Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival

It's back to the normally scheduled weather here in the Pacific Northwest -- partly cloudy with a chance of rain.  That didn't keep us from strolling around the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival though, looking at, among other things, kayaks and little sailing dinghys.  The usual suspects were there: Pygmy, Redfish, Orca Boats, and the Skinboat School.  Something new for me:  Chesapeake Light Craft had a very strong presence with a lot of kayaks, including the Sea Island Sport, a new stitch and glue sit-on-top, as well as their Passagemaker sailing dinghy, which really interested me.   

Port Townsend is Pygmy's home town, by the way.  I visited their big new showroom for the first time today.  Imagine The Gap for kayaks.  That's what it was like.  Honestly, Pygmy seems dead in the water.  I never paid much attention to Chesapeake Light Craft before but they keep coming out with new designs, and in contrast Pygmy hasn't come out with anything new for a long, long time.   Maybe it's because they have only one designer.  Pygmy started me out in sea kayaking so I have a soft spot in my heart for them.  But they should keep up. They totally missed the sit-on-top market, for instance.   You can't just stop designing and not innovate!  They could use more high performance traditional models like  Greenland style kayaks and baidarkas.  Not to mention racing kayaks, surf boats, canoes, and sailing dinghys.

Speaking of baidarkas, Corey Freedman was in the process of building a frame and bending yellow cedar ribs when I walked by the Skin Boat School pavilion.  I asked him about coating his Spirit Line two-part urethane with cheap hardware store one-part urethane and he said, "Why do you want to use that stuff?  It's not industrial.  It will probably flake off in a year.  Use our stuff."  Well, boatbuilders are an independent bunch so I'll just have to try it my way and see if he's right. 

Finally, I got on board The Lady Washington.  I've been getting it wrong all these years: the Lady played The Interceptor on Pirates of the Caribbean, not The Black Pearl.  An interesting factoid: the Lady has no wheel, but instead has the biggest tiller I've ever seen.  Of course in the movie they added the wheel in.

[See more pictures of the Wooden Boat Festival here]

Comments

[bonnie]

Lovely, lovely boats!