The Bilge &
Tankage
Quarterly.

A note from the Editor — Marcus Greve

We publish six issues a year on a paper that arrives by the half-ton pallet from a press in Tacoma. We do it because most of the trade literature on marine plumbing — Calder, Casey, Nigel Calder again, the various manufacturer-issued application notes — was written for a continent away from us, and because the work itself, on the haul-out yard at the Boat Haven, looks different on a 47°F February morning than it does in the photograph on the manufacturer's catalog page. The journal is the record of how it actually went, and it is the only document we ourselves trust at the start of a difficult refit.

We are six people: a master plumber, three journeymen, an apprentice, and an office. The shop sits at the south end of the boatyard, between SEA Marine and the haul-out pit, in Shop 7 — the long galvanized building behind the Travelift. We work only on vessels. We do not do houses, and we do not do shore-side plumbing for marina restrooms; the trade is wide enough without us drifting outside it.

If you have a project to bring us, the Classifieds desk is the place to begin. If you are reading us for the first time, the Features section will tell you more about how we work than any About page can. — M.G., editor.

The Port of Port Townsend Boat Haven sits on the south side of the Quimper Peninsula, on the inside of Point Hudson, six minutes by foot from the ferry terminal that connects the town to Whidbey Island via the Coupeville run. It is the largest haul-out facility on the Olympic Peninsula. The Port operates a 150-foot, 330-ton Marine Travelift; SEA Marine, our neighbor to the north, has a smaller 75-ton lift. We share the yard with sixty-some other marine trades — riggers, sailmakers, engine shops, electronics shops, the shipwrights at Haven Boatworks, and the spar-and-rig people on the back side of the pit. The Port of Port Townsend has been operating the boatyard, in one form or another, since 1925.¹

The town of Port Townsend itself has been a working port since 1851 and a designated wooden-boat town since 1976, when the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding moved into its present yard in nearby Port Hadlock.² The September Wooden Boat Festival, run by Northwest Maritime out of the Northwest Maritime Center at 431 Water Street, is the second-largest wooden-boat festival in the world. Most of our customers find us because they came to the festival, walked across Sims Way to the boatyard, saw what we do, and remembered six months later when something failed.

We are listed on the boatyard tenant board outside the Port office. To find us, you walk past the Travelift pit, turn left at the spar yard, and look for the long galvanized building with the red door — that is Shop 7. The bay door faces the chained-link side toward the strait. The office is just inside, to the right of the door, behind the chart table.