La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

We count “boat nights” as a measure of how busy the marina is over any given time period. Each boat that spends a single night on one of our guest docks counts, so a boat that is here for a week will count as a stay of seven boat nights. Over the past week, we have hosted 124 boat nights, or just over 30 boats per night on F and G docks. That is a lot of visitors coming to our town and for more than just a few hours. The boats that come in for lunch and shopping and then depart for home are counted separately and we get a good number of those as well.

The other place we use “boat nights” is in counting RVs, which are not, of course, boats, but the principle is the same. Over the same past week we hosted 291 “boat nights” of RVs, an average of just over 40 RVs per night. Again, that is a significant number of visitors coming to our charming town, by water and by land.

Maintenance tip: As I write this edition of Marina Moorings, I can hear an alarm sounding on a 20 foot boat on F Dock. When this happens, we call the boat owner to check what might be happening. In this case, the owner does not have her phone number listed with her registration information, nor does she have a card in the window giving a contact number.

It is a great idea to have a “call me” number in the window of vessels at the marina. When your boat is moored in a marina, there is a community of caring boaters who walk past boats all the time and can let the boater or marina office know if they see something wrong or hear an alarm sounding before anything worse happens. We have a great boating community here in La Conner and it’s one of many reasons people love it here.

Mark your calendar: The Chamber of Commerce’s Classic Car and Boat Show will be Aug.5 at the marina. Be sure to come by to see these fabulous cars and boats! I was blown away last year by the quality of vehicles and boats that showed up for this event and there’s no reason to expect this year will fall short.

See you on the Channel!

— Chris Omdal, harbormaster