Arriving into town from the west on Highway 20, visitors descend a hill that opens a splendid panorama of old Victorians, azure ocean, snowcapped mountains and dozens of boats sprinkled throughout the scene. For many who wash up here—coming from California, the East Coast or far-away countries—this sight is the eureka moment that suggests they have found Shangri-La. And yet no matter how they come—by jalopy, boat or unicorn and wearing chainmail—once they enter Port Townsend’s field of gravity, it becomes impossible to leave.
Maybe it’s because of the festivals that take place here: jazz, blues, farm, films, fiddle tunes, rhododendron, steampunks, writing, or the kooky Kinetic Skulpture Race. They all have a devoted following, but they also bow to the iconic Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, which is celebrated on the second weekend in September. For 47 years it’s been a pilgrimage for wooden boat freaks and wannabes, an inclusive affair for people, but deliberately discriminating against vessels not made from ligneous matter. Much has changed since the festival’s inception in the late 1970s, and not just through the wretched days of Covid. The show has endured because it continues to adapt while keeping its promise to entertain, educate and elevate wooden boat craft and culture.
This year the festival welcomed more than 200 boats and 12,000 ticket holders directed by 420 volunteers who each did more than one shift. Volunteering and helping others are legal tender in this town of roughly 10,000, which takes pride in the social fabric of the community and the blue-collar culture of a working waterfront with marine trades contributing about 20 percent of Jefferson County’s tax revenue. Those with limited financial means voice concerns about getting priced out of festival participation, if it turns into a jet set affair, but so far the show motto remains “Come as you are, bring what you got, and be ready to dance when the band strikes up some tunes.”
The festival welcomes almost any wooden craft that floats and goes places. That includes SUPs, rowing shells, kids’ paddle wheelers, Spidsgatters, Folkboats, Thunderbirds, runabouts, steamboats, schooners, cutters, sloops or grand old motor yachts. They all get to parade in full glory in the final sail-by on Sunday. Many moons ago, a pile of driftwood that was ratchet-strapped to a pallet with an outboard showed up. The verdict: All wood, all good, you’re in.
At this year’s show, there was the freshly launched replica of Tally Ho, Leo Goolden’s project that garnered a large YouTube following, and regulars like the William Hand-designed 161-foot schooner Zodiac, which celebrated its first century afloat. There was also a trio of B.B. Crowninshield schooners: two local favorites, the 133-foot Adventuress and the 84-foot Martha, plus the dainty 45-foot Fame, the designer’s personal boat from 1910, which Dennis Conner bought and restored for its centennial. Conner never made it to this festival, but he’d face a reckoning in the small-boat race (under 26 feet) or the Schooner Cup that also admits boats identifying as schooners while looking like a sloop or a cutter. Obviously, gender fluidity isn’t just for people.
The Port Townsend festival dates back to 1977, when the world was a different kind of crazy. This was after Watergate, Vietnam, Woodstock and the Summer of Love. Among the many catalysts that started it was Carol Hasse, now one of three commissioners of the Port of Port Townsend. She blew into town in 1975 as a young sailmaker, meeting other hippie friends and finding “the cosmic home,” as she told the local paper. “I was really looking for something I could do and be part of and be proud of,” she added. Counterculture folks like her who did not buy into fighting wars or chasing profits tied to a corporate yoke, found this sleepy mill town to their liking.
Previously, Hasse lived in a hippie commune in Bellingham, Washington, that built out a Skookum 47 and traveled to Moclips, Washington, a remote spot on the Pacific coast, to help another commune led by Sam Connor build a 40-foot ferrocement boat. Eventually, Hasse and Connor fetched up in Port Townsend, where he opened a boat shop in Point Hudson and she made a name for herself with a sail loft. Both were instrumental in starting the Wooden Boat Foundation that soon would organize the first festival.
Then there’s Tim Snider, who grew up in Connecticut and helped his father build a Blue Jay dinghy in the basement. He’d worked as magazine writer and, by his own account, at some point as a cable-car conductor in San Francisco. In the mid-1970s he and sailing buddy Jon Wilson were producing and promoting a new magazine called Wooden Boat that ran illustrated how-to articles. In search of new markets, Snider scouted the West Coast for a place to hold a gathering where newbies could mingle with wooden-boat devotees and check out vessels that emerged from hidden sheds or basements. The idea was inspired by John Gardner’s Small Boat Workshop in Mystic, Connecticut.
