Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 2026

A live, moderated conversation in the style of Beyond the Boat — but not recorded — featuring four panelists:•    A shipwright•    A wooden boat owner•    An operator/captain•    A representative from a maritime education programDuration: 60–75 minutesAudience Q&A included.
ConceptWooden boats endure not simply because they are beautiful, but because people choose to carry them forward.
This session explores how different roles — ownership, craftsmanship, seamanship, operations, and education — intersect in sustaining wooden boats. Each panelist represents a distinct path, yet all share responsibility for continuity.The conversation centers on:• Why individuals choose to commit to wooden boats• How responsibility shapes that commitment• What continuity requires from each role• How these paths overlap in real life
The goal is not technical instruction, but reflection. Wooden boats are more than vessels. They are places where people learn patience, care, accountability, and stewardship.
This session invites the audience to see wooden boats not as isolated projects, but as living ecosystems sustained by interconnected choices.
Why This Fits the FestivalThe Festival celebrates craftsmanship, tradition, and community. This conversation highlights the human dimension behind that celebration.Rather than focusing on tools, techniques, or restoration specifics, this session examines:• The values that sustain wooden boat culture• The shared responsibility between builders, owners, operators, and educators• The lived experience behind preservationIt speaks to current owners, aspiring stewards, and younger generations entering the field.
Intended ToneConversational, thoughtful, accessible.Honest about challenges.Grounded in lived experience.
This is not a lecture. It is a guided conversation designed to invite the audience into the deeper story of continuity.

Panel discussion of how various riggers stumbled into the field, some of their experiences, how they pass along the knowledge to newcomers

Moderated by Mark Shiner
Allison Wood, Emiliano Marino, 

What does it mean to devote your life to making sails?
Part craft, part engineering, part problem-solving, sailmaking sits at the intersection of tradition and performance — shaping the way boats move through the world. Join a conversation with working sailmakers as they share stories from the loft, discuss the evolution of the craft, and explore what it takes to build sails for everything from traditional wooden boats to modern voyaging vessels.
In many parts of the world, traditional sailmaking is becoming increasingly rare. Here in Port Townsend, it remains a vibrant and active part of the working waterfront.

What do most adventurers have in common? How do they ensure they get to base camp fit and ready to take on the actual challenge they set out to accomplish? How do they handle fear? And how do they handle the fear of failure?  This talk is for a more general audience but of course is based on my sailing experience.
Possible other topics – Storm Tactics, preparing for and handling storms at seaHow to encourage your partner to share your dream?Creating an unstoppable boat.

As 20th century designers and builders created our area’s maritime history, photographer Ken Ollar was there to record it. For over half a century, he sped through the Salish Sea aboard his motor vessel Shutterbug, capturing the action at Swiftsure, fleet and PIYA races, Opening Day celebrations, unlimited hydroplane races, and yacht club cruises. His collection of over 10,000 negatives, slides, prints and ephemeral, is now part of the Gig Harbor BoatShop’s Northwest Fleet Photography Collection. Using archival protocol, a team of volunteers are digitizing images for a publicly accessible database. As the body of work grows online, the historical importance of it becomes more apparent. Ken Ollar’s stunning work is filling our maritime past with narratives and details never heard before. We will share gems and highlights with you through projected images and stories.

Docking with dynamic springlines has become a lost art - with tragic results in marinas all around the world, not the least in the Pacific Northwest. Captain Phyllis Woolwine is leading a charge to bring these powerful skills & strategies back. Owner of Shearwater University - Maritime Education, “Captain Wooly” specializes in training boaters of all types to use springlines for maximum safety and boat control while leaving and returning to the dock - every time, in any conditions, with just two people. This seminar provides an overview on the physics of the core springline strategy we apply on all boats, every time, no matter the boat type or scenario.

Every boat begins as an idea.
Join a conversation with yacht designers as they explore the balance between beauty, seaworthiness, performance, and practicality in designing boats for real people and real waters. From traditional wooden craft to modern interpretations, this panel offers insight into the thinking, creativity, and experience that shape the boats we admire — and the lives built around them.
What makes a boat feel “right” on the water? Come find out.

Moderated by Ernie Baird, 
Brad Seamans, Pete Stein, Daniel Hawkins
Wood spars are at the heart of traditional sailing craft — shaping the way a boat moves, balances, and feels at sea. But what exactly goes into designing and building a wooden mast or spar?
Join a conversation with experienced spar makers as they explore the art, engineering, materials, and traditions behind these beautiful and highly functional structures. From selecting wood to shaping spars for vessels that sail everywhere from local waters to Cape Horn, this discussion offers a rare glimpse into a craft still actively practiced here in Port Townsend.

Moderated by Allison Woods
Megan Hudson, Mark Shiner, Chance Bates, Justin Lathrop, Ossian Smith, Bruce Tipton

A sailing rig only works when every piece works together.
Sails, rigging, and spars are deeply interconnected — each affecting how a boat performs, balances, handles, and endures at sea. It’s far more complex than simply ordering a sail or stepping a mast. Sail shape influences rig loads, rigging affects sail trim, spars bend and flex under pressure, and every detail must work in harmony.
Join working sailmakers, riggers, and spar makers for a fascinating conversation about the collaboration, craftsmanship, and problem-solving required to bring a successful sailing rig to life — from traditional wooden boats to modern voyaging vessels.

Mark Shiner maybe owns a copy of every English language book about sail making published in the last 250 years. More importantly, he has read them, so you don’t have to! But when, and more importantly, why, did we start putting the art of sailmaking into print? How did the thousand-year tradition of apprenticeship training go head-to-head with “book learning”? Join Mark, an island sailmaker, teacher and researcher, on a walk through time, starting with an Elizabethan eviction notice in 1571, meeting some interesting characters along the way, some good books and some dreadful books, and ending with a look at Mark’s favourite text, the Sailmaker’s Apprentice by Port Townsend's own Emiliano Marino. (and if you made the Ditty Bag in chapter 1, bring it!)

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.