Coming event

Boy, once I start writing I sure make up for taking a few weeks off. But there is so much coming up in the next couple of months that I want to tell you about, that it is hard to keep quiet. Let's start with next weekend. How can you turn down an invitation that starts like this:

"Imagine sitting in a natural amphitheater overlooking picturesque Gamble Bay on a warm August afternoon in the Pacific Northwest and looking out where once the oldest operating sawmill in the United States processed and shipped lumber all over the West Coast. Steeped in history, Port Gamble is the perfect place to have one of the West's few maritime music festivals. Now in our fifth year, we've played host to the cream of the Northwest maritime music community and continue to have much fun doing it!"

This is the opening paragraph from the "Port Gamble Maritime Music Festival" page on the internet (http://www.portgamblemaritimemusic.com/) where the writer is describing what it will be like to be here on Saturday, Aug. 14th, from noon to 5 pm. to participate in the festival.

I must admit to being a bit partial to this kind of music which seems like it is hanging on by a thread in  those few "seafaring communities" (like Port Townsend, for instance) where stories are told through music of shipwrecks and collisions, calms and storms, where the heroes were often those who went down to the sea.

And what better place to tell some of those stories (and hear them) than in a place like Port Gamble, where men have been going to sea (and often coming home) since the middle of the century before last. The venue is the grass field between the Port Gamble General Store and what we "locals" call the Walker Ames house, maybe a hundred feet away.

If the weather is good and people show up in town the way they have been doing  this summer, there may not be room for everyone, and you may miss  the likes of  Pint and Dale or  Shifty Sailors or Watch the Sky or even Sanger and Diddle.

This is my kind of Port Gamble fun ... no noisy cannons going off, no running till you collapse, no rain, just listening, singing, visiting a few stores and eating an ice cream cone on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.. If you haven't been here for awhile, come this Saturday and you will get a  taste of what this place is about.