PORT ANGELES — The Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby is moving to Lincoln Park, organizers announced Monday.
The May 13 fundraiser for the Olympic Medical Center Foundation and the Sequim Rotary Club needed a new home because of continuing construction of a biomass cogeneration plant at the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill in Port Angeles.
The racing of rubber ducks in a tidal flow has been held in a canal at the paper mill in May for almost 20 years.
Bruce Skinner, executive director of the Olympic Medical Center Foundation, said a new location came down to two choices: Port Angeles City Pier or the Lincoln Park ponds.
He said both sites have plenty of parking but Lincoln Park is “just an easier place to stage a race.”
“If you do it at the City Pier, you’re in effect throwing ducks into the ocean,” Skinner said. “You have to control where they go.”
The plastic duck races draw hundreds of spectators every year. A total of 31,179 tickets were sold for last year’s derby
Tickets will be sold at area businesses in the weeks leading up to the event. If the number on the ticket corresponds to the number on the rubber duck that crosses the finish line first, you win.
Tom Baermann of Port Angeles won last year’s grand prize: a new Toyota donated by Wilder Toyota-Scion.
In addition to the main race, larger rubber ducks are floated in the Bub and Alice Olsen Very Important Duck Race.
Other than the new location, Skinner said this year’s derby will look the same as it has in the past
“It’s the same event,” he said
The mill canal had hosted the 23-year-old derby every year since 1992, Skinner said.
Mill Manager Harold Norlund said it is unknown whether the race can return to Nippon after the biomass project is completed.
The first Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby was held in the Dungeness River in 1990.
It moved to Carrie Blake Park in 1991 before settling in at Nippon.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com
