What does tradition smell like?

To some, it might smell like an apple pie baking in the oven. To others, maybe it’s the smell of campfire smoke, or the chlorine of a swimming pool.

For Emiliano Marino and Pami-Sue Alvarado, owners of the Artful Sailor, the smell of tradition is the woodsy scent of pine tar, the earthy odor of flax twine, and the sweet fragrance of beeswax.

The two “Artful Sailors,” who set up shop in 2017 in the Port Townsend Sail Loft building on Jackson Street, held ditty bag and grommet-making demonstrations at the 2018 Wooden Boat Festival, where each and every onlooker got a chance to take a whiff of the smells of tradition.

While those watching the grommet-making demonstration - or “grommeteers,” as Marino dubbed them - passed around different nautical objects to sniff, Marino and Alvarado took turns instructing the proper way to make a grommet out of rope, using their theatrical act to teach the crowd an important traditional sailmaking skill.

“What’s the most important rule, Salty Sue?” Marino shouted across the crowd to Alvarado, who goes by “Salty Sue.”

“Keep the squiggle!” she replied.

“What happens if you don’t keep the squiggle, Salty Sue?” Marino asked.

“You get shredded wheat!” sung Salty Sue, gaining a laugh from the crowd as they began their own grommet-making, with Alvarado and Marino helping them along the way.

To passers-by, the theatrics and songs that Alvarado and Marino incorporate into their demonstration may seem spontaneous, or just part of an act, but the two have a distinct teaching strategy behind what they do.

“We really love teaching because we want to keep this skill alive,” Alvarado said. “We like to have fun doing it. We do workshops with adults and children … It’s important to keep those traditions going, so they don’t get lost.”

Part of the Artful Sailor’s mission is to teach self-sufficiency to current and up-and-coming sailors. Teaching the traditional hand-sewing, sailmaking, rigging and ditty bag-making skills brings history alive, but also helps sailors if they’re out in the ocean and need to fix a sail. Ditty bags date back to the 1800s, when sailors would sew bags to store their sailmaking tools on their downtime.

“It actually became kind of a calling card for sailors, where they would personalize it or put their names on it, or embroider it, or embellish it with beads or shells,” Alvarado said. “Some of them are very elaborate and quite ornate.”

A long-time sailor and sailmaker, Marino came from a family of sailors, and has worked in various sail lofts over the course of his career. The traditional skills he teaches, he has written about in his 1995 book, “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice.”

“My purpose was, in part, to keep the tools and the skills alive,” Marino said. “I’d like people to see these skills and these materials not just as some vintage oddity, but as a real way to survive, make a living, build a lifestyle, have a family.”

Marino and Alvarado want sailors to be self-sufficient, but they also hope to help the planet by using repurposed materials to make sails and ditty bags. They use all natural beeswax from Tonasket to wax their twine, and even make nautical knots out of old guitar strings, which then become jewelry.

“The fate of life on the planet is important to me. Human lifestyles and relationships with other beings on the planet are important,” Marino said. “And so the more whole earth, balanced, natural things can be, then the less warfare there is.”