Three years of waiting wound up everyone into an explosion of excitement for this year’s Wooden Boat Festival. Ticket sales were up from their pre-pandemic levels, exemplified by shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on docks at Point Hudson.

And Saturday’s smoke didn’t stop the sea of spectators from descending. One estimate from the ticket counters put the figure between 5,000 and 6,000 attendees for the day — despite the ashen skies.

The sea-shanty tent was swinging with songs all day long, children lined up for the paddle-boat pool and fish-printing, and the boats were, of course, a sight to see. Especially the Croatian batana named Brac designed by shipwright Michael Vlahovich specifically for the festival.

The 100-year-old, repurposed old growth Douglas Fir milled and donated by Pacific Northwest Timber with its hand-sanded texture had a feel to it that one passerby could only describe with a touch of awe as, “something else.”

One of the biggest draws of the day was the Sea Stories Headliner Panel with Lin Pardey, Steve Callahan, Nigel Calder, and Karl Kruger. The line to get in stretched across the upper deck of the Northwest Maritime Center, down the stairs, and then some, with volunteers guessing people had waited an hour to be the first inside.

The first question for the panel of renowned sailors went straight to the heart of the matter: What makes a good sea story?

Callahan, famous for surviving 76 days adrift on the Atlantic Ocean in a life raft, noted that authenticity, an element of surprise, and a foundation upon which to build were key elements.

“It isn’t a story unless something changes,” Pardey said, and added, “People learn reading about change.”

“When I’m telling a story, what makes me happiest is when I look out at the audience and see it resonating on people’s faces. When I finally find the courage to say something a little deeper than I wanted to and I see it land, for me that’s what makes a good sea story,” said Kruger, the first and only person daring enough to paddleboard the Northwest Passage.

Calder, best known for his books on boat mechanics, had a different take on what makes for a good story.

“Pretty much anything I screwed up that worked out okay,” he said.

As the panel went into their tales, the audience let out an audible gasp as Callahan described a moment from his life that was eventually adapted into a scene for the movie “Life of Pi.”

“It was the middle of the night, really gentle rolling waves. The boat was just ghosting along, really just magical … a beautiful view of the main hull just sliding through the water and all the bioluminescence was streaming down the hull,” Callahan began.

“Then all of a sudden, less than a hundred yards off to the side of the boat up, out of the water leaps a big whale, a mother, and a baby whale, belly to belly, streaming bioluminescence like waterfalls coming down. Then whoosh! Back into the sea and it’s gone.”

Pardey didn’t try to top that beauty, but she did get an eruption of her own.

She recounted a harrowing moment when a big ship was approaching her much smaller vessel and she was unable to get its crew to respond on the radio.

After multiple tries and no response, she was getting fed up.

“This [expletive] [expletive] isn’t listening,” she said.

Then, finally, came a response.

“This [expletive] [expletive] is