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The Port of Skagit hosted two massive events on the last weekend of September to benefit and promote the Genuine Skagit Valley program. The Tidewater Boil and Skagit Farm to Pint Fest were, as reported in this paper, both big successes. More than 150 people for dinner the first night and about 600 for the Farm to Pint Fest made for a busy and exciting weekend, especially for the La Conner Marina’s first time hosting. The Genuine Skagit Valley program does outstanding work showcasing local f...
The Port was honored to host the Tom Robbins parade this past weekend! What a spectacle! It was a lot of fun, though, and many of our guests were able to see La Conner put on quite a show. We found a rowboat in Sullivan Slough last week. It has some small damage in the stern but it is otherwise a beautiful little boat. If anyone knows whose it is, please have them call the office at 360-466-3118 and we will be happy to return it. We met with the Army Corps of Engineers recently and they told us...
The smoke from fires across the western U.S. and Canada is across the sky, and with it we have people coming in who cannot get home due to the fires in their home areas. We have had a family from Maui here as well, and they are wondering not just “when” they can go back but “if.” Everyone else we have spoken with is waiting for either Highway 20 to reopen or one of the Canadian fires to die down enough they can pass through the affected areas. We had the largest vessel of the year put in yest...
The weather has been fabulous for boating this summer and our guest docks continue to be full. Many of our guests are stopping in La Conner on their way to or from Seattle. They come in around lunch time, relax for a day in town, then head out early to get into the traffic lines at the locks. We had a boat come through this week that was over 100 feet long. This is pretty large for our guest docks and the channel. Our guest docks are 500 feet long, so over 20% was covered by just this one vessel...
The guest docks are full most nights this week. We have seen visitors from all over the area and up and down the west coast. We had three larger vessels that came up from Portland and they reported the ocean journey was really nice, with mild weather and relatively calm seas. This, while one of our other regular visitors is held up in southern California due to storms through Oregon and northern California! Hard to believe sometimes how varied the ocean can be. We have had four nights this summe...
We are getting the parking lots ready for the Car and Boat Show Saturday, Aug 5. This is a bigger endeavor than you might imagine. Boaters in our marina are sometimes gone for months at a time, and we have to make sure their cars are parked somewhere safe. It can be difficult to manage, but we are blessed with a community of boaters who enjoy supporting town events and most people are happy to help. Remember to come out for this event if you can, it should be good again this year. Safety and...
We count “boat nights” as a measure of how busy the marina is over any given time period. Each boat that spends a single night on one of our guest docks counts, so a boat that is here for a week will count as a stay of seven boat nights. Over the past week, we have hosted 124 boat nights, or just over 30 boats per night on F and G docks. That is a lot of visitors coming to our town and for more than just a few hours. The boats that come in for lunch and shopping and then depart for home are coun...
The marina has been very busy. People love to visit La Conner! And it is not just boaters, although there is certainly a lot of them, but it is also the RV park. We have had several days this month where all spots in the park have been taken. This is really something for us, and our camp hosts have done a remarkable job of keeping up with changes and managing busy arrival and departure times. With the low tides of the summer we have had a multitude of questions about the depth of the channel....
The Fourth of July was just fantastic! We had so many people contribute their time and efforts I can’t possibly name them all, but I will say our marina maintenance staff and dockhands were everywhere all the time and I could not have been more pleased with how they represented the Port of Skagit. We see all types of travelers passing through the La Conner Marina and RV Park. One example is an RV couple who is trying to be out for an entire month. They want to see if they enjoy actually l...
What a week! We have been so busy for the past few weeks I did not think we could be busier, but the 4th has set a new high water mark. We had to turn away dozens of reservation requests for G dock and the RV park because every foot of the dock is spoken for. We even stashed a couple of smaller boats on the flat just to ease congestion and fit everyone in – literally as busy as it can be. This weekend and through the holiday we are averaging about 30 boats per night on the guest docks and 40 RVs...
The guest docks have been slammed this week. We have been docking boats and fielding reservations left and right. And yet, even as the summer rush is upon us we generally still have space available during the week. Boaters who are not tied to the weekend have their choice of moorings. We have had a lot of people asking about crab season opening, with audible disappointment when we tell them we are not the ones who set the season. Talking with these people has made me realize once again what a...
Last week the Swinomish Yacht Club was able to put together a visit from the Coast Guard Auxiliary to carry out safety inspections on boats in the water. This is a very valuable service the Coast Guard provides. It is purely informational, so there is no penalty if they find something wrong. However, such a finding could be a life-saver. All the things they require are built on hard experience, so it is a good idea to go through their list and make sure vessels are properly equipped and...
The docks are super busy this week with crab boats. There is a commercial opener going on and the activity is frenetic on the commercial pier. The buyers have six people on hand and a forklift to keep up with deliveries. We only have a few of these days per year, but they are so busy they really leave an impression. The marina used to have a lot more commercial fishing vessels than it does now, but time has changed the industry and our moorage customer base has changed as well. We have two...
Sometimes the most important lessons are learned, or reinforced, by the most harrowing experiences. I hope the following experience, shared with me by a highly skilled boater, serves as an important safety reminder for everyone out on the water. The tale began at four in the morning when the anchor alarm went off; instead of being secure for the night they were drifting with the tide. They had to take up and re-set the anchor before anyone on board would be sleeping again. She shrugged on a jack...
Summer is well and truly upon us! The sure sign at the marina is the Edmonds Yacht Club taking up literally every inch of guest dock space for their Memorial Day bash. It is a great time and we are super pleased to have them back again this year. The second sign of summer at the marina is the summer dockhands reporting for their first day of work. We have a great bunch this year, all of them high-achieving college students. Be sure to greet them if you see them around the marina or bringing...
Guitar Festival: This week we had numerous guests who came to La Conner expressly for the La Conner Guitar Festival. Many of them have come before and plan to come again. I can see why! Walking into Maple Hall with all of those incredible pieces of art – guitars of all shapes and sizes – was just breathtaking. It was worth the cost of entry just to walk through the hall, and the shows were a bonus. We had a guitar circle in the RV park two nights in a row and at least one luthier stayed with us...
People always wonder if they are getting good value when they buy major items such as boats. One thing I have noticed in the marina is a surprising number of Tollycraft boats, from 26 up to 52 feet and all sizes in between. On B dock there are even two twin vessels moored right next to each other. I counted, and we have over 30 Tollycraft still actively moored with us. That is remarkable for a boatbuilding company that stopped operating in 1997, 26 years ago. The nice thing about Tollycraft is...
With the completion of the Swinomish Yacht Club's kick-off of the boating season, the marina is getting ready to have many more visiting boaters. We are seeing significantly higher activity at the guest docks and the key weekends throughout the summer are filling up with reservations already. We also have 10 yacht clubs signed up to visit over the summer. They are able to reserve sections of the docks so their groups can be moored together. These are great activities which bring lots of people t...
Spring is in the air! Birds are flying through, tulips are blooming and boaters are waking up from their winter slumbers. We are seeing more and more people every day down on the docks. We have a pretty robust crew of boat mechanics down here. While they stay busy all winter, things really ramp up for them in spring and you can see them all bustling. Boats are getting cleaned off, engines getting prepared for the coming season and things are finally starting to warm up. The winter moorage...
