This is what happened at The Manette Saloon Saturday night in Bremerton when L.A. rockers Prima Donna dropped into the area.
They are set to play The Funhouse tonight with Blue Ribbon Boys, Vast Void, and The Piniellas starting at 9 p.m. The cost at the door is just $5 too. How can you beat that?
For more about Prima Donna, check out their Twitter and Facebook profiles. More photos from the Bremerton show after the jump!
Continue reading Prima Donna Set To Destroy The Funhouse Tonight!
Ah, Seattle! Gateway to getaways! (Take it, Seattle tourism department, I give it to you free.)
Peninsula Daily News reports that the Port of Port Townsend has won a $1.3-million federal grant for construction of a new passenger ferry, to run between Port Townsend and Seattle. Best of all, it’s got to happen fairly quickly: “Sea trials must be finished by the summer of 2013 or the port will not be reimbursed for the construction of the vessel,” the newspaper quotes Port Director Larry Crockett as saying.
Regular readers of The SunBreak know our stance on this issue: Genius! Port Townsend is a lovely seaside village, with plenty of amusements (i.e., brewers and brewpubs). Also, there’s a castle. But as it takes some two-and-a-half hours to get there from Seattle by car, I haven’t been back since a trip via a temporary passenger ferry in 2008. With the new boat, the crossing should take about 75 minutes, says the Seattle Times. Better.
The Port of Port Townsend still needs a private company to operate the boat, which will likely sail more occasionally than a full-time ferry. (For one thing, there’s only the one boat, and it will need to be maintained and repaired.) “The initial plan is to run the service once or twice a day with a 49-passenger capacity, since a greater amount would require a larger crew and cost more to operate,” reports the PDN.
Even with suggested fares ranging from $20 to $25 one-way, the ferry would make only $1,225 per trip at the most. The idea is to keep the boat “no frills,” but already there’s been push back. What can’t ferry passengers live without? Coffee and Wi-Fi. Conflictedly, the Port of Port Townsend sees the ferry as primarily tourist-driven: 80 percent tourists and 20 percent commuters.
Not since Gilligan’s Island have tourists plumped for “no frills” when they’re considering what’s close to a three-hour tour by water. Instead of $40 to $50 round trip, tourists may be interested instead in Bremerton, the “Port Townsend that’s closer than Port Townsend,” especially once Bremerton, too, is served by passenger ferry. A trip to Bremerton is just over $7, round trip, since the run is operated by the Washington State Ferries.
That said, 2013 is a ways off yet, and Labor Day weekend is fast approaching. If you’re stalled on getaway ideas, Gogobot.com has a few Labor Day outings for you, in and out of town:
If you visited Bremerton on July 23, 2011, you might have just been passing through, driving off the ferry and exiting through the tunnel. The tunnel’s goal was to make Bremerton more pedestrian friendly, and in fact, above your head, for three blocks along a closed-to-traffic Pacific Avenue, about 4,000 people were standing and socializing right there in the road.
They were attending the Washington Beer Commission‘s first summertime beer festival, the cunningly named Summer Brewfest. “I haven’t seen this many people in Bremerton in 20 years,” resident Brian Duclos told the Kitsap Sun. “I can’t imagine a scenario where we would not do this again. This is absolutely a home run for us,” said Eric Radovich, WBC executive director.
I was there to meet Bremerton Mayor Patty Lent, after lunch at the Anthony’s at Harborside. A former Kitsap County Commissioner, Lent began her four-year term in January of 2010, the 32nd mayor (and second female mayor–Seattle has yet to follow up on Bertha Landes).
Lent was downtown for the Brewfest, then off to the 2011 U.S. Junior Amateur golf tournament at the Gold Mountain Golf Club. In between, coordinating meeting up with her husband Doug by cell phone, she gave me a primer on Bremerton’s revival.
Since the city’s founding in 1891, its fate has been entwined with that of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, mirroring Seattle’s relationship with Boeing in ways. Bremerton’s total population was only 37,700 in 2010, almost exactly half what it was during World War II.
