Festival Highlights

By Bruce Bateau When I pulled up to the customs dock on San Juan Island on a sunny September afternoon, I was feeling good. Over the past six weeks, I had traveled some two hundred miles down Vancouver Island, traversed five major rapids, and used mostly paper charts to do it. Now, I had completed the final major crossing of …

By Andy Gale As you walk the docks at this year’s Festival, take a look at the 83-foot schooner Destiny, the 44-foot sloop Inca, and 49-foot M/V Riptide—boats repaired or retrofitted by the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-Op. A Unique Business Model in Marine Trades In 1981, a unique business ownership model in the marine trades arose when a few shipwrights …

By Ross Anderson Sixty miles into the SEVENTY48 race, Akeyla Behrenfeld decided she was done. The 14-year-old Port Townsend middle schooler had rowed her home-built boat solo through rain, three to five-foot seas, and 20-knot headwinds. She was soaked from the salt spray, her arms aching, hands blistered. The race had been won hours earlier by veteran mariners in high-tech …

By Robert d’Arcy For me, working on classic wooden boats is about values. Good design: these vessels are drawn for seakeeping—finely tuned to their purpose and environment, highly functional, and incredibly beautiful at the same time. Fine construction: these boats had to be well-built to survive a variety of wind conditions, sea states, and weather events, both expected and unexpected. …

Dear friends, It’s with a heavy heart that, despite our best efforts, we are cancelling this year’s Wooden Boat Festival. It’s a big shift since last week’s announcement of our advanced safety protocols, but this is a rapidly shifting world, and we’ve decided cancelling is the only responsible way forward. We stand by the “vaccinated/negative-test-only” protocols we established which received …

Written by Andy Gale. Wolfhound photos by Paul Wyeth Marine Photography. Crewed by owners Steven and Louise Dews, the 64-foot schooner Wolfhound is on a 25,000-plus mile delivery, from the shipyard where she was built in Shillingstone, UK, to her new home in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Wolfhound and the Dews are on an extended layover in Port …

By Sugar Flanagan (owner) When we think about boats, we often wonder, “Is she a keeper?” Alcyone is definitely a keeper. She was designed and built by Frank Prothero in his backyard in Seattle. He sailed her for 9 years and then sold her to the Hanke family who took care of her for 22 years. We have now owned …