Festival Highlights

By Dan Rubin Sometime in the mid-1970s, Allen and Sharie Farrell, renowned for their hand-built sailing vessels and offshore adventuring, were living in a little cedar shake floathouse in False Bay on Lasqueti Island, when Allen began sketching plans for a vessel unlike any they had ever built. They had already managed to obtain their beautiful boat, Native Girl, back …

Before he was hired here (and helped us improve event security), Northwest Maritime Center Executive Director Jake Beattie brought boats, volunteered, and snuck into Wooden Boat Festival for the better part of a decade. “I’m a festival fanboy.” After getting him off of his soapbox (“What do you mean I only get five?”), Jake shared his top five can’t-miss activities …

Header photo by Mitchel Osborne Harbormaster, Daniel Evans, has scoured over every boat application—learning about each vessel and filling this year’s harbor with wooden boats from near and far. Through this process, he’s compiled his five must-see boats at this year’s festival. Introducing the Harbormaster’s picks: Lady Washington Owned by Grays Harbor Historical Society, Lady Washington is the official tall …

Header photo by Thomas Hawthorne We have an epic line-up of speakers on the new Adventure Stage across the harbor in the newly renovated Pygmy building. Some of the speakers on the Adventure Stage this year include: Karl Kruger The only stand-up paddleboarder who has finished the 750-mile Race to Alaska on a paddleboard. Karl is currently attempting to become …

By WBF staff As anyone with a wooden boat will tell you, owning one is like having another member of the family. A little high-maintenance, yes, but strong and beautiful, with captivating stories and the scars to go with them, not to mention the kind of charisma that would induce you to expend a nice weekend going through stacks of …

Michael Vlahovich says “from design to construction, from launch to adventure, from maintenance to restoration, wooden boats are what maritime stories are made of.” A master shipwright, commercial fisherman, and Tacoma native, Mike has dedicated his career to the preservation of maritime heritage from the Chesapeake Bay to the Pacific Northwest. Now living in his father’s birth village of Sumartin, …

Lin Pardey A pioneer of long-distance voyaging and longtime Wooden Boat Festival icon, Lin Pardey is most certainly the real deal. Since the 1960s, Lin has accrued more than 217,000 sea miles sailing on boats ranging from 24 feet to more than 60, the majority without engines on two wooden cutters she and her husband Larry built: Serafin and Taleisin. …

By Pete Leenhouts, owner RIPTIDE was built in 1927 by the Schertzer Brothers Boat and Machine Company, then located on the north shore of Lake Union near the foot of Stone Way in Seattle. She is planked in Port Orford cedar, copper riveted to white oak frames over an Apitong backbone with a marine plywood pilothouse and a western red …