PORT ANGELES — Specialized four-wheel-drive vehicles — called rock crawlers — might have a race track where small sprint boats are to race west of town, the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce was told Monday.
Property owner Dan Morrison said the sprint boat track is still in development as he waited for the various permits to be evaluated.
Morrison told a chamber luncheon meeting at the Port Angeles CrabHouse Restaurant that he has been in talks with Rich Klein, a prominent rock crawl competition coordinator who lives in Oregon, about holding around competitions a year in Port Angeles.
“These [rock-crawler] trucks are very well-muffled, so noise shouldn’t be a problem,” Morrison said.
“They also are very efficient, so the carbon footprint of this event is very, very small,” Morrison said.
Shallow water track
Morrison and a group of investors want to build a sprint boat race track — a shallow watercourse — to race the small, colorful jet boats.
He said the group was hoping to have surface water rights transferred to groundwater rights.
“We know that there are several wells already on our property,” he said.
“Our surface water rights allow us way more water than we could ever need.”
Morrison, speaking during a chamber program that focused on Port Angeles-area events that bring revenue to town, attempted to dispel concerns about nearby Dry Creek.
The 4-acre sprint boat race course on land southwest of William R. Fairchild International Airport in west Port Angeles would be 3-feet-deep and 15-feet-wide — filled with 500,000 to 750,000 gallons of water.
Dry Creek water
“There are all sorts of rumors that we plan to pump water out of Dry Creek, which runs near our property, but that is not the case,” Morrison told the chamber audience.
“We are trying to transfer our surface water rights so that we can make use of the already existing wells.”
In sprint boat racing, small two-person speed boats powered by water jet propulsion are raced around in the watercourse about 3 feet deep and 15 feet wide.
Navigators help the drivers negotiate a series of turns, with boats usually completing a course in less than a minute.
The boats are about 12 feet long and can reach 80 mph in two seconds.
Four investors
Morrison, one of four investors who bought the 113-acre South Fairchild Industrial Park for $1.05 million from the Port of Port Angeles in August, said the group hopes to have permitting and construction finished by May, but that it can’t set a firm date.
The investors — including Morrison, Don Zozosky and Josh Armstrong of Port Angeles, and Scott Ackerman of Colfax under the name, Dan Morrison Group — have 22 acres of the land for sale.
“We also would design the course so that the water runoff would go into our sprint boat track to make the most use out of that,” Morrison said.
“The water out of the sprint boat track will later be used for irrigation on the rest of the property.”
Community benefit
He said he is enthusiastic about what sprint boat racing — and other competitions on the land — could do for Port Angeles.
“There is really very little gain in this for us putting on the sport,” he said.
“The best benefit is for the community and for the town putting it on.
“The rock crawlers would be some small way for us to recoup some of the money that we have spent doing all of this.”
Also speaking at Monday’s chamber meeting were Scott Nagel of the Sequim Lavender Festival and Dungeness Crab & Seafood Festival, Carol Pope of the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts and Vanessa Shearer of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce, who spoke about the Jazz in the Olympics Dixieland festival.
Pope said the Juan de Fuca Festival — to be held May 22- 25 — will make extra effort to reach out to Victoria and to the Olympia area because the Hood Canal Bridge will be closed for repairs.
“We are holding this festival when the bridge is closed,” she said, “so we can’t in good conscious spend a great deal of money in advertising in the Seattle area.”
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
