A Six-Pack of Boat Festival Favorites
Small Boats We Loved at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival
The 47th annual Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival wrapped up yesterday—an exhilarating love-in featuring 300 boats, 100 expert presenters, 50 commercial exhibitors and three long, awesome days of fun. (If you exhibited a boat, you’re exhausted this morning, having answered 873 questions about your much-loved vessel. If you were a dock-walking attendee, you’re probably bleary but blissed out, recalling many boats you admired, and at least a few you’d love to own.)
For me, having exhibited boats umpteen times since the first-ever Wooden Boat Festival, it was nice to attend this year’s WBF as a ‘civilian,’ no longer as a registered boat owner or one of 300 volunteers who make the event happen.
While the WBF always includes an array of big boats, from schooners to classic motor yachts, I’m naturally drawn to small watercraft on display, whether rowing, paddling, sailing or motoring.
Just for fun, here are six of the smaller boats I admired at this year’s Wooden Boat Festival, in no special order.
A Classic, Recently Built 20’ Motor Launch (for sale)
This one immediately stole my heart, since I’m a fool who loves boats I should never consider. But geez, isn’t pure beauty irresistible?
The launch was designed and built by the late Cliff Neiderer, using the finest materials: Honduras mahogany planks over steambent oak frames, with purple heart for the stem and keel, and more Honduras for the stern post, deadwood, horn timber and stern. The deck is solid teak.
Round-bottomed and relatively tender, the hull carries 500 pounds of lead ballast (could use more), and she’s powered by a two-cylinder 15-hp Yanmar diesel, freshwater cooled. (The boat may not appear to be quite finished, at least to some potential buyers who could consider reworking the small cabin for greater comfort. The launch has had only three brief sea trials, but she’s a lovely thing created by a master boatbuilder who produced 15 wooden boats, including a 41’ schooner he cruised extensively and described in his book, Schooners, Seekers and Seas.)
Cliff Neiderer died in 2023; the boat is being offered by his longtime partner, Mia Pearson, who can be reached via email at Mia@vom.com (The asking price at the Wooden Boat Festival, including a custom-fitting trailer, was $25,000, but Mia indicated she was determined not to haul the launch back to California, so…)
OLLIE, a 13’ Penn Yan Cartopper (for sale)
And now, something completely different…
Ricardo Love has restored a lot of larger boats, but he fell in love with this classic little fishing boat and did a terrific job of bringing it back to near-showroom condition. Now he’s ready for another project, so the 80-pound Cartopper is being offered with its vintage (and colorful) Tee Nee trailer, and period-matching 5-hp Johnson outboard motor…fully rebuilt by a collector of such motors.
If you’re really interested, ask me via email at Norseboater22@gmail.com and I’ll put you in touch with the seller. (It’s possible the boat has already sold, since I wasn’t around during final day of the WBF.)
SERENITY, One-of-a-Kind Fishing Skiff, 22’ 5” x 5’
It was hard not to love this unusual skiff, designed and built in 1989 by John Breiby of Alaska, a talented woodworker and boatbuilder who grew up set-netting in Nushagak Bay (Bristol Bay region), and who later retired as a historian and anthropologist with the Alaska State office of History and Archaeology.
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