David King has spent his life building boats, from small wooden boats to mega yachts. He built the Alice, pictured above, 38 years ago, naming the craft after his wife.

Photo courtesy David King

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It was the marine trades that brought David King to Port Townsend more than 40 years ago, and it’s what has kept him here ever since. Even as he worked his way up in the local trades, helping build up the Port of Port Townsend to what it is today before going on to serve as a city councilmember and mayor, his focus and heart was always on Port Townsend’s working waterfront.

King, who grew up in a small town outside of Washington, D.C., never envisioned himself settling down in the Northwest, or, for that matter, settling down at all.

He had attended military school in his youth, which helped convert him from a poor student to a strong one — strong enough to be accepted into Harvard University. 

At Harvard he studied government, inspired by his father who worked in government. By the time he graduated in 1971, he knew what his next move was going to be. 

“I wanted to build a boat and sail away,” he said. “I really had no idea how inconvenient or costly building a boat was, or how. I was completely naive.” 

He found work in boatyards in Virginia and Maine, where he worked on boats and built a few of his own. He worked in a “have tools, will travel” fashion for years, always looking for the next adventure. Working in the marine trades, King found, was a “passport to living in cool places,” especially along the East Coast.

It was during a brief stint in the Bay Area in the mid-1970s, however, that he heard about the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, a town he’d soon find himself settling down in. King was helping his sister build a house there when he met his wife Alice. The two longed for a quieter, less urban environment, and were attracted to the Pacific Northwest. 

King drove back to Virginia to get some belongings, hitched a boat to his truck and drove back to the West Coast, all in one shot.

King and Alice pulled into town on the first day of the second annual festival, and were immediately impressed by the large crowds swarming the floating docks of such an otherwise sleepy town.

“There were so many people on the floats that the water was submerging,” he said.

Their first weekend in Port Townsend had its hiccups; their food and beverage cooler was stolen from their Fort Townsend State Park campsite, and their truck towed from its parking spot near Point Hudson. Despite those incidents, the couple knew they had found their new home.

Shortly thereafter, King was hired by Cecil Lange and Son, one of the major players in the Port Townsend marine trades scene at the time, King said. He and Alice bought a home and brought a son, Jamie, into the world a few years later.

After leaving that firm, King went to work freelance in the Port Townsend Boat Haven, which at a time looked much different than the Boat Haven of today. 

He founded Port Townsend Yacht Builders, then went on to join Admiral Marine Works as a project manager, working his way up to general manager over time. While there, he helped build the largest boat ever built in Port Townsend — the 161-foot mega-yacht Evviva, which was also the largest foam-core fiberglass yacht ever built when it launched in 1993.

It was during this time that the Port began growing, both out and up. King played a key role in the construction of the three biggest buildings in the Port — all built for Admiral, which grew from 20 to 160 employees during his tenure. When Admiral moved to Port Angeles, he decided to stay in Port Townsend, and started a consulting business.

Admiral Marine went under shortly after their move to Port Angeles, and five of their employees returned to their old space at the Port Townsend Boat Haven, starting Townsend Bay Marine with King in 1999. As chief financial officer, King helped steer the company through the Great Recession, a time when they became a refuge for the many workers being laid off across the port, at one point employing around 80 employees.

“We almost always had a boat under construction,” King said, adding that this was not always the case for the businesses in the boatyard.

One contract in particular, a 129-foot sport fishing boat, kept the company afloat. 

However, when that boat was finished, their situation resembled that of the other businesses in the boat yard.

“When we were done with that, we had no work,” he said. “We decided it was time to do other things.” 

The men looked to sell the business, but found it harder than they had anticipated.

By this time, King had become heavily involved in local politics. After “disappearing” into his work for 10 years at Admiral Marine, he decided he wanted to become more active in the port and steering it into the future. He put his degree in government to work, serving on several advisory and strategic planning committees over the years. One was the shoreline master plan committee, in which he worked to revive regulations for waterfront development with the goal of preserving as much of it as a working waterfront as possible.

