Port to Commercial Fishermen: Drop Dead
The Port is on a mission to kill Fishermen's Terminal and thereby stamp out one of the last embers of working Seattle. By "kill" we mean "revitalize" or "update for today's urban needs" or something else that means a healthy and functioning area of the city will be wiped away to make room for yuppie entertainments. No more liveaboards, the Port says, ostensibly in response to the four bodies that have been found floating in Salmon Bay over the past few months, but we know that they've been waiting for any opportunity to march into the area with a scrub brush and a couple thousand gallons of bleach for years now. The drowinings are to the new restrictions what 911 is to Iraq; the one has nothing whatsoever to do with the other, but you've wanted to do this thing anyway so why not call it a reason.
New concrete piers are being built soon and while there's probably a great deal of upside to those for commercial fishermen they are also going to serve tour and dive boats and, no doubt, yachts. Tour and dive boats and yachts probably bring in a lot of money and they're "clean" so to speak which doesn't mean that they're environmentally friendly because we all know that any maritime industry, even yacht storage, is an absolute nightmare environmentally, but they lack the "colorful characters" of the fishing industry and they're messy and smell like fish. The Port of Seattle doesn't want Fishermen's Terminal to smell like fish. To that end they've got some new regulations (via the P-I):
# Banning anyone from living aboard a boat permanently, and limiting live-aboards to no more than two consecutive months, or four months total in a year;# Allowing only those who can show active involvement in commercial operations to stay aboard a boat;
# Restricting live-aboards' stay on a boat, pre-departure, to between two weeks and a month, depending on boat size (less than or more than 40 feet);
# Giving owners 90 days to repair or move vessels determined to be inoperable or unseaworthy by the management, or cede them to a port auction;
# Evicting any live-aboard who "disturbs or creates a nuisance," whether by drugs, alcohol or otherwise.
When we talked to Jonathan Raban recently he said of Fishermen's Terminal, "[it] still remains a real working waterfront and a great place to wander around," in the course of a conversation about interesting waterfronts. So far we haven't taken him up on that - It's been some time since we wandered around Fishermen's Terminal. This weekend we're there, though. Before the Port turns it into a promenade.
Image courtesy of The Port of Seattle
