High Stakes Tetris: Festival Harbormasters Make it Fit By Libby Urner Looking out over the acres of varnish in the Wooden Boat Festival harbor, with gleaming classics filling every available cranny, it’s hard to imagine that for much of the year, Point Hudson’s 70-odd slips lie empty. Working behind the scenes for months, the Harbormaster team is a big part of what makes the magic happen. Beginning in March, the boat acceptance team meets weekly to go over boat applications – the complex dance of creating a rich, varied collection of boats that actually fit in the harbor. Adventuress Captain Daniel Evans has been at the helm as the Capital-H Harbormaster since 2010. Boat registrar Libby Urner herds the cats, and makes sure we have vessel specs, photos and descriptions, with a lot of help from Northwest Maritime Center staffer Catherine Leporati. We aim for a mix – old, new, huge, tiny, shiny and salty. In an average year, the Festival has about 170 boats in the water in a harbor designed to
hold no more than 70. Getting them to fit on paper is just the beginning! Working from detailed harbor measurements and annual soundings, we plug the data into RhinoCAD and start arranging. Then rearranging. Harbor layout is always a work in progress – if a boat cancels, it creates a ripple effect. Someone breaks their ankle and needs to be dockside. Someone installs new davits, and when they arrive, they don’t fit. Concierge Melissa Groussman calls everyone with a “time window” to arrive – contrary to popular notion, arriving really early will NOT ensure you a dockside slip, but will keep you motoring in circles for hours. We need to park the big boats first – leaving room in the turning basin, and placing the “anchor” boats that hold the raft-outs on the linear dock. In six hours, a crew of 25 pushboat crews and line handlers will park more 5,000 linear feet of boats, ranging from 8’ prams to 125’ steamers. Most of the drivers hold Masters’ licenses, and all have literally thousands of hours of
The M/V Lotus was the largest power yacht on the West Coast when launched in 1909; the 92-foot vessel is just one of many large vessels put into place by the Wooden Boat Festival Harbormaster team .
close-quarters maneuvering experience. It’s an incredibly complex skill set – database jockey, CAD geek, radio operator juggling five calls with a smile, pushboat cowboy, dockline load manage-
ment – all with zero margin for error. We’re playing high-stakes Tetris with irreplaceable, fragile works of art. Safety is priority No. 1 – if the Harbormasters ask you to
do something (or to stop doing something), there’s a good reason. We’re justifiably proud of what we do. And, looking out at that acre of varnish, we think you’ll agree that the end result is worth it.
We Shall Miss ‘HarborMasher’ Doug Rathbun For the first time since the Clinton Administration, this year’s Wooden Boat Festival will not be graced by longtime “HarborMasher” Doug Rathbun, who finally figured out a way to get out of doing the harbor layout. (Doug, 60, died on June 11, 2014) Doug was a genius at computers and geometry, with a dry wit and an encyclopedic knowledge of boats big and small. It was Doug’s crazy idea to park ‘em sideways,
Doug had a knack for making people laugh .
fitting eight in the space of four. If Doug said it would fit,
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it would fit. Though battling cancer for the past several years, he continued to wrestle with the CAD layout all night, and still get out and park boats all day in a thunderstorm. From using a dinghy jib as a waters’l for mighty Team Dorjun, to literally raising Caine, to managing to get himself fired on Festival Friday, Doug kept things interesting around here. Fair winds and following seas, HarborMasher. You’re incredibly missed.
Following Doug’s layout, harbormasters keep squeezing boats in . Submitted photo
Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader