of a historic American ship in the 1700s that explored the Pacific Coast.

Many sailboats with Wooden Boat Foundation building on right

If you’re a wood boat nut, what more could you ask for??? The Wooden Boat Festival offers everything you can imagine from free seminars, free boat tours of all types and sizes of wood sail and power boats, hand-on woodworking demonstrations, excellent food and drink, free concerts and the closing sailby including many of the exhibitor boats and much more, all for the price of an admission ticket!

Glass Ball booth

Take a look at the photographs for a virtual tour of the 2014 Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival!! If you have any salt water running in your veins, you’re going to want to come to Port Townsend for the 2015 WBF!