Summertime in the Olympia Region
Olympia Harbor Days Festival
Olympia Harbor Days (OHD) is an annual non-profit festival celebrating the maritime heritage of the Puget Sound in Olympia for a weekend of entertainment, food, art, history and a last farewell to summer.
The Olympia Harbor Days Festival, a free event offered every Labor Day Weekend since 1974, showcases the vintage tugboats with a walk-aboard show at the docks and races in the bay, tall ships, steam ships and other historic vessels of twentieth century commerce on the Puget Sound. On land, festival attendees enjoy great food, great music, a wide variety of booths featuring local artists and craftsmen, plus nautical and marine themed attractions and hands on activities, including Olympia’s tugboat heritage and tribal history. On water, maritime fans enjoy tours of historic tugboats and vessels, cruises on Budd Bay and vintage tugboat races. All in all, here are over 300 things to do and see.
Bring your kids to this family-friendly maritime celebration and fuel their dreams of working on the water and sailing the world when they grow up. The location at Percival Landing is a well-known Pacific Northwest maritime landmark located in downtown Olympia, the Washington state Capitol, and is the southern-most tip of the Puget Sound, a destination for many who travel by boat. Hotels, shops, galleries, museums, restaurants, and bars featuring locally brewed beers, wines and distillery products are all within walking distance of the event.
History of Harbor Days & the Tugboats
Back before there were cell phones and radio communications, skippers and captains of the large ships moving cargo (and people) into the Port of Olympia relied on tugboats to navigate them into harbor. Spotters would catch site of the tall ships and let the skippers of steam-driven tugboats know that sheep needed to be brought into port. Smart tugboat skippers would already be set to go, tossing their lines and leaving the docks to race out to intercept the ships. Usually, the first tug to reach the ship got the job of bringing her into port. The start of tugboat racing was born.
Now a major Puget Sound maritime festival, Olympia Harbor Days began in 1974 as a small, one-day gathering of historic vessels at the Port of Olympia marine terminal. The informal, end-of-summer event was organized by the newly-formed Olympia-South Sound Maritime Chapter (OSSMC) of the State Capital Historical Association, which operated the State Capital Museum. The OSSMC’s founders were Olympia resident and regionally-known maritime historian Gordon Newell, local boat builder Albert Giles, and State Capitol Museum curator Patrick Haskett. A year later, in 1975, the OSSMC’s Harbor Day event focused on vintage tugboats with addition of the first tugboat race in the South Sound. This marked a return of traditional tug racing in Puget Sound that had ended 20 years earlier in Seattle.
In 1978, a separate downtown arts and crafts event, Harborfair, was inaugurated as a companion shore-side event. Organized by downtown merchant Marti Galbreath, Harborfair included arts, crafts and food vendors, and entertainment acts. Harbor Days and Harborfair continued as coordinated but separately-organized events through 1983 when they were co-sponsored by the OSSMC, City of Olympia, Port of Olympia, and the Olympia Downtown Development Association. The two events merged under the Olympia Harbor Days name starting in 1984, with the same primary co-sponsors.
Olympia's Tugboat Heritage
A competitive spirit is alive and well among tug owners each year, although many of them will deny it. Fuel loads are lightened, some install “racing” propellers, and hull bottoms are cleaned and painted in preparation for the races.
The community’s commitment to its tugboat heritage doesn’t stop with the annual Harbor Days festival. The venerable local tug Sand Man is now owned by the non-profit Sand Man Foundation, which was chartered in 1997. The Sand Man has been on year-round public display at Percival Landing since 2005 under a long-term agreement with the City of Olympia. Based on historical photographs, her moorage at Percival Landing, just north of the Olympia Oyster House restaurant, is the exact site where the boat was moored about 1910. Sand Man is open to the public free of charge, principally on weekends, as a floating museum and interpretive center. She also remains the local host tug for the annual Olympia Harbor Days event.
Visit the official Olympia Harbor Days page for the general schedule, food & drink and other vendors, plus tons of historical information.
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