Blake Island State Park August, 28th 2025 — Labor Day weekend starts this Friday. Today is Thursday and I expected people to start to fill the docks last night. Instead, it is more than half empty this morning.
We were here last Friday. The marina was completely full with boats, jockeying and rafting.
Jennifer is an expert arriving when there will be space on the dock. She has done it every time this trip, but yesterday she could have arrived well into the night and still had places to dock.
This is our fifth time at Blake island, I think, which makes it the most popular place we’ve ever been. At high tide, standing on the dock, the Seattle skyline is visible with the Space Needle in a valley by itself.
We’ve anchored at the dock a few times, and at the mooring buoys on the protected Southwest side and anchored, as opposed to mooring over there as well. On one ill-fated night, we picked up a buoy on the North side. The North side picks up the wake from the ferries, which is annoying, but it also picks up the fetch from the North winds, which often blow here. We watched the mast on a monohull last night wave ominously in the air. It wasn’t a boat I wanted to be on.
For only the second time, we met a volunteer working the docks. His name is Leo. He approached me about volunteering next year. It is not something I see myself doing, but Jennifer is interested.
Leo is retired like most dock hosts and lives on a ranger tug with his spouse, docked in the spot reserved for them. He is a very nice, smart, orderly and organized man. I don’t know how many years he’s been doing this, but it must be a few. Then again, one gets a lot of experience in a single season.
The harbor here is small and holds about 40 boats. The park is the most profitable one in the state system and has dozens of camp sites and group camp sites and did for a number of years also have a theater and catering venue run by Argosy, one of the big Seattle boat companies. The building is empty now and maintained by the state, which fixes roof leaks and replaces the sprung boards in the outer skin. I don’t know what will happen to the building. This is all a result of COVID.
Leo has told me about the multiple plans for the harbor. The first, and the one that will be implemented for the forth coming years, is just to maintain what they have. The docks are in pretty good shape. The other two are to enlarge the harbor by moving the breakwater out and in a second version also dig into the park. There are a million-and-a-half boaters in the Seattle area, Leo tells me. Though given how empty the dock is, I don’t know.
There are trails that run all over the park and the remains of the estate that was here. It seems that most of the parks were gifts from families that no longer wanted them. Time marches on and now the estate it would be the most coveted and expensive real estate in the Seattle area. The ebb and flow of the wealth in Seattle has made this a lovely, wonderful spot.
In past years, the island has been overrun with raccoons and deer. Jennifer got a hell of a surprise one night when she shown the flashlight out through the transparent drop boards and faced a raccoon staring back at her. Now, there are very few of either thanks to some sort of disease that came through a few years ago and killed almost all of the animals. It does make it a much nicer park
We’re returning from spending three nights in Gig Harbor visiting with our friend John Riley. The explicit purpose was to replace a solar panel on his boat. The panel had become damaged during some rough weather when John dragged into another boat. I had thought the panel didn’t work and looking at it, I became quite certain it didn’t work, but it did. Replacing the panel took about 35 or 40 minutes.
We spent the rest of our three days there wandering around the town, eating ice cream, touring the Marina area in our Portland Pudgy and watching people rowing and the classes for the little kids in their optimus dinghies. This part of the trip has been very relaxing. I haven’t been doing much and I’m itching to change that. This blog post is, I guess, the first step in that.
Beginning the night of the of 30th or the 31st we will be in Port Townsend for almost two weeks. It will be a busy time for us with friends coming to stay at the house even though we won’t be there; Jennifer running to the airport and the hospital to take a friend for examinations and procedures; and running down to Olympia to help her daughter move from a dorm room to an apartment.
I will stay to mind the boat. While Jennifer does those things, I’ll catch up on accounting, taxes and who knows what else.
It looks like we will stay here on Blake Island through Saturday morning. When we think about the other places we will anchor none of them have as many things to do or are as relaxing as this park.
We’ve come to recognize some of the returning people. They say hello to us.
Many of the people here are boaters who spends significant amounts of time on their boat. But surprisingly to Jennifer and me, most have never been out of Puget Sound. That wouldn’t have surprised us before we went to Alaska. I’m in a cohort group that are blue water sailors. It’s unfair of us to be surprised.
Many of the boaters are retired with large boats that they have accumulated across their boating career. They generally have grandchildren on board with them, and sometimes the intervening generation as well. There are a number of open skiffs that come across from Seattle full of camping gear and the family. They use the carts provided by the park and oftentimes their own cart to set up camp. I see the fathers out walking very early in the morning with a child or a dog or sometimes both, while, presumably, the mother sleeps.
Jennifer talks with everyone on the dock much more than I do. This is quite a juxtaposition from years gone by, I think. If she speaks to them long enough, she will tell them that we traveled to Alaska, but not generally about the Hawaii gig.
The truth is, most people don’t travel to Alaska because they work. And no one has the minimum of three months to take off and do so. We didn’t spend August in the Desolation Sound area to see whether the number of people and starlink were the same as last year. My guess is that it is not the same. But you’ll need someone else to tell you that.
It’s five pm, Friday. Boats have been coming and going all day. Fifty-fifty small versus big. Not busy, peaceful.
We’ll leave tomorrow at nine am. It turns out there is a web cam. We’ll learn about the weekend at Blake Island that way.
