31st Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival Sets Sail over July 4 Weekend
SEATTLE, May 31, 2007 – Seattle’s love-affair with everything nautical renews over the July 4 weekend with the 31st annual Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival on South Lake Union.
 Presented by The Center for Wooden Boats (www.cwb.org) and over 30 boating and community organizations, the five-day festival brings together over 150 classic wooden, sail, steam and human-powered water craft in an interactive environment. Among the many hands-on activities are maritime clinics, boating education and safety programs, plenty of food, nautical music and fun boating contests for kids and the entire family.
The festival is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily Saturday, June 30 through Wednesday, July 4. Admission is by suggested donation of $5 per person, $10 for families. Limited free parking is available at Lake Union Park and The Center for Wooden Boats. In 2006, an estimated 10,000 wooden boat enthusiasts and landlubbers visited the Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival.
“The Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival is a wonderful family event for the July 4 weekend,” said Dick Wagner, Founding Director of The Center for Wooden Boats. “Whether you’re interested in sailing, classic steam boats or learning about the rich heritage of wooden boats in the Northwest, there’s an opportunity to experience it first-hand through the eyes of boat owners, builders and skippers.”
The festival gets underway Saturday, June 30 with a traditional Haida blessing ceremony to launch a hand-carved 22-foot cedar canoe at 11 a.m. and a helicopter rescue demonstration by the U.S. Coast Guard at 2 p.m. The Haida canoe was hewn over 18 months at The Center for Wooden Boats from a single Northwest cedar log by Alaska native and CWB Artist-in-Residence, Saaduuts, along with the help of hundreds of local school children. Following the ceremony, festival attendees can participate in the initial carving of a similar canoe project from a cedar log native to the Northwest.
Throughout the festival, tours are available on a variety of classic Northwest wood-hulled vessels including the Adventuress – an 85-foot, 1913-vintage working schooner, Virginia V - a 125-foot, steam-powered passenger vessel launched in 1921 and survivor of the fabled Puget Sound “Mosquito Fleet” and Arthur Foss – a 111-foot former working tugboat, constructed of Douglas fir and launched in 1889.
The 110th anniversary of the launching of the historic 165-foot Wawona will also be celebrated during the Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival. With timbers cut from virgin NW forests, the 1897-vintage, 111-foot Wawona is one of the largest three-masted schooners built in North America.
The Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival includes fun and educational boating activities for the entire family including boating education and safety programs presented by the Northwest Yacht Brokers Association. The programs are structured to promote safe boating and help boaters of all ages comply with the new Washington Boater Education requirements. Other ongoing festival activities include:
- A toy boat building tent where kids can build and decorate their own model boats.
- Practice your tacks and gybes with classic pond-boats in the model boat pond.
- Quick and Daring? Kids of all ages will have just one day to build a boat and then race it; sailing a leg, paddling the next and anything goes on the homeward leg, in this inventive and hilarious contest.
- Learn nautical skills through demonstrations including building of traditional Baidarkas - Aleutian-style sea kayaks, lapstrake planking, paddle making, knot tying and more.
- Visit kid’s story time where stories of the sea, ships and maritime adventures will be spun for young and old alike.
- Admire over 20 classic wood runabouts from the Antique and Classic Boat Society.
- Entertainment includes local music with a nautical flare and food and refreshments at the Crew’s Mess and Pewter Pig Pub beer garden.
For more information, visit The Center for Wooden Boats at Lake Union Park or log onto www.CWB.org .
About The Center for Wooden Boats
Located at Seattle’s Lake Union Park, The Center for Wooden Boats (www.CWB.org) is a hands-on maritime museum focused on preserving the rich, vital and varied wooden-boat heritage of the Pacific Northwest. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, The Center for Wooden Boats—one of the few “hands-on” museums in the Seattle community, is a gathering place for restoring and preserving classic Northwest wooden boats and provides year-round educational and experiential public boating programs for the entire family including the annual July 4th Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival.
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Northwest Yacht Brokers Association