Marina Moorings, Port of Skagit

The weather has been fabulous for boating this summer and our guest docks continue to be full. Many of our guests are stopping in La Conner on their way to or from Seattle. They come in around lunch time, relax for a day in town, then head out early to get into the traffic lines at the locks.

We had a boat come through this week that was over 100 feet long. This is pretty large for our guest docks and the channel. Our guest docks are 500 feet long, so over 20% was covered by just this one vessel. And moored in front of it was the second largest boat we have seen this summer, a beautiful 90 foot yacht. These two were pretty impressive, parked nose to nose, and combined they took up half the dock.

We have had RV guests from all over the country and Canada and even a few Europeans. It’s remarkable how some of these travelers get around and how many of them love visiting La Conner.

We constantly get questions about the depth of the channel. People get very nervous when they pass through a constrained feature such as this. Usually in the salt water around here if it is wet there’s plenty of water for navigation, whereas in the channel the max depth is 12 feet when measured at a zero tide. We lose a bit of that depth with a minus tide, so a minus 2 tide gives us a nominal depth of 10-feet. A boat’s draft has to be subtracted from that, so a boat with a 3-foot draft theoretically has 7 feet of water under it. This means that any obstruction on the bottom would have to be over 6 feet high to interfere with this boat’s passage. Most boats are just fine passing through at any stage of tide, but some report they have touched bottom in various places. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scheduled to dredge the channel this fall and we hope this improves boater safety.

Our first summer hires have left us to go back to college. These are WSU students and they start early. We will gradually lose the rest as their schools start up. They are a high-powered bunch and we wish them the best after a summer of good work!

See you on the Channel!

— Chris Omdal, harbormaster