The Olympia Harbor Days Festival, a free event offered every Labor Day Weekend, is an award winning free and family friendly event that showcases many of the vintage tugboats of the Puget Sound with a walk aboard show at the docks and races in the bay. Visitors to the event may also find tall ships, steamships, other historic vessels of twentieth century commerce, tribal canoes, and current recreational small watercraft. Harbor cruises on Budd Bay are also offered.
On land, festival attendees enjoy great food, great music, great artisans, plus nautical and marine themed attractions, and hands on activities, including Olympia’s tugboat heritage, tribal history and the working waterfront with Port of Olympia tours. 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. Olympia Harbor Days Festival also includes locally hand built small watercraft, tribal cultural sharings, sand carving, a LEGO Harbor Build, and dancing pirates just to name a few. The location at Percival Landing is a well-known Pacific Northwest maritime landmark located in downtown Olympia, the WA state Capitol, and is the southern-most tip of the Puget Sound, a destination for many who travel by boat. Hotels, shops, gallery’s, a children’s museum, restaurants, and bars featuring locally brewed beers, wines and distillery products are all within walking distance of the event. For more to do before or after your festival visit go to www.experienceolympia.com.
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.
