There are more than 240 boats registered for this year's Wooden Boat Festival.

If you want to see big boats and ones you might not have seen before, Port Townsend is the place to be this weekend.

The 34th annual Wooden Boat Festival, held tomorrow through Sunday, will feature not just a record number of boats more than 50 feet long — 45 of them — but also about 60 boats that appear to be first-time entries (or have not appeared since at least 2003, when the festival’s database of participating boats was launched.).

In total, the 240-plus boats registered for the show will take up more than a nautical mile of dock space, creating a challenge for organizers to figure out where to place them. It’s a logistical headache, but one that brings a smile to festival director Kaci Cronkhite’s face.

“This has to be one of the few places in the world you could have this problem, and it’s kind of a fun problem to have,” Cronkhite says.

Boats on display will include everything from Native canoes to working boats, tall ships, classic powerboaters and one-of-a-kind designs. Vintage boats include, among others, Dirigo II, a 72-foot, gaff-rigged sailboat built in 1939 and recently put into use as a charter boat out of Friday Harbor; Lotus, a century-old Edwardian houseboat cruiser listed on the National Register of Historic Places; and Olympus, a 92-foot double fantail yacht built for the president of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. Most of the boats will be open for tours.

“This is not a boat show where you’re just going to look at pretty things,” Cronkhite says. “You’re going to interact and climb aboard. It’s very interactive.”

If there’s an unofficial theme for this year’s festival, it’s more: not just more boats, but more speakers, more exhibitors, more kids’ activities and more venue space. This year’s festival is the first since the Northwest Maritime Center, located on the waterfront between Point Hudson Marina and Port Townsend’s historic downtown, became fully operational in May.

A boatbuilder at work during last year's festival.

At last year’s festival, just one of the center’s two buildings had opened; this year, attendees will find the facility completely open and buzzing with activity in all corners.

“The biggest change is that we’ve expanded the (festival) campus to include the whole facility,” Cronkhite says. “What that means is we have more programming than we’ve ever had.”

The opening of the 26,000-square foot center increases the festival’s indoor presentation spaces from two to five, including space for hand tool demonstration in the boathouse, where attendees can also check out the work of local boatbuilders.

Upstairs classrooms will be used for presentations and to house the “Kidz Cove,” where kids can play on a make-believe pirate ship and create their own costumers. Also open on the second floor is a maritime library with items ranging from maritime fiction to charts. Downstairs, showgoers can get a cup of coffee and something to eat at the café operated by local grocer Alrich’s Market and poke around the adjoining chandlery, which sells a combination of boat gear and gift items.

This year’s festival also features more speakers, Cronkhite says. Those include Captain Mark Schrader, who will be talking about the Around the Americas project, the circumnavigation around North and South America he led in an effort to draw awareness to the deteriorating state of ocean health.

Shipwright Richard Baila will detail how he and his boat survived Chile’s devastating earthquake and tsunami last year, and Coast Guard veteran Peter Joseph will lead an interactive discussion about how boaters can deal with a fictional cruise to the San Juan Islands that turns into the trip from hell.

Other seminars focus on areas ranging from cruising to boatbuilding, and hands-on demonstrations will provide information on topics such as fiberglassing, stitch and glue boatbuilding, and spar-making.

For those who want to get out on the water, public sails will be offered on boats including the 130-foot historic schooner Adventuress and the schooners Martha, Alcyone, Suva, Merrie Ellen, Mycia and Lavengro. Ticket information and schedules are available on the boats’ websites, or you can stop by the boats at the festival.

And as in past years, music and food will be a key part of the festivities. A beer garden and stage will be set up next to the cupola house at the north end of Point Hudson Marina. Music starts around noon each day and ranges from sea shanties to folk, Brazilian jazz and bluegrass, capped off by dancing until midnight. A food pavilion next to the beer garden will offer a wide selection of food from local restaurants, from Thai dishes to slow-cooked barbecue, pizza to bratwurst.

Started in 1977, the Wooden Boat Festival has become one of the most well-known and popular events of its type nationwide, drawing thousands of attendees annually from as far away as Europe and Australia. Cronkhite says the festival’s wide offering of boats and hands-on activities, as well as Port Towsend’s location in the center of a region steeped in maritime tradition, makes the annual event unique.

“The exciting thing to me is that we live in this region where people have wooden boats that can travel, where people do things with their boats, where people will come here for the festival,” she says. “We’re in the middle of an amazing region.

The Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival runs Friday, Sept. 10 through Sunday, Sept. 12. For additional information, check out the festival website.

About Deborah Bach

Deborah Bach is the editor and co-founder of Three Sheets Northwest. She is an avid sailor and long-time professional journalist. You can find Deborah aboard Three Sheets, an Island Packet 38, with her husband Marty and their cat Lily.

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