My only boat is a red canoe perched on sawhorses in the back yard. But lack of a larger vessel hasn’t kept me from the Everett Yacht Club over the years.
At my wedding rehearsal dinner in 1982, family from out of town enjoyed a Port Gardner view from the club’s dining room. For years, an annual auction benefiting my children’s school was held at the yacht club building.
On Saturday, I once again attended that auction – at the Holiday Inn in Everett.
“That’s a long way from the water,” Don Loken of Everett said.
He’s right. The newly renovated Holiday Inn is a fine meeting place for a large group, but there’s no waterfront view.
Loken was commodore of the Everett Yacht Club in 1968, the year the club opened its multilevel, $500,000 facility overlooking the 14th Street yacht basin. During the club’s heyday, it was a thriving boating and social organization.
Bob Johnson, another former commodore, recalls when hundreds of members weren’t boaters at all.
“I remember taking my family there for Easter brunch,” Johnson said.
Now owned by the Port of Everett, the old yacht club building has been operated in recent years as the Marine View Conference Center. The Everett Rotary Club, wedding parties and organizations such as our auction group used its big conference room.
Folks who remember dressing up for festive occasions there might be surprised at the look of that spacious ballroom today. The place where many sipped champagne and dined on prime rib is now divided into a meeting room and workplace cubicles. Instead of a dance floor, its decor would make Dilbert feel at home.
“It’s the Port Gardner Wharf project office now,” said Lisa Mandt, spokeswoman for the port. “All of our contractors, the Maritime Trust Co. and a lot of our port staff are there.”
Everett waterfront development eventually will include condominiums, a new 12th Street yacht basin, a plaza and amphitheater, retail space and public walkways.
The yacht club still uses a large room on the second floor of its old building and continues to meet every Wednesday evening, said Andrea Kirby, who will be installed this weekend as the club’s rear commodore.
Groups such as wedding parties can continue to rent the smaller upstairs ballroom from the yacht club, Kirby and Mandt said, but there is no longer on-site catering. The Rotary now meets at Naval Station Everett.
Kirby said the group has about 150 people with full memberships and about 60 social members.
“It’s a diverse group of people of every age,” said Kirby, who owns a 26-foot powerboat. “There are people in their 30s and people in their 80s. It’s not stuffy at all. I’m in it because I wanted to learn more about boating.”
She keeps her boat at her home in Snohomish. Many members have moorage at the Everett Marina, and some keep boats at Dagmar’s Marina. Kirby said owners of one of the club’s largest yachts, a 70-footer, live on a farm in Idaho.
The Everett Yacht Club, which will mark its 100th anniversary in 2007, sponsors cruises throughout the year and is part of the Grand 14 group of area yacht clubs. Members are gearing up for Opening Day and the boat parade in Seattle the first weekend in May.
Mandt said the yacht club eventually will have a new home, but its old one won’t be demolished. “It will be completely renovated,” she said.
The building will be part of what Mandt called the new development’s “hospitality district,” an area of restaurants and “lots of public access.”
A new building in the 12th Street marina area is expected to house several yacht clubs someday, she said.
Loken, who owns a boathouse and a wooden-hull boat at Everett Marina, has seen lots of history come and go on the waterfront. He remembers the yacht club’s previous home at the foot of Hewitt Avenue near where the alumina dome is now.
“The meeting room was in an old stern-wheeler, the Black Prince. It was out of the water,” Loken said. “The port decided to move the yacht club to its present location. We didn’t want to do that. We were perfectly happy where we were.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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