Today, a little over 10,000 servicemen and women live and work in the Bremerton area, almost 13,000 civilians work at various military installations, the vast majority at the shipyard. The yard looks busy through 2016, said Lent; the Nimitz will leave this December, its space taken almost immediately by the USS Ronald Reagan in January 2012.
That’s largely the work of Norm Dicks, the powerful congressman who is Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Mayor Lent’s office is located in the new Norm Dicks Government Center.
Yet a city does not feed on appropriations alone, and so Lent was, when I met her just after noon, was enthused about the 1,200 tickets pre-sold for the Brewfest, and interested in showing me around Bremerton’s arts district, featuring outdoor art installations funded by a one percent for the arts program. I spotted a single homeless person, and asked how Bremerton was doing on that score–Lent had a ready answer for that.
2014 can’t come soon enough for Bremertonians who do own homes, but even so, the Harborside condominium development, which had stalled out after opening in the teeth of the recession, is 75 percent sold. That’s before the much-anticipated return of a Seattle-Bremerton foot ferry, this time featuring a hydrofoil.
An earlier incarnation in the late ’90s was tremendously popular, and Bremerton finally seemed ready to take advantage of its waterfront bedroom-community status, like Larkspur to San Francisco. It lies just 11 miles from Seattle, and a fast ferry can make the distance in just 30 minutes–burdened by lawsuits, however, it goes slower. After Rich Passage homeowners complained about erosion from the ferry’s wake, it was slowed to around 40 minutes, then finally halted in 2003.
Still, Bremerton has plenty of locals to cater to: A 9-plex movie theater is planned to go in atop a 250-car parking garage on Burwell Street. (Sadly, depending on how you look at it, the handsome Roxy Theater, designed by Bjarne Moe, is now used mainly for church services.)
This particular weekend in July, all 250 rooms in Bremerton’s Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriott and the Hampton Inn and Suites were full because of sports events. Kids played in the five downtown parks. Diners filled the patio of the Bremerton Bar & Grill (“40 new jobs,” noted Lent). The Toro Lounge, a tapas/gastropub, was just opening. (UPDATE: The Kitsap Wine Fest on Saturday, August 20, at the Harborside Fountain Park, drew 700 people.)
But Bremerton’s downtown is not all about the new–it’s home to the Kitsap Historical Society and Museum, and shoe people will want to visit the “Made for Walkin'” exhibit before it closes this December. You can also take a stroll down a recreation of an historic Bremerton Main Street, and you have a few more chances to eat your way through Kitsap history.
You can also pop into the Aurora Valentinetti Puppet Museum; Stanley Hess, the curator, is happy to take your questions about the puppets, which hail from all over the world. Not far is the Amy Burnett Gallery and “world famous Kitsap Peninsula Pyrex Museum.” This last is a real thing which must be seen to be believed. (There’s a “That Hat” party there this September 15, from 5:30 to 9 p.m., including a wine and jazz reception.)
Back at the Brewfest, I was sampling from among the 23 microbrews there (Chuckanut’s Alt German Ale, Port Townsend Brewing’s Hop Diggidy IPA, Iron Horse’s Irish Death, Valholl Brewing’s Poulsbo Abbey Wit–the line for Slippery Pig Brewing never shortened enough for me to try it) when I ran into Bremerton City Councilman Roy Runyon, who was delightedly surveying the Brewfest crowds.
While Runyon clearly still smarted from losing the foot ferry service years ago, he had hopes that the new ferry will be running in 2012. A 30-minute ride has come to seem talismanic to Bremertonians, hundreds of whom were on the jumbo ferry with me on the way back to Seattle, on their way to a Mariners game. By their reckoning, Safeco Field is just a few minutes walk from downtown Bremerton.
On July 27, a resident of Erlands Point Road noticed a gray whale on the beach. “I thought it was a log at first, then I saw the breathing,” Jim Ryan told the Kitsap Sun. “It looked pretty beat up.”
