The Making of a Boat Festival
30 years celebrating the craft and culture of wooden boats
My first view of the Port Townsend waterfront came in 1977, when I sailed my 21-foot double-ender up from Seattle for the first Wooden Boat Festival. That’s when I knew I wanted to live here.
Thirty years later, the festival has become an institution, an annual celebration of the arts and crafts of wooden boats, and an exchange of information and good will among the people who continue to keep it alive. This event is the equivalent of an annual convention for people in the maritime trades who are such a vibrant part of the regional culture and economy.
Sustaining an institution for 30 years requires the passions and hard work of countless individuals. There had to be people with a vision and the will to see it through, people to recruit volunteers and take tickets and clean up afterwards, people to volunteer their boats and skills and advice, people to take over the festival helm when others became exhausted, people to refine and update the original vision to keep it all going...
This summer, we talked to a just a few of those people. Here, edited and somewhat distilled for space, is what they had to say:
Carol Hasse
For more than three decades, Carol has advocated Port Townsend as a regional center for traditional maritime trades, and she was an early organizer of the festival. From her sail loft at Port Hudson, she and her friends have created one of the nation’s pre-eminent sailmaking shops.
It’s been a wonderful 30-year run. There’s something truly amazing about this festival. The Port Townsend population doubles or triples, the hotels and restaurants fill up, and it’s all about these beautiful old wooden boats!
Every year we open the doors to the sail loft and people wander through to see how we do what we do. And we’ve never had a bad experience, never had anything stolen. It’s like a dream.
I grew up in Camas, on the Columbia River, and learned to sail with the family doctor and his wife and eight kids. I started college, but then spent a year cruising in the Pacific, and I realized that’s what want to do – sail, hike, play my guitar. So I came back and joined friends in a communal building of a 47-foot ketch. And that’s how I got my job at Schattauer Sails in Seattle and started to learn sailmaking.
In 1975, we were working on that boat, and Sam Connor called to say there was work in Port Townsend. We hoped to make some money to do a circumnavigation. We all were blown away by the beauty of this town, and started dreaming of Port Townsend as a place where people could learn traditional maritime skills from each other, a west coast center for stewardship of the crafts – rigging, boatbuilding, sailmaking. And we started thinking about turning this old, rundown harbor into a campus for some kind of festival..
Sam was living in the pilot house and Tim Snider was working with him. We were all working for the same things, looking for credibility. I was working in this same loft with Ron Harrow. That went on for two years. In ‘78, Ron left and went to the Carribean. And Nora Petrich and I started this business right here. We realized that sailmaking is both a link to the past and something of relevance today. Sailing is as magical as ever, still beautiful and functional.
It’s the same with wooden boats. Those of us afflicted with this dementia believe that wooden boats have souls. They deliver a sheer joy that is not the same with glass or steel boats. There is this whole set of crafts that go into building and maintaining them. And I knew a long time ago that I wanted to be part of that.
Of course, the festival has changed over the years, just as the town has changed. But the essence is still there. I’m drawn to this town as portrayed in the marine trades. It’s a set of values that we share, the desire for beauty and functionality and simplicity. We are an island of people who want to grow our own food, mend our own sails and build our own boats. And that has not changed.
But the town is changing in other ways. Every year, somebody comes along who wants to
put condos and yuppie restaurants on this little harbor. Each time, people here rally to the cause of these beautiful old buildings and this historic little harbor.
I know the town and the festival will continue to grow. I hope to see the Wooden Boat
Foundation and the Maritime Center grow together, using their sailing programs to connect people with the sea. That’s what we all have been working for these 30 years.
Tim Snider
Tim was coordinator of the festival, founding director of the WBF, and an early writer and editor at Wooden Boat Magazine. I found him in overalls and a baseball cap, perched on the porch of his small, energy-efficient home in Port Townsend.
The positive response to Wooden Boat Magazine nurtured the idea of a festival. We felt there was a need for a forum where amateur and professional boatbuilders could come together. And that’s what we wanted to do.
I grew up in Connecticut, where my father and I built a boat when I was a kid. He was a cabinetmaker, and I became a teacher, developing woodworking curriculums and how-to books. Everybody’s boats were wood, unless they were rich. About 1974, I ran into my boating friend Jon Wilson on the docks in Stony Creek (CT). He had a box full of photos and manuscripts, the raw material for this new magazine – Wooden Boat. We put the magazine together and started taking it to boat shows, soliciting subscriptions. We found an incredible thirst for knowledge, and our mission was to find the best answers to people’s questions.
So, in 1976, I came out here to the Pacific Northwest, and I was impressed by the intensity of the wooden boat culture here. I came back in the spring of 1977, driving a van full of magazines, looking for boatbuilders and bookstores to help sell our magazine. And I decided we needed the festival here. I was looking seriously at Anacortes, but I met Sam Connor who invited me to come over and look at Port Townsend. He had a shop at Port Hudson, and the harbor was perfect.
There had been groups of boatbuilders gathering all over the nation, but they tended to have a few beers and then go back to work, making a living. After being a part of other events I knew we could do better. Sam and I opened an office with a phone and a typewriter next to the sail loft at Port Hudson and worked all summer. We put together a program of seminars and how-to sessions with professional faculty from around the nation that encompassed the scope of the wooden boat culture and profession. It was a coming-together of people who had years of experience – Spike Africa and Lance Lee and Earl Wakefield . The trick was to get the older people to talk to the younger people, and it worked.
And people came. We expected 800, maybe 1,000. We got 3,000 people from all over the nation. It became the Woodstock of Wooden Boats.
So we needed to do it again. And we needed an organization. So we came up with the Wooden Boat Foundation, and that winter we started having boatbuilding classes. The next year
we brought in Nat Wilson from the tall ship Eagle, and the next year we got John Gardner from Mystic Seaport.
Initially, the city fathers didn’t know if they supported our Hippie event -- until the first festival sold out the hotels and restaurants. Then they realized that we were a serious organization running a serious festival.
Wooden boats have made a comeback because wood is still the natural material for building boats. A properly-constructed wooden boat can take enormous punishment. And, if something fails, it an be repaired anywhere. That’s why people come here – this tremendous interest in handmade vessels and the persistence and skills that go into building them.
Alex Spear
Alex is a professional woodworker who showed up for the 1979 Wooden Boat Festival – two weeks late. Since then he has made his home here, serving on the WBF Board and opening his 1933 wooden double-ender to visitors each September since 1980.
For me, wooden boats are primarily about beauty. We live in a world where aesthetics get discounted. Most people want bigger and bigger boats with maximum power and maximum living space and maximum speed. There’s an inherent beauty to wooden boats. They represent something older and more important about the human endeavor.
I sailed into Port Townsend from Sitka and Hawaii in the fall of 1979, and missed the festival. I spent the winter on my boat at Port Hudson, met my wife here, and stayed. It was wonderful to come to a place that appreciates wooden boats as I do. And working with the festival, the foundation, and now the Maritime Center was all a natural progression for me.
To me, there is something very special about seeing all the fiberglass boats leave and replaced by these beautiful, amazing wooden boats. It’s a precious few days, an amazing gathering of people who value the same things I value, and people who are willing to share their ideas and skills and experiences. We don’t get many opportunities to do that, and it’s been really important to me.
And there’s always a bit of a letdown when the festival ends, and the wooden boats leave, and the other boats come back. But that’s life.
Mary Dietz McCurdy
Mary served as festival director in the mid-1980s. She now lives on Bainbridge Island, returning frequently to Port Townsend.
The festival attracts people for different reasons. There are people who come to look at the boats, people who come to learn how to build and maintain boats, and people who just come to have fun on a nice day.
But whatever the reasons, somebody still has to pay the bills. When I took over in 1984, the festival was in poor financial shape and some people thought it had strayed from its original purpose. Tim Snider was gone, and some of the city fathers thought we were a bunch of ne’r-do-well hippies – even though we filled the motels and restaurants. The city still doesn’t appreciate the benefits that festival brings to Port Townsend.
There were also lots of people who wanted to help, but they were trying to keep their businesses going, and there was no capacity for philanthropy.
Some new people stepped forward. We sat down and asked ourselves: What’s our vision? How do we rejuvenate this event? We had our dreams, but we had to raise enough money to start actually paying some people rather than relying completely on volunteers. I worked for three or four months without pay, just hoping the festival would raise enough to eventually pay myself.
And we did. I had worked at South Street Seaport in New York, and I’d learned that non-profits have to learn to do retail. So we designed and ordered up T-shirts, and we sold $50,000 worth. We looked for corporate sponsors, and got LaBatts to sponsor the first beer garden. The poster became a best seller. And all that helped bring in the revenue we needed.
Some of the purists don’t like the T-shirts and the beer garden. But we learned that marketing is important. There is a magic to wooden boats. They make people feel good. And that’s what the festival is about. But it’s also about raising some money to keep things going.
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Anne Greer
Anne Greer, who divides her life between homes in Port Townsend and Newport Beach, CA, directed the festival from 1996 to 2000. She spoke by telephone from her southern port.
I believe wooden boats are about much more than history. They are about a wonderful set of skills and crafts that were in danger of being lost, and the Wooden Boat Foundation and Festival are helping to keep those skills alive.
I come from generations of sailors and wooden boats. My parents sailed, my husband sails and builds boats, and our home is filled with boats and spars and sails. We came to Port Townsend first in the late ‘70s, when I was a teacher and a writer working for a boating magazine and my editor suggested I do something with this wild wooden boat festival. I was hooked.
In 1986, we came up for the tenth festival and stayed in our VW camper at Port Hudson. It was a gorgeous three days, and the next year we came back – except this time we bought a nice old Victorian and built a boat shop alongside.
Ten years later, the festival was well-established and the foundation was looking for a festival coordinator. My family also had many years of marketing experience, and I was working in advertising. So I combined by experience in teaching and sailing and promotion. I had learned so much from so many people, and this was my way of trying to give something back.
Some people wanted to keep the festival very local, and others wanted to take it to another level without destroying what we had – to make Port Townsend the “wooden boat mecca” of the nation. I was sympathetic to both arguments. So we took what was already here and tried to tell the rest of world about it. We didn’t have a big budget, but we had a great event to market, and we were able to do that.
Our other charge was to make a clear distinction between the Wooden Boat Foundation and the Festival. The Foundation stages the festival, but it also has an even more important mission to introduce people to the sea and to traditional boats.
I think the merger of the WBF and the Maritime Center is a very positive move. Together, I think they will develop Port Hudson into an even more important center for the maritime trades. I know it hasn’t been easy, but I think it will be a very good thing.
Ernie Baird
Ernie is a Port Townsend shipwright who has served on the boards of the Wooden Boat Foundation and the Northwest Maritime Center.
I arrived here in March of 1977 for reasons that had nothing to do with boats. I attended the Wooden Boat Festival in September, and I was profoundly impressed, and I think disturbed by what I saw. The boats were so compellingly beautiful. It’s hard to articulate, because it’s so much a matter of the heart. But I wanted so much to be part of it.
That thought festered until I was hired by Mark Burn at Port Townsend Boatworks, which spawned so many of the boatyard enterprises of that day. A number of young people had gone fishing in Alaska, made some money, came back and spent that money on repairing and maintaining their boats, which sparked the renaissance of wooden boats in this town. I don’t know that people here appreciate how important that was.
In 1980, I decided I had to build my own boat – a 26-footer. I was one of the shed boys, who lived in an 8-by-12-foot plywood shed while working on boats. When I finished it, a friend asked me to put it in the festival. I did, and it’s been back every year since. In 1999, that boat was the model for the festival poster.
The festival has always been a wonderful visual event, but it’s easy to overlook the education that goes on here. When I was on the WBF Board, we decided to move toward an expanded educational mission – especially on behalf of young people. And that has continued.
I’m optimistic about the future of the festival and of wooden boats. People my age are slowing down and looking for new passions. And that’s what wooden boats do for some of us. As an investment, they stink. But as a work of art, they are of immense value. There are few things in the world quite so beautiful as a wooden boat on the water.
