PORT ANGELES — Let us introduce you to the woman in the duck suit.
Pam Scott will be the woman inside the “big old fat fluffy duck suit” near the Edie Beck Kids Pavilion at City Pier in Port Angeles on Sunday, the day of the 36th annual Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby.
She already has been spotted selling duck tickets in Sequim and Port Angeles stores and farmers markets. The captain of the Sequim Free Clinic team suggested several years ago that sellers have a duck costume.
She was told one existed, but no one had wanted to wear it. So she gleefully took it on.
“I have to be really careful I don’t knock things over at the store, or little kids,” Scott said.
Ticket sales continue through Saturday for the Olympic Medical Center Foundation’s 36th annual Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby, presented by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe.
The duck pluck — the event is no longer a race in water — will be at the Port Angeles City Pier Stage, a new location for the giant raffle organized by the OMC Foundation to benefit the hospital.
Thirty-six prizes will be awarded, including the top prize of a 2025 Toyota from Wilder Toyota.
Festivities will start at 11:30 a.m. Sunday with the opening of the Edie Beck Kids Pavilion and the VID party at noon.
The main event will be at 1:30 p.m. The Bub and Alice Olsen VID (Very Important Duck) event will precede it at 1:15 p.m.; three prizes will be awarded in that race.
Main race tickets are $7 per duck or $35 for six entries for the price of five. Each VID ticket, which is $350, buys 60 entries in the main race and one VID duck. VID ducks are larger than the main race ducks and have the names of the business or individual purchasers emblazoned upon them.
Duck tickets are available at Swain’s General Store, the Lincoln Street and Eastside Safeway stores and Wilder Toyota in Port Angeles; the Safeway in Sequim; Sequim and Port Angeles farmers markets; and at First Fed and Sound Community Bank branches in Port Angeles and Sequim.
Proceeds will go to the OMC Foundation Healthcare Scholarship Fund, which benefits area residents who want to pursue medical careers while increasing the pool of trained nurses and medical assisting workers for OMC.
Scott is among dozens of volunteers selling duck tickets. Those include Esther Littlejohn, the widow of Bill Littlejohn, who sold 37,748 ducks before his death in 2019 — a record as yet unsurpassed.
“I tried to keep up some of the things that Bill was doing,” she said.
Littlejohn sells through the mail mostly, she said.
“Bill and I always supported the hospital foundation and other local places that we thought needed our support,” she said. “I’ve always been attached to whatever Bill and I were involved in.”
So far, she has sold 10,051 ducks for the event, so between them, the Littlejohns have sold 47,499 duck derby tickets.
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Leah Leach is a former executive editor for Peninsula Daily News.
