Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 2012 pre festival setup

The 36th annual Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival was magnificent.  Port Townsends Wooden Boat Festival is the most education-packed and inspiring wooden boat event in the world. Featuring more than 300 wooden vessels, dozens of indoor and outdoor presentations and demonstrations, a whos who of wooden boat experts and thousands of wooden boat enthusiasts, theres something to do, someone to meet, or a boat to board at every turn. Expanded a little each year, the festival honors its traditions while inviting energetic debate and demonstration about the latest innovations in boatbuilding, equipment, skills, and adventures.

On Thursday, the busy setup day before Fridays start of the festival, I met Jay Thorpe and family with their lovely Pathfinder Gunvor at the boat launch at Boat Haven marina. Jay brought Gunvor up from Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he sails her on Klamath lake.

After launching, we sailed together for a few hours while awaiting our turn to enter the festival marina. The idyllic sailing conditions gave me a perfect opportunity to capture how majestic she looks under sail.

After we eventually tied up at our assigned slips, I ran into "Doryman" Mike Bogoger and we took a closer look at Gunvor.

Jay Thorpe and "Doryman" Mike Bogoger discussing Gunvor

Jay let me climb aboard. Very roomy

 Next up:  The festival begins

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Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 2012 day 2

Saturday, the busiest day of the Festival.


I headed over to sign up for a rowing/sailing trip aboard the longboats. These longboats are replicas of the longboats used by Captain George Vancouver to explore the Puget Sound region in 1792. Ive been wanting to take a tour on them for years, but havent been able to until now because they were either full or there were too many other things to see and do. There are so many things to do at the festival there is no way to do them all.

These 26 replica longboats are used by the Northwest Maritime Center School Programs. They are each equipped with 8 rowing stations and 3 dipping lug sails.  They are used to teach youth teambuilding, problem solving, and maritime skills.  Teenagers attend intensive 2-5 day programs of discovery and exploration where they learn to row, sail, learn navigation, compass use, knots, marine biology, history and more.  They are also used in the Pacific Challenge.

Fortunately, we had several of these teenage students aboard to help us learn to row in sync and teach us how to tack the three sails on our dipping lug rig.

The first lesson we learned was "Crab!".  "Crab!" is what you yell out when the rowers get out of sync and get their oars all tangled up, which usually brings all four rowers on that side to a halt.

To prevent Crabs, one rower is designated as the pace setter.  From the rowers point of view, its the rower on their right and all the way up front. The rowers are all facing aft of course, so that would make him the aft-most port-side rower.  Anyway, the rower to his immediate left is supposed to row in sync with him.  The rest of the rowers are all supposed to keep in sync with the rower seated immediately in front of them.  Sounds simple, right?  We had lots of Crabs.  All it takes to create a Crab is for one rower to lose focus for a second or two.

Tacking the dipping lug rig involved a complex sequence of  tacking the halyard, the sail tack, tacking the sheets, lowering the sail and dipping the yard, that I still dont fully understand.  It was unlike anything Id ever done before and required about 3 or 4 people on each sail.  I loved it!  I wish I were a teenager so I could sign up for these programs.  I also have a new found respect for the crew of these longboats. After only a half hour of rowing, my hands were numb and my back started to ache.  Vancouvers explorers often rowed for hours upon hours exploring and charting the miles of coastlines here.  Heres a bit of video.  Its not very good.  These are working boats.  Youre always rowing or sailing, or trying to stay out of the way of other boats.  There is very little opportunity for filming.

More to come.

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Wooden Boat Festival

I have been trying for years to get to the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, WA, but have somehow never managed to put it together. The 2014 event will be the 38th rendition of the annual festival, which grows each year in size and what it offers. It is organised by the Wooden Boat Foundation under the umbrella of the Northwest Maritime Center. In 2014 the  Festival will run from Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September.

This year I am finally going to make it to the Wooden Boat Festival. I expect to be there all three days and will be a speaker as well. I am scheduled to present on the subject "Plywood Boatbuilding Methods" from 10h45 to 11h45 on Friday 5th September, in the Discovery Classroom.

The Wooden Boat Festival boasts over 300 boats on display, some in the water and others on land. There are also about 150 presentations and demos, covering a wide range of subjects about every imaginable subject either directly or indirectly related to wooden boats.

Poster for 2014 Wooden Boat Festival

There are many wooden boats of my design in the Pacific Northwest. If you have built one of our wooden boats in the area or know someone who has, it would be great to get a bunch of those boats to the show to exhibit. I always enjoy seeing the completed boats, meeting the owners and chatting to them about building and sailing their boats. Owners generally enjoy meeting other builders and swapping ideas and experiences. This can be a great occasion to do just that. I cant arrange for the boats to be exhibited, that must be arranged with the organisers through their website.

Even if you dont have one of our boats to exhibit, I would be pleased to chat at the show. You can catch my presentation at the time and place given above and there will be time to chat afterwards. Closer to the start of the show I hope to be able to pass on info about where to find me at other times as well. Keep tabs on this blog for updates closer to the time.

Paper Jet built by Jim Phoenix, just one of a bunch of them in WA & OR.

Hope to see you there.

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Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival Part Three

Dawn, Saturday, the busiest day of the Festival, had arrived.  I spent most of the day aboard Ellie, answering questions, but occasionally sneaking off to watch presentations and view the other boats.

The Main Attraction today, for us Welsford fans anyway, was Scamp.  Howard Rice did an amazing talk. I wish I could have recorded it. The adventures Howard had taken aboard small boats are jaw dropping. He has gone around Cape Horn, both ways, in a sailing canoe, which ranks as one of the most epic journeys ever undertaken in a small boat.  No, hes not crazy.  Just the opposite. He trains Navy Seals in small boat handling.  Small Craft Advisor magazine did a series of interviews with Howard in issues 58 through 63.  In his presentation, Howard talked about his past and about the tests he had done aboard Scamp.  Howard was having a microcruiser designed for him by a French designer, but replaced it with Scamp hull #3.

John Welsford did another outstanding talk later that day entitled "The Designers Role: More Than Just Drawing".  This time I brought my camera and recorded the talk.  Unfortunately the room was packed.  My seat was near the back of the room, too far away to make a video, and the audio is not the greatest quality either.  But if you crank up the volume, it is well worth listening to.  John talks about the Designers role, which is turning your dreams into reality, and about how he designed Scamp to fulfill the specified design criteria.

 

 

I missed the majestic Schooner Cup races this year.  I was at Johns talk instead. There are so many things to see and do at the festival that its impossible to see them all.  Here is a little bit of the race.

Ive been toying with the idea of building a cedar-stripped kayak or canoe. I know next to nothing about kayaks, but the cedar strip kayaks at the festival are just so beautiful, and they look like they would be a lot of fun to build.  I went to Joe Greenleys Cedar Strip Canoe & Kayak building demonstration.  I went away from the presentation thinking they didnt look too difficult.  A typical kayak uses a quarter mile of cedar strips!

The musical entertainment at the festival is fun. There is live music at Bar Harbor all day long. Here is a sample from "The Whateverly Brothers".  Many people play their instruments on their boats and they are quite good and a lot of fun to listen to.

These boats are replicas of the longboats that Capt Vancouver used to explore Puget Sound in 1792. Every year I kick myself for not signing up early enough to go out for a rowing and sailing tour aboard them. Next year for sure!

Remember Captain Kirk Gresham, inventor of the home-made roller furler?

Heres his latest contraption he built for his Devlin cutter Eider.  It keeps his full-keeled Eider comfortably upright on the beach while the tide is out.  They say the tide waits for no man.  Well, Kirk waits for no tide!

Here are a few more photos that I took of a few of the boats. This is a tiny, tiny fraction of the boats at the festival, which number in the hundreds. I really wish the festival was a week long instead of only three days!

  

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Wooden Boat Festival Starts Tomorrow

Today I spent a very pleasant few hours sailing the Didi Cruise-Mini "Segue" on the very beautiful Puget Sound. She was lying on the dock of the NorthWest School of Wooden Boatbuilding at Port Hadlock and we needed to take her the few miles to Port Townsend, venue of the Wooden Boat Festival, which starts tomorrow.

Fine bow and beamy hull of the Didi Cruise-Mini "Segue"

 This was the first time that I had the opportunity to sail one of these little boats and it proved to be a delightfull surprise. It is a cruising version of our Didi Mini Mk2 design, with detuned rig and shallower but heavier lifting keel in place of the deep draft fixed keel. The water was flat and the breeze a very pleasant 10-15 knots. We were towing a 12ft dinghy that is also to be exhibited and which was probably knocking off about 1 knot from our speed. Yet she still sailed at good enough pace and heading to outsail other small cruisers that were heading the same way, both on heading and speed through the water.

Robust rig, with full-width swept spreaders.

 "Segue" was built by the NorthWest School of Wooden Boatbuilding for David Blessing, who completed her from the structure and interior that was supplied. She proved to be very stable, able to carry her generous full sail plan to windward even in the strongest gusts that came our way. I helmed from the leeward side of the cockpit, only moving to windward twice when stronger gusts arrived. She is very forgiving, with light and comfortable helm and just the right amount of weather helm to allow her to round up if the tiller is left unattended. With only two of us on board, she did not demand weight on the rail to give her power and was very easy to helm from leeward, for best view of the jib telltales. She has the feel of a much larger boat, giving a sense of strength and security.

Didi Cruise-mini "Segue" with her tag-along dinghy.

Overall, she showed me that she very aptly fits the fast micro-cruiser role for which she was designed. I would be happy to go coastal cruising on her, with her lifting keel and shallow twin rudders opening up many cruising areas that are totally inaccessible to larger boats. She can tuck into shallow bays, far from the cruising crowds. And when she comes out onto open water she can pick up her skirts and carry her crew to their next destination at better speed than almost any other cruiser of comparable size, as well as many bigger boats.

In company of hundreds of other wooden boats, waiting to show herself.

David Blessing sails her single-handed much of the time and at other times with friends and family. His comments to me have been that she is an amazing little boat and has not disappointed him in any way. I tweaked the rig and his sail setups during and after our delivery sail and am sure that he will find her even better now than before.

To see more about this and our other designs, please go to our main website at http://dixdesign.com .

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Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival Part One

The 35th Annual Wooden Boat Festival at Port Townsend was, in a word, magnificent!  I have been attending this festival for many years now.  It was two years ago when I met Barrett Faneuf here, she invited my wife and I out for a sail aboard her Navigator "Yuko", and the rest is history.  The festival seems to get a little bigger and a little better with each passing year, but this years festival took a quantum leap for me.  Not only was it my first time as an exhibitor, but I had the honor of meeting people such as John Welsford, Howard Rice, Josh Colvin (editor of Small Craft Advisor magazine), Sam Devlin, and a surprising number of people currently building Welsfords designs.

But more on that later.

There is no way to compress all four days of the festival into one blog entry.  Its going to take several. Lets start with the pre-festival setup.

Ellie, of course, wanted to look her best, so I spent the weekend prior to the festival getting her in "ship shape".  I touched up the few scratches she had picked up from the barnacle encrusted rocky beach at Sucia, cleaned off the bits of dried seaweed from her most recent outing to a TSCA messabout at Bowman Bay and gave her mahogany seats a fresh coat of Seafin oil.  We even bought her a pretty little bouquet of flowers for the show. Ellie is a tomboy, but she didnt seem to mind.

Thursday, the busy setup day before the start of the festival, finally arrived.  We set out early because we had to tackle a bit of Seattles morning rush hour traffic, take a Washington State ferry, and cross a major drawbridge just to get there, then set up the boat, launch her at Boat Haven marina, travel over to Port Hudson marina, and report in all before noon.

Here is Ellie, gleaming aboard the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry.

For those of you not from around here, the Washington State Ferry system has the largest passenger and automobile ferry fleet in the U.S. and the third largest in the world based on number of vehicles carried - about 11 million vehicles per year.

After the ferry crossing, and wait for the Hood Canal bridge to close, we finally arrived at Boat Haven marina.  At the boat launch was Peter Van Sickle with his Welsford Penguin "Tenacious".  Peter, who trailered over from Idaho, completed his Penguin about two months ago.  After launching our boats we headed for the festival at Port Hudson.  Here I am admiring "Tenacious".

Upon arriving at Port Hudson, we were instructed to contact the Harbormaster on VHF radio for our slip assignments.  Squeezing a couple hundred boats into Port Hudson in an orderly fashion is no easy task. More like a gigantic game of Tetris.  Harbormaster Dan Evans of the schooner Adventuress did a remarkable job.  What I didnt know was that they place all the larger yachts first.  Because we arrived fairly early we were forced to sail under beautiful, near perfect conditions for several hours while awaiting our turn to enter the harbor.  Feel sorry for us?  Dont!

At last it was our turn to enter and we tied up at our assigned spot.

Here is a panorama of all of us shoehorned in snug and cozy like.  Well done harbormaster!

At this point I had to make a quick side trip to check into our hotel, then hurry back for the reception. We were treated to a thank-you reception, complimentary drink, music and dancing at Bar Harbor (a large tent on the Western edge of the Festival where they serve beer, wine and have live music all day) that went on until after midnight.

Next up: The Festival begins.  A momentous sail with John and much more.  Stay tuned!

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