Bainbridge Island is one of three Kitsap cities hosting National Marina Day festivities Saturday. Similar Marina Day  recognitions will take place across the country this weekend.

Events are scheduled at Waterfront Park from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. One unique activity planned for Eagle Harbor is an “anchoring with a local” workshop. Boaters will partner with an island mariner to learn how to anchor in 30 feet of water.

Back of Beyond Outfitters will offer a free “small boat mess-about” all day. There will be a rodeo for small non-motorized boats, demonstrations, and canoe tours of the harbor. Participants can bring their own craft or rent one on-site.

Other Marina Day activities will include free vessel examinations, a flare demonstration, sailboat rides, ROV hull inspections and rigging lessons.

Eagle Harbor also welcomed a special guest this week. MV Lotus (pictured above) is anchored off the Harbour Marina. Lotus will be on hand this weekend and on June 15-16 for the Bainbridge Wooden Boat Festival, according to the Lotus page on Facebook. Lotus was launched in 1909 and has plied Puget Sound and the Inside Passage for more than a century.

(Tad Sooter photos)

I had the honor of visiting local legend Dave Ullin aboard his tugboat last week.

Ullin is revered by many on the island for his self-sufficiency, integrity and generosity.

Many more only know him as a strikingly uncommon sight: a big man with big hands wearing thick wool pants, suspenders and a bag full of archaic tools tromping through Winslow. You don’t see people like Ullin much anymore. He looks like a man who stepped out of the old Hall Brothers Shipyard, circa 1892, and into modern Winslow.

Going below deck on Ullin’s tug is like taking that step in reverse. The boat is a living museum of old logging, fishing, farming, blacksmithing and shipbuilding equipment. All fitting snugly in designated spots. And it’s full of innovative touches, like Ullin’s custom-built hinged bunk, his kale sauerkraut-making operation, his clothes-mending station and a compact little workshop, complete with a 100-year-old drill press and tools Ullin forged himself.

I could go on and on about Dave Ullin. And I did, in THIS profile.

Ullin’s future is uncertain. The state gave him and the other dozen or so liveaboards eviction notices last month. There is some late-breaking hope, city leaders say, for a compromise. I detail that development HERE.

Check in on Wednesday to see where that proposal goes. The City Council is set to vote on a new plan that may allow as many as 14 liveaboards to remain anchored in the harbor.

The city sidelined a plan for regulating Eagle Harbor’s liveaboards this week after the state reversed its position on a key, and possibly contradictory, maritime regulation.

“Suddenly, we had a new interpretation (of state law) brought to us” from the state Department of Natural Resources, said Councilwoman Hilary Franz, who has led efforts in recent months to develop three options for creating an open water marina, the first of its kind in the state and the last bastion for a anchored-out liveaboard community in Puget Sound.

DNR’s reversed position on marina regulations last week spurred the city to cancel a discussion of the options at Wednesday’s night’s City Council meeting, further delaying open water marina plans that have spent nearly a decade in development.

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