A Cool Wooden Boat Festival. No, Really

We’ve had a crazy-busy couple of months, with boat shows, demo days, and photo shoots.  So, I’m just getting around to writing up our experience at the annual Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, WA.  The short story is: the festival is special.  Here’s the longer story….

The Port Townsend WBF is a great place to spend a day or two if you are into wooden boats, small boats, boatbuilding, nautical history, nautical art, kayaks, canoes, sailboats…or anything else related to the water.  Strip planked, plywood, cold molded, cedar, oak, lapped, painted, stained — it was all there, and it reminded you of the wide varieties of sailboats and boats. 

There were hundreds of wooden boats there, in the water at the dock and on trailers in the display areas on land — boats of every size and vintage and design and construction method.  From modern boat designs built with classic boatbuilding techniques, to classic boats that broke all the rules and innovated new techniques still being used today.

People new to sailing could go for a first sailing experience in a lovely venue on great boats with knowledgeable skippers.  The kids could even get started paddle boarding in a temporary shallow pond filled with fresh water.  I’ve been to a lot of boat shows, but I’ve never seen such variety in a single location. Thanks to the Northwest Maritime Center (www.nwmaritime.org) and the band of nautical artisans that have migrated to the Port Townsend waterfront, there were many excellent talks and demonstrations on how to build boats, how to repair boats, how to sail well, how to properly rig boats — again…terrific variety of “how to” lessons from experienced boating folk.   

Which brings me to the most interesting part of the “boat” festival —  here’s a hint: it’s not the boats.  It’s the people.   We met equal numbers of people thinking of building a boat, people who have already built a boat (or several), people who’d rather buy a boat, and people who just think boats are cool.  We met retirees looking for a boatbuilding project, hipster millennial makers looking to build a unique boat themselves, and young granddads looking for a memory-making project with the grandkids.  We met around-the-world sailing veterans, renowned big-boat racers, and some of the most badass women engineers — all of them drawn to the sweet lines and mellow feel of wooden boats.  

Even the manufacturers and vendors of boat kits, boats, sailboat accessories, and boatbuilding equipment were super cool.  There was no sense of zero-sum competition, even from other companies selling small sailboat kits or from other small sailboat designers.  Joe, from Electric Paddle (www.electricpaddle.com), came over to help us get our boat moved…before we had even introduced ourselves to him!   Another designer brought a video camera to our booth and asked to video as we demonstrated our unique SnapTrue boatbuilding jig (more at www.puursailboats.com/method)— no problem, of course! 

We gave as good as we got, sharing some good boat design ideas and boatbuilding techniques with others and also bringing back some ideas we’ll try on future prototypes.

The cool and rare thing about the Wooden Boat Festival at Port Townsend was that somehow the amazing variety of people and experiences and companies and venues and events and boats …just seemed to mesh together in mutual respect.  The wooden boat community at Port Townsend is more of a “community” than an “industry,” IMO. 

Hope we see you there next year.