This year’s Penn Cove Water Festival May 10 will be a full day of family fun with toe-tapping music, colorful stories, great food, entertaining games, boat rides, Native American canoe races, crafts, historical exhibits and environmental education.
Penn Cove Water Festival is fun, with a serious purpose. “It is about preserving a legacy,” said Festival Coordinator Roxallanne Medley. “The role of water is indispensable in our lives. We want people to understand this better and be aware of what they can do in their own lives to help preserve that legacy.” The beginnings of Penn Cove’s Water Festival can be traced to the early 1920s, when businessmen organized the event to attract tourists. They invited Native Americans to bring their canoes and race them. World War II brought an end to the festival, but in 1992 Island County Beach Watchers and other community members revived it.
Medley says this year’s event brings back favorite activities from past festivals together with some exciting new attractions.
Shifty Sailors will return to the Front Street stage.
For children, a runaway favorite returning again this year is a train made out of recycled barrels and powered by a lawnmower engine.
New this year for those who want to get out on the water is the Langley Explorer. The 20-passenger craft will be available for 30- to 40-minute, naturalist-narrated tours for $5 from the town wharf.
Tour leaders will include: Phyllis Kind of Greenbank, president of Whidbey Audubon and member of Island County WSU Beach Watchers and the Marine Resources Committee; Susan Horton, Island County weed control coordinator, discussing the Langley Middle School’s Penn Cove Spartina Project; Gary Wood of Coupeville, executive director of the Island County Marine Resources Committee on forage fish, shoreline hardening and aquaculture; Roger Sherman of Coupeville, maritime historian and member of the Island County Marine Resources Committee.
Also new this year is a day of educational and historic activities at Island County Historical Museum, including a special Water Festival canoe exhibit, Native American children’s crafts, flint-knapping demonstrations and workshop, and carving demonstrations by Kevin Paul, an artist from the Swinomish/Colville Tribe. The museum will also be premiering and selling his Native artwork in the gift store.
Water Festival activities will be under way all day over a large area, and a free shuttle service will transport the public between Captain Coupe Park and downtown.
Native American canoe racing is invariably the big draw, but it is just one of the many highlights of this action-packed day. Tribes from Western Washington and British Columbia have been invited as honored guests of the town. Many Coupeville residents are baking loaves of bread to give as gifts to these visitors.
For those interested in experiencing Penn Cove close-up and quietly, kayaks will be for rent at Coupeville Park boat launch.
For children, 13 activities will be offered in three locations: Captain Coupe Park, Front Street and the Historical Museum. These include rope making, plankton theatre, piling fun, watershed model, wheel of water, a water treasure hunt, non-point pollution game, nature prints and rubbings, and more.
Live entertainment will be under way from noon to 5:30 p.m. at the Front Street Stage. Auto-harpist and singer Jonathan Betz-Zall of Edmonds will present a water-related program of stories, songs and participation games.
A popular group from South Whidbey, The Other Side, will entertain with guitar, banjo and vocals. Special guest is vocalist Maribeth Crowe. They perform finger-picking acoustics and old-time harmony in bluegrass, traditional and folk tunes, mixed with a good deal of humor.
The Tsimshian Storyboys of Bow will share Native American stories. The three brothers are 12, 9- and 6- years-old, and have appeared before .
Cricket on the Hearth, of Olympia, a Celtic and folk group, will be making its first appearance north of King County.
The public will have many opportunities to learn more about the environment and our water legacy from a wide range of exhibits on display.
At Coupeville Recreation Hall, the public may view art and photography entered in this year’s visual arts contest, which celebrates the theme: Preserving the Legacy. All entries will reflect the role water plays in the life of Whidbey Island’s plants, animals and people. Prizes will be awarded, based on the public’s vote, to the top three entries by both youths and adults in each of two categories: Photography and Drawing/Painting.
Vendors will display and sell their wares in such categories as silver jewelry, Native American art prints and bird houses.
Education starts early
The improvement could be as humble as installing a rain barrel that collects and saves water from your roof. Or as lovely as designing an entire rooftop garden. It could be as practical as creating a driveway of permeable pavers or gravel, rather than asphalt. Or making a road narrow instead of wide.
All are examples of Low Impact Development (LID), an idea whose time has come on Whidbey Island. Home-buyers, home owners, real estate agents, developers, re-modelers – all are discovering the environmental and personal rewards of these earth-friendly and water-friendly approaches to the relentless march of development.
The public is invited to learn more and start visualizing the possibilities Thursday, May 8, in a 7 pm presentation at Coupeville Recreation Hall. Speakers will be Gwenn Maxfield, assistant public works director for Island County, and Harriet Beale, outreach manager of Puget Sound Action Team.
“We will explore the issues generated by surface-water runoff,” Maxfield says. Development is creating more impervious areas, which cause rainfall to run off rather than infiltrate the ground and recharge the aquifer. “Low-impact methods can attractively and efficiently offset some of the problems,” she says.
The program is sponsored by the town of Coupeville and WSU/Island County Beach Watchers.
