The waters of the South Puget Sound have been a source of food for people for a long time. The land around the sound was a good place to live many generations before European settlers discovered it. Clams and oysters are relatively easy to harvest and the indigenous people who fished the waters were able to do so from open boats. The relatively protected waters and the abundance of massive trees along the shore meant that dugout canoes were among the most popular of working craft for many years. As more and more settlers came to the Puget Sound, they brought with them different boat-building techniques and boat designs. It was natural for boatbuilding to develop as one of the area’s industries. Ships to cross the Pacific began to emerge from some of the larger boatyards and some of the area cities became home to sailmakers and chandlers and riggers and other specialized services.

Like many other ports around the nation, the role of the port of Olympia has changed with the times. Olympia lies at the southern end of the Puget Sound and never had the deepest or busiest of Puget Sound ports. However, the area between the city of Olympia and what is now known as Boston Harbor became a place for logs that were cut in the surrounding forests to be unloaded from trains and moved on the water. At one location, trestles were built out over the water so that the train cars could dump logs directly into the sound where they were gathered to gather in giant rafts and pushed and pulled by tugboats to sawmills elsewhere on the sound. The rate of cutting the trees has slowed and the methods of handling the longs have changed, but there is still a significant industry of loading logs onto ships for journeys to sawmills.

As is true with many other places alongside quiet waters, recreational boating developed alongside the working boats. Recreational craft were initially small, designed for day outings and picnics. Rowing craft and small sailboats are still common all around the Puget Sound. Olympia has also become home to some significant yachts, both motor yachts and sailing craft. The San Juan Islands and the inland passages to Alaska are very popular destinations for recreational vessels to explore and the Puget Sound makes a great home base for those craft and a place for preparations and fitting out for longer journeys for craft that have come up the coast from California headed for the adventures of British Columbia and Alaska.

The Sound is also home to a number of people who live full time aboard boats of various sizes and configurations and spend seasons of their lives in port anchored or moored.

The City of Olympia has provided public access to the sound at several locations. When I am visiting I usually paddle from Boston Harbor or from Percival Landing. Percival Landing is right in downtown Olympia, a short distance from the Washington State Capitol Building. There is ample free parking and a series of ramps and docks that rise and fall with the tides making it easy to launch and retrieve my kayak at any water level. My rowboat is a bit beamy to fit through the gates and roll down the ramps at Percival Landing, so I usually launch it from Boston Harbor. It is a little bit farther to drive, but sill a very convenient place for a bit of recreational rowing.

Compared to the reservoirs where I am used to paddling in the Hills, the waters of the South Puget Sound seem big to me. There is often a light chop on the surface of the water and the boats that use the waters are much bigger than those I encounter on the lakes of South Dakota. From my little kayak on the surface of the water it is eight or ten feet to where the rubber bumpers start on the tug boats that are waiting at Olympia Harbor. The deck is several feet higher and the wheelhouse towers over me like a multiple-story building. Even the private yachts and sailboats are large by the standards of our tiny waters. I paddled along the row of slips reading the names of the boats off of their sterns. The choices of names range from whimsical to adventurous. Boats that are named from characters in fiction are common. So are those with made-up and hybrid names. Some of the names of the boats tell stories. One large multi-million dollar motor yacht is named “Knot Hers,” and it may hint of a painful divorce or at least a tense relationship with different attitudes and priorities about boats. Another, named “Dulcinea,” hints of the romance of the sea and chasing adventures.

It is also fun to note the home ports of the boats. The majority are from Olympia, of course, but there are boats in the slips from Portland, Seattle, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Anacortes, and San Francisco. I imagine painting the transom of a small row boat with the home port Rapid City and then leaving it tied up at the dock for people to wonder what route my trip took getting from home to these waters. I do name my boats, but don’t put the home port on them. I’ve paddled “Little Awk,” “Wee Lassie,” “Prospector,” and “Paha Sapa” and rowed “Mister E” in the Sound over the years. Paddling here often inspires me to think of making other boats and I’ve been imagining a triple kayak with room for grandchildren in the middle cockpit as I paddle on this vacation.

There is something deep in human nature that predisposes us to be attracted to the sea. There are no sailors in my family for many generations. We have been farmers and merchants and professionals, but I know of no stories of ancestors who were mariners. Yet in my generation, I have a cousin who settled in Belize and built a large wooden sailing boat from which he runs charters and explores the Caribbean and I find myself inexplicably drawn to paddle in the waters wherever I find myself.

I won’t be outfitting a ship for a trip to Alaska soon, but I do enjoy paddling amongst the boats that will soon be heading for distant ports.

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