The town of Anacortes was Snider’s early favorite, until he met Connor, who swayed him to visit Port Townsend. “After I got off the ferry at the old dock and walked half a block on Quincy Street, I fell into the Town Tavern, then a watering hole, community center and hub for counterculture,” Snider remembered. “It looked like Nantucket on a hill and when I saw Point Hudson with its little harbor and wooden sheds, I knew I had found the right place.” Connor pushed the idea, reckoning that a boat fest might be good for his business, and he was not wrong.
History aside, no account can overlook the staggering number of scheduled talks and demonstrations on the festival’s docket (115 in 2024) that cover topics like phytoplankton monitoring, heavy weather tactics, dirtbag sailing and maritime matriarchs. Hands-on activities in woodworking tents encourage attendees to make cheeseboards or shave and sand a tiller handle. Elsewhere they can dive into steam-bending planks, chopping a rabbet, varnishing like a pro, troubleshooting electrical systems, resuscitating sick diesels or traditional rope making with Norwegian gals.
In 2024, organizers also invited a European group of female boatbuilders, which gratified Diana Talley, who jokes that she might own the world record for throwing up at sea after getting pregnant on a 106-day engineless, non-stop voyage from Panama to Port Townsend, in a boat without standing headroom. Now retired, she’d worked in boat yards and ran her own shop, thus inspiring a new generation of locals. They include Emma Gunn and Ginny Wilson, who showed off a potential rebuild project of the Nordic Folkboat that was sailed across the Pacific by Sharon Sites Adams in 1965.
On the academic end, Caroline Collins, an assistant professor at the University of California San Diego, talked about the Black Pacific Project and an exhibit she curated titled “Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific.” It documents the connections of Blacks to water-based leisure and maritime industries like fishing, whaling and shipbuilding on the Pacific Coast, thus highlighting a previously unseen story and proving that this happened in the face of segregation and intentional exclusion.
From up north, a delegation of the Haida Nation gave talks about carving ocean-going canoes from old-growth cedar trees, a tradition that goes back millennia, and about the resurgence of Haida sailmaking with natural materials such as cedar bark to weave the first traditional sail in over a century. “We’re lucky that our leadership fought to protect these large trees,” said Jaalen Edenshaw, a Haida artist and canoe carver. While not abundant, such trees still can be found and harvested, he said.
But that does not end the other challenges, like attracting youth to learn the craft, making time to go paddling, and finding money for construction, storage and maintenance to preserve these craft for future generations. “With those big wooden sailboats, you can almost feel the spirit and the love that’s gone into building them,” Edenshaw observed at the festival. “The [audience] might not look at it in a spiritual way as we do, but I think on some level, they do understand it.”
Also exhibiting at the festival was Nathan Tatro, a canoe builder with the Stillaguamish tribe, which showed a traditional 28-foot Salish canoe. The craft was modeled here in town at Turnpoint Design, where the kit was cut before being constructed in stitch-and-glue with supervision from Devlin Designing Boatbuilders in Olympia, Washington.
This festival survives and thrives by adapting to change without casting aside its original principles. So, what if it can’t grow much in size at Point Hudson? Decamping is not an option, as that would require breaking Port Townsend’s field of gravity. Therefore, it will find other ways forward by making the most of this splendid spot. To quote local boatbuilder Russell Brown: “Folks who have seen other wooden boat festivals say there is nothing like Port Townsend on the face of the earth.”
Making it Happen
Headquarters of the festival is the 26,000-square-foot Northwest Maritime Center that sits on prime real estate in Point Hudson, overlooking Port Townsend Bay. The location was made possible by a $12.8-million capital campaign executed 15 years ago that was funded by many small donors and some heavy hitters like the Chandler family, which made a $1-million naming gift, plus First Federal and the Gates Foundation, both of which kicked in $500,000 each.
Now branded as Northwest Maritime (NWM), the organization spins more plates than ever, having acquired a hotel, a magazine and about 50 boats of all kinds and sizes. Aside from the Wooden Boat Festival, NWM produces competitions like the Race to Alaska, the 70/48 race from Tacoma to Port Townsend and the WA 360. NWM also partners with local and regional schools to introduce students to the opportunities of working in marine trades.
Directing it all is CEO Jake Beattie, who formerly ran the nonprofit Bike Works and was the deputy director of the Seattle Center for Wooden Boats. To him, the festival is a means of encouraging folks to take an interest in all things maritime. “Whoever you are, whatever your level of interest, expertise or age,” he says, “there’s a way for you to plug into a deeper connection with the sea and the craft, and it starts here in Port Townsend.”
December 2024
