Luck and a promise for starboard bunk

This morning two busy women in the trades, one a shipwright with another boat on deadline and the other an expert on interior cushions with 4 other boats in line for Festival projects, are meeting me at Pax to decide if it's remotely feasible to finish the starboard bunk in time for festival. Boat projects, like house projects, are always a maze of details and design, deadlines and delays. Tear that out or leave that in to make the measurement so an order can be made? Experience makes a might difference and each project on the boat, like the Oklahoma house last year, got closer to reality, budget and otherwise. Thankfully, I've got no one depending on this outcome but me. There's enough complete already so to have a comfortable place for folks to sit for festival and a significant progress made on the interior that the answers this morning aren't under pressure. Sure, I'd love to get the mahogany on and varnished, the new ply seat with hatches complete and installed AND get the new 5" foam and cushions finished. But this timeline for all 3 of us is extremely tight. For it to all happen well, all 3 of us will have to be smart in detailing the steps, meet our part of the deadline, be lucky with other projects in our lives, basically be totally in-sync. Sometimes that happens. Touch wood!

Custom Interior Cushions: Gwendolyn Tracey

PAX has new main cabin cushions thanks to Port Townsend interior designer, Gwendolyn Tracy with Fine Yacht Interiors. Gwendolyn has been sewing since she was in her teens, and it shows. Her custom canvas shop above the Blue Moose Cafe in Port Townsend's "big boat" shipyard is organized with that mix of artistic verve and production room stations neatly sequenced from her decades of experience. Fabric rolls, cushion materials, sample and swatch books are snuggly tucked into functional spaces around the center piece, the giant cutting table. Sewing machines are at one end, where she can see the road the 300 ton haulout takes as it brings her often very large clients to and from their work sites with one of a variety of boatbuilder or repair businessses. Townsend Bay Marine is next door, as is Haven Boatworks. Gwendolyn designs cushions, interiors, covers, you name it. She has done huge projects like the latest mega yacht from TBM to major historic boat restorations done by a variety of shipwright shops in Puget Sound. In between the big boat and big budget projects, she manages to squeeze in smaller projects like PAX. We needed custom settee cushions, forpeak bedding, and some creative seat pillows for the bulkhead transition. The transition pieces will expand comfortable seating options in the main cabin when we're doing tours aboard the boat, seminars and charters. For a look at the first phase of the project, the Port settee seats, take a look at the photo galley. Gwendolyn can be reached at 360-379-0661.