The whale was 30 feet long, likely a juvenile, and emaciated, and died within two hours. Cascade Research and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists plan to do a necropsy to try to determine an official cause of death, but on average four to six gray whales strand themselves each year on Washington beaches.
Gray whales will grow to about 50 feet in length and live up to 70 years. Each spring, gray whales migrate between Baja and the Arctic, showing up off the Washington coast by late March through early May. A few hundred whales make up the Pacific Coast Feeding Group; these apparently don’t care for either Arctic waters or long-distance travel, remaining off the Pacific coast instead, while the rest make the 5,000-7,000 mile journey.
Outside of an as-yet-contentious die-off in 1999-2000, when 50 gray whales washed up in Washington alone, and the overall population dropped by perhaps 6,000, the eastern Pacific gray whale population is keeping to around 20,000. (They’ve been protected from commercial hunting by the International Whaling Commission since 1949.)
The initial hypothesis on the die-off was that it was a success story–there were now so many gray whales that they had exceeded the available food supply. But Stephen Palumbi, a Stanford University marine sciences professor, made news in 2007 by arguing that, based on genetic diversity, the total gray whale population had once been closer to 100,000.
This estimate has remained difficult to reconcile with known whaling results, though Palumbi points to the critically endangered population of the northwest Pacific as the likely reservoir of “missing” whales.
Whatever the oceans could once support, NOAA researchers estimate that the eastern Pacific gray whale contingent bumps up against current food supply limits at around 25,000. (See pdf of “Population status of the eastern North Pacific stock of gray whales in 2009.”) Increasingly, researchers have wondered how climate change is affecting the whales’ Arctic feeding grounds.
A 2011 paper,”What Happened to Gray Whales during the Pleistocene? The Ecological Impact of Sea-Level Change on Benthic Feeding Areas in the North Pacific Ocean,” has revisited the census vs. genetics debate:
This census-based estimate, however, conflicts by orders of magnitude with molecular analyses of gray whale genetic diversity, which suggest that pre-whaling population sizes were dramatically larger, up to 118 k individuals. (This molecular estimate covered the entirety of possible North Pacific metapopulations, although distributing the mean molecular value across both western and eastern population still indicates that eastern gray whales are 28–56% of their historical abundances.) If the molecular data on historical, pre-whaling estimates of gray whale population size are accurate, then the fixation of today’s population at much lower carrying capacity may indicate that the structure of nearshore ecosystems in the North Pacific has fundamentally changed over the past few centuries.
Co-author and evolutionary biologist David Lindberg, at UC Berkeley, suggests that the answer to the discrepancy may lie in the behavior of the gray whales who take up summer homes off northern Washington State and Vancouver Island. They’re believed to feed on herring and krill, rather than primarily sucking up nutrients from an ocean floor sediment slurry. Lindberg says it’s the earlier whaling that may have harassed gray whales into their arduous migrations and bottom-feeding. Now that the coast is clear, the whales could be relaxing into old habits, but finding the coastal corner stores don’t carry as much as they used to.
NOAA’s Dave Weller has read Lindberg’s paper and agrees that gray whales “are definitely a catholic feeder,” with an opportunistic edge. But he says the evidence isn’t there for large-scale emaciation due to food supply shortages (caused by climate change or other factors). Clearly, he says, the melting of Arctic sea ice has prompted a redistribution of ocean-floor (or “benthic”) food sources.
Due to increased sunlight penetration and water temperatures, the nutrient base that nourishes ocean-floor life (such as the amphipods that gray whales hoover up) has been shifting over the past two decades, and the gray whales have expanded their range from the Chukchi Basin to the Beaufort Sea. Presumably they’re chasing their food, but in fact “we don’t have very good data on the abundance of food” across their feeding area, says Weller.
What Weller and others believe is that, actually, gray whales are one of the species poised to take advantage of climate change’s swiftness–as it mows down less flexible eaters, the whales will find more elbow fluke room at the dining table. We will have to hope that we are no less adaptable with how we eat.
