PORT TOWNSEND – The 31st Annual Wooden Boat festival has all of Port Townsend’s favorite ladies hanging out by the docks off Water Street.
There’s the state’s own tall ship, Lady Washington, seen Thursday moored at Union Wharf on Taylor Street.
Tours of the Lady Washington are scheduled throughout the weekend.
Also making runs up and down the waterfront are Port Townsend’s fancy old school marms, the 135-foot environmental education schooner Adventuress, operated by Sound Experience, and the schooner Martha.
The Martha is now permanently moored at the home of the Wooden Boat Festival, Hudson Point Marina, at the end of Water Street.
Both the Adventuress and the Martha are working vessels where educators teach youths and adults about the maritime experience and the marine ecology of Puget Sound.
Also visiting for the Wooden Boat Festival is the tall ship based in Grays Harbor with the Lady Washington – the Hawaiian Chieftain – which fired its canon off Hudson Point Marina on Wednesday afternoon.
Tall wooden ships are joining small wooden boats at this year’s festival.
More small boats are expected than ever before, said Kaci Cronkhite, Wooden Boat Festival director.
“We will have a record 112 vessels, not including all the kayaks and rowing shells.”
More than 200 wooden boats are expected to crowd the newly renovated Hudson Point Marina and dot the shallows along downtown Port Townsend’s shorelines.
The event drew more than 30,000 last year.
This year’s Wooden Boat Festival also feature a number of wooden boats that have never been to a festival, or have not been to the popular Port Townsend event in several few years.
They are Red Jacket, a 72-foot schooner; Veteran, a 65-foot trawler; Olympus, a 97-foot fantail classic motor yacht; Zodiac, a 167-foot schooner; and the 144-foot mine sweeper, Liseron.
A new Boatyard Stage demonstration area has been added. It will have five wooden boat examples and the public will be invited to “Ask a Shipwright” questions, from the simple to complex.
The boats on display will illustrate strip, carvel and lapstrake construction, for example.
Wooden boat schools, marine trades training programs and government education organizations from across the country are represented at the festival.
Displays are to be set up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Coast Guard – which is celebrating its 200th anniversary – the Youth Maritime Training Association and Washington State Shellfish programs.
About half of the exhibitors are located outside the main gate in the free education area. The rest are inside the gate.
The Northwest Maritime Center and Wooden Boat Foundation will give free boat rides aboard the foundation’s “Learn to Sail” Thunderbirds and two longboats.
