Schooner Adventuress to lead Sunday’s Locks Centennial Boat Parade

This Sunday, July 9 is the Locks Centennial Boat Parade, and the historic schooner Adventuress will lead the pack. The classic sailboat will enter the large lock around 10:15 am Sunday morning, joined by around 40 other vessels in a parade from Salmon Bay to Lake Union.

The opening 1917 parade was led by the SS Roosevelt, which had, about a decade earlier, returned from the North Pole under the command of Admiral Robert Peary. At 184 feet, it was built for Arctic travel with a hull 30 inches thick in places. According to History Link, Peary reached the North Pole in 1909, and little more than a year later, the Roosevelt was sold to ship salvager John Arbuckle. After his death in 1912, the boat changed ownership three times in the next three years, and by the time she reached Seattle in April 1917, the Roosevelt had been converted to a supply-transport boat for the United States Bureau of Fisheries, which planned to use her in the Pribilof Islands of Alaska.

The Adventuress was built in 1913, and according to Catherine Collins, Executive Director of Sound Experiencethe schooner one of only two National Historic Landmark (NHL) sailing ships still in active operation on the West Coast and is a Puget Sound icon. And, like the Roosevelt, she was built in a Maine shipyard.

From Collins:

Adventuress can normally be found in Port Townsend undergoing maintenance or restoration in winters, but during the spring, summer and fall, she goes sailing. Since 1989, the ship has been owned and operated by Sound Experience, a nonprofit dedicated to the Salish Sea through education, empowerment and inspiration. More than 60,000 “youth of all ages” have sailed on day and overnight programs in the past two decades, and Adventuress sails not for one, but for all. This year, her crew sport the motto, “We Are All Shipmates.”

Long and lean, the 133-foot Adventuress was designed along the lines of a fishing boat, a yacht whose maiden voyage was to the Arctic in search of a Bowhead Whale specimen for the American Museum of Natural History. They didn’t find a whale, and Adventuress went into service for the San Francisco Pilots soon afterward, navigating the shifting sands of the bar to deposit knowledgeable pilots aboard incoming ships for decades.

For more information about sailing aboard Adventuress, call Robin at 360-379-0438, extension 1; or email robin@soundexp.org.

Photo by Jan Anderson, courtesy Sound Experience

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