Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 2026

If you own a boat which was owned by a famous writer, if your father and mother owned her before you, if her other significant owners did adventurous voyages of a type you'll never even dream of, how do you cope with the feeling of inadequacy? Put it another way, how do you manage to care for the boat and have fun on your own terms, without feeling like an undeserving imposter? They are the ghosts on your cabin. An individually designed and traditionally built yacht is the work of many hands, all of them highly skilled, most of them poorly paid.  They are the forgotten people whose labour is too easily taken for grant ed and forgotten.Writing my new book about 80 years of Peter Duck, I'm trying to face up to some of these questions: lay the ghosts, celebrate the makers. It was teh Port Townsend invitation that started me on this quest, please come and join me.