“It’s a precious, scarce resource, a shoreline used for diverse economic activity,” he said. “We have a very unique thing going here and it’s been my pleasure to help work on it.”

King joined the board of directors for The Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, the Wooden Boat Foundation — launched the same year he arrived in town — and the Northwest Maritime Center. King’s work on the WBF’s board prompted Dave Robison, the founding executive director of the maritime center, to push King to run for city council. 

King did so, running unopposed, as he would again during his re-election campaign four years later.

“I’ve never been opposed in an election, and I’m not bragging about that,” King said. “I kind of miss it as an experience I never had. I never had to sell myself as a candidate.”

He was appointed as mayor in his second term on the council, during which time he worked on everything from affordable housing to Port Townsend’s water systems, and served on the joint board for fire service and emergency services among other committees.

“I was very glad to be a weak mayor,” he said, referencing how he took office shortly after the city manager system was adopted in Port Townsend. “You can take on as much as you have an appetite for.” 

And he did. 

“It was a lot of work,” he said.

After years of being knee-deep in the marine trades community, King was eager to learn about the many other communities in town, such as the avid equestrian and instrument-building communities that he didn’t previously know much about.

But he always had his mind on the waterfront.

“I’ve always been interested in what it means to be a port in the 21st century,” he said, noting Port Townsend’s history as one of the premiere port cities of the Puget Sound in the late 1800s.

The marine trades and the culture of wooden boat building had died down by the time he and Alice showed up at that second Wooden Boat Festival, he said. 

“Port Townsend, when we got here — apart from the Wooden Boat Festival — was basically turning its back on the water,” he said.

That weekend was “the beginning of the change of attitude of the community’s relationship with the water,” King said.

“I’ve spent most of my life helping preserve that in the community — keeping the port in Port Townsend,” he said. 

Not only has he watched the festival grow much bigger than he ever anticipated, but he believes that the town residents, regardless of background, have begun to embrace the town’s working waterfront and its importance in the local economy.

“I think Port Townsend has sort of realized its potential in marine trades and being a port,” he said. 

While acknowledging that Port Townsend’s tourism economy helps keeps it afloat, King stresses that its working waterfront makes it unique, and hopes that Port Townsend holds onto its roots as a port waterfront and doesn’t go the way of regional cities like Edmonds and its condo-lined shores.

He takes pride in the fact that the port’s tall buildings were all built by local businesses that outgrew their spaces, such as the businesses he helped run, not out-of-town developers with commercial ambitions.

“Port Townsend has done a good job of not becoming just a place for casual tourism,” he said, crediting the Wooden Boat Festival as being a prime example of the “deep,” or educational tourism he sees Port Townsend as offering to the world. 

King reckons that he may be the town’s first boat-building mayor, but his intention was never to do both things full time all at once. He had wanted to sell Townsend Bay Marine and throw himself into government, but ended up juggling both jobs simultaneously for several years.

His experience working for private businesses, non-profits, government and for himself has given him the ability to empathize with and work with people from all of these backgrounds, he said.

“I’m a moderate,” he said. “I’m always looking for ways to get through stuff and get things done.”

Townsend Bay Marine was finally sold in 2015 to the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-Op, the year that King’s term as mayor ended. King decided to put politics and building big boats behind him and focus on hiking the region’s many mountains and building smaller wooden boats, something he has done avidly since his days in Maine. He’s built sailboats, dories and canoes, his most recent canoe built from an 1897 design.

King still views his career in the marine trades as a “passport” to see cool places. When he first came to Port Townsend, he thought it would be just another one of those places in his travels. In fact, he and Alice initially aimed to find work in the San Juan Islands, a place he found to be “more remote and cooler” than Port Townsend. 

However, something about Port Townsend got him to stick around for 42 years, even with “cool” states like Maine and Virginia tempting him. The reason why, he said, is pretty simple.

“This is the coolest place,” he said. “This is a great place, it’s just a wonderful community.”