“Please move forward,” came the order from Ruby, my precocious teenage driver, who trimmed her 8-foot inflatable for speed in pursuit of a swarm of dinghies flying downwind like a cloud of butterflies on a sparkling blue late summer day. It was a fitting scene for a wooden boat gathering that in 2027 will celebrate a golden anniversary in this Victorian seaport on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.
On the weekend after Labor Day, more than 10,000 ticket holders flock to Point Hudson for three days to check out 200-plus craft built of biomass that range from kiddie paddle-wheelers to oceangoing schooners and anything in between. Attendees get a chance to climb on board, talk to owners, or take a break and dance to the groovy tunes of a pop-up band. Talks, presentations, and hands-on activities offer opportunities to learn: build a cheeseboard, shave a tiller handle, immerse yourself in phytoplankton monitoring, become familiar with traditional Haida canoe construction, Norwegian roping techniques, heavy weather tactics, steam bending planks, or the cure for sick diesels.
Murrelet, based on a design by K. Aage Nielsen, on a reach. Photo Dieter Loibner
But really, what they come for is the eye candy, and for sailors, the Wooden Boat Festival is a virtual candy store. Among the nautical nobility at the 2024 festival was the reconstructed Albert Strange cutter Tally Ho, which in its heyday won the Fastnet Race in 1927, next to local regulars like the 65-foot Frank Prothero schooner Alcyone, a bluewater-tested veteran of the festival and now also part of the port’s logo. Celebrating its first century afloat was the William Hand-designed 161-foot schooner Zodiac, a frequent guest like the 133-foot BB Crowninshield schooner Adventuress and her Crowninshield cousin, the 68-foot Martha, built by William F. Stone & Son in San Francisco right after the 1906 earthquake. These joined the gracefully elegant 45-foot Fame, Crowninshield’s personal boat, which Dennis Conner bought and restored for its centennial in 2010.
These vessels with miles of waterline, acres of canvas, and legions of crew reliably fill the balcony bar that overlooks the racecourse. But size isn’t all that matters—especially not in the race for boats of 26 feet and under that put on a show—while others are subjects of wondrous tales and imagination.
Highbrow, Lowbrow, and Everything in Between
True to the egalitarian come-as-you-are-and-bring-what-you-got attitude, admission policies leave room for bizarre entries, like a pile of driftwood strapped to a pallet powered by an outboard.
“The festival is a celebration of who we still are, not who we were,” says Jake Beattie, executive director of the nonprofit Northwest Maritime and the NW Maritime Center, a jewel of a boating facility in Point Hudson that is the organizational epicenter of the event. “What still makes it feel authentic and true is that it’s of this place. But you don’t have to be of this place to enjoy it. It is as much highbrow as it is lowbrow.”
Naturally, the event has changed over time but has managed to retain vestiges of the old hippie vibe of Port Townsend, “a town that time forgot,” as the joke goes. In the ’70s, this blue-collar burg at the end of the road attracted adventurous spirits who sought to escape the rat race in search of a fresh start. Arriving by boat, on foot, by bike, or barely road-legal vehicles, many of them stopped here to hang out for a while but never left.
“Coming down that hill, I had an optical orgasm,” quipped Bertram Levy, 85, a retired urologist, musician, and skilled amateur boatbuilder, who hitchhiked into town as a young man and never left.
“At that time, Port Townsend was a cosmic home and refuge for those of us in our 20s who were looking for something more real than the path that was laid out for us,” retired sailmaker and Port Commissioner Carol Hasse was quoted in the local paper. Young, restless, talented, and broke characterizes many free spirits who built boats here as “shed boys” or independent tailgaters before starting boatyards, rigging shops, sail lofts, a foundry, machine shops, toolmaking businesses, a shipwright’s co-op, and the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding.
Left to Right: a participant uses a draw-knife to shape a tiller; a builder shaves paper-thin layers with a Japanese plane; David Smith preps Chesuki. Photos Dieter Loibner
It was 1977 and the stars lined up for a wooden boat festival in Point Hudson. Besides, two of the chief proponents had business interests: Boatbuilder Sam Connor had a shop there, and Tim Snider, an East Coast publishing exec, wanted to sell more copies of WoodenBoat magazine. The festival was a collaborative effort of the visionaries and the community, and it was a draw because of the ingredients: T-shirts, boats, beer, and music, plus boatbuilders who came here from all points of the compass.
However, past success doesn’t guarantee future survival. Therefore, the festival explores means of keeping wooden-boat culture alive for generations that grew up with internet, smart phones, apps, and artificial intelligence and prefer sharing or renting assets like cars, vacation homes, or boats to the traditional model of hands-on ownership.
“There’s always this tension about what’s the heart of the festival and what can’t change,” Beattie says. “How can we experiment? If you’re not actively seeking new audiences, you’re gonna lose. And we’ve tried different activities and different formats, we even tried a virtual festival. It’s [about] finding new ways to reach new people. How do we diversify, make it more representative?”
Boats and Stories
While this will play out over time, action on the water still follows the old adage: Two boats (or more) going the same way are in a race. And one of them was Chesuki, a Swampscott dory that harks back to the era of dory racing in New England in the late 19th century, with a lapstrake-planked hull and giant gaff main. It is based on Charles Mower’s 21-foot X-Dory he’d designed for the Swampscott Club, which intrigued David Smith, a fish surveyor for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW).
“I built her as a beginner project from a simple lines drawing in The Dory Book by John Gardner,” Smith explained in a social media post. “Taking my time after work and every other weekend, it took three years to loft and build, with help from other library books.” He loved planking with Port Orford cedar on oak, using copper rivets and bronze screws, and using old tools he sourced from junk shops. The hybrid propulsion package consists of oars and a gaff rig that carries more than 100 square feet of canvas. Smith wanted to cut and sew the sails himself, so he asked Sean Rankins, a sailmaking friend from Port Townsend, for some cream-colored Dacron cloth before going to work on the carpeted floor at the DFW.
He says he’d attended the festival regularly since launching the dory in 1986 but also rowed it down the Willamette River and trailered it to California and Baja Mexico. When he travels with two boats, he tows Chesuki behind his 40-foot cutter Silva Bans, which he cruises to Desolation Sound and uses as a mother ship when tying up at the Wooden Boat Festival near the spidsgatters dock. Not a typo—those boats were popular in Denmark in the 1930s with designers like Berg, Hansen, and Utzon driving their development. After World War II, many were exported to North America, finding new homes in the Pacific Northwest.
America also became home for K. Aage Nielsen, another Danish yacht designer, who worked for Sparkman & Stephens before going into business for himself. In the late 1940s he drew an 18-footer with handsome lines and proportions, which author E.B. White ordered from Nielsen and christened Fern. After seeing a magazine article with a small drawing, that boat became the object of desire for Levy, the retired doctor, who was looking for a new building project.
Because Nielsen’s plans are not available for new construction, he asked Peter Christensen, a Danish boatbuilder on Shaw Island, to draw up something similar, which he did by stretching Nielsen’s design to 19 feet. Christensen also helped Levy set up the backbone for this new creation, which was launched in 2019 and christened Murrelet. Soup to nuts, Levy spent about a decade in his shop crafting a perfect little vessel (a million-dollar 19-footer as some would have it) that became an instant classic in Port Townsend.
“I wanted to build [a] boat that I could leave my daughter, a boat she could put in storage and leave there for 20 years and it would be fine,” Levy says. “So I built it out of 40-year-old mahogany and locust with tight planks, no caulking. You can’t bang this together, so I used a 1/6000th gauge and planked to that. It’s completely dry.”
Age be damned, Levy uses Murrelet frequently, maneuvering her in and out of the slip under sail and a sculling oar.
“That boat is a dream, the nicest I ever sailed in my life,” he professes.
But when it comes to racing, Levy likes to finish in the money, which means battling Havhesten, another pretty little spidsgatter that came to Port Townsend straight from Norway and turned into a local legend. The name means sea horse in Norwegian, but the boat is a Langesund seiling (sailing) snekke, a traditional 19-foot, lapstrake-planked, double-ended workboat with an open cockpit built in 1939 on the southern coast of Norway. Rankins, the sailmaker, and his Norwegian wife, Inger, who runs her own canvas shop, used to spend summers there and found Havhesten in a storage shed. Planked with Norwegian wood, red pitch pine copper fastened to sawn oak frames, she had the looks, the bones and a ballast keel, which made her ideal for daysailing and camp cruising. In a flight of folly, they bought the boat and shipped it to their home in Port Townsend where they did all that.
But they also raced in the White Cap series, and on a breezy day in April of 2001, disaster struck. Flying a chute without float bags in the boat, Havhesten submarined and instantly sank in 70 feet of water.
“We were surfing down this wave and when the gust hit us, we just heeled enough to ship the sea, end of story,” Sean remembers. Luckily, they were pulled from the frigid water, shocked but unharmed.
“Havhesten died as she should have, in battle…and had gone to Valhalla,” Inger remembers. And that’s where she’d be, if it wasn’t for friends in the marine trades who helped salvage and rebuild the heavily damaged boat, including Levy who donated shop space. It took five years and many hands to put Havhesten back together and relaunch her before the 2006 festival. With a fresh Marconi rig and a bowsprit for an asymmetrical chute, Havhesten never leaves port without float bags to go full throttle when duking it out at the small-boat race with Murrelet and Chesuki.
Back at the marina, the party was hopping as throngs of people migrated to the beer garden and the live music stage. I bid farewell to Ruby, my talented driver, whose skill and kindness saved my day. Walking up the ramp to join the merriment, I was swallowed by the crowd of wooden boat nuts that have been part and parcel of this place and this show for five decades.
August/September 2025
