Olympia Harbor Days

LABOR DAY WEEKEND - SEPTEMBER 1-3, 2023

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 assortment 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, there 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.

Location and Directions

Olympia Harbor Days is located on the Waterfront

Mailing Address: PO Box 2875, Olympia WA 98507

CONSIDER RIDING THE BUS! Visit INTERCITY TRANSIT for routes and schedules! Free Parking available at Market St & Marine Drive made available by the Port of Olympia.

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.