PTWBF - Final Day

Today, Sunday 13 August, was the third and final day of the 2009 Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival.

Before we left for the festival marina I took advantage of the calm wind to drop the spare light jib that I had been using while my first-line genoa was getting attention at Pt Townsend Sails. We took the sail to an area of dry lawn at the eastern end of the boat haven and stumbled into the most amazing collection of vintage cars that we had ever seen. These were working street-legal members of the "Horseless Carriage Society". In a future blog I will publish photos of the following brands of pre-1920 cars:

- Renault (complete with Louis Vuitton side trunks)
- Cadillac
- Buick
- Ford
- Stanley Steamer (1914)
- Willis (Overlander)
- EMF (precursor to Studebaker)
- McLaughlin (Canadian Buick)
- Pullman (very large)

The Stanley Steamer was an amazing experience. We heard and saw a cloud of steam and I exclaimed "Oh, It's a Stanley Steamer!" (never having seen one before). And so it was: a real, live, working, Stanley Steamer. Great experience.

... You never know what folding up your sail will lead to at Port Townsend.


I attended an excellent hour-long presentation by Nigel Calder on diesel engines. (I have a copy of his "Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual".) Nigel said that it is better to keep an old engine running until it drops dead because repairing them is more expensive that purchasing a new one. The numbers that I have heard do not bear that out but I'll learn the truth very soon. After that I met Brenda, who had been doing her own thing exploring the boat show, for lunch. Then we visited "Lotus", a large one-off Edwardian house boat built in 1909 for a tycoon. The boat had all of the comforts of home of the era, including a fireplace, and she was equipped with large fuel and water tanks and a counter stern to enable her to motor to Alaska in the summers (where the he owned a gold mine).

I then met the owner of "Kathleen", a British naval launch built in 1909, whom Brenda had met while I was at the talk by Nigel Calder. What interested me was that Kathleen had a 30 HP SABB diesel. We had a chat on his boat while he had his lunch. He told me that in the 22 years that he's had the boat the only work he has done on the engine is to change a water pump diaphragm, of which he had two spares when he bought the boat. (He has changed starters and alternators which he does not consider part of the engine.) I told him that SABB's are little-known in Australia and I found it comforting to speak with a fellow SABB owner. He said that he's spoken with at least 10 SABB owners during the festival.

As I departed Kathleen I saw the sad sight of boats leaving the marina to participate in the afternoon sail-by festival finale.

Brenda and I found a good and high vantage and enjoyed the amazing spectacle of more than 100 wooden boats of all sizes and types sailing by with a fair wind and brilliant sun. We had a conversation with a retired local man named Joe who said that in his 11 consecutive years of attending the Boat Festival this was the best consistently good weather he had seen. To us visitors it was three days of perfect weather and we were very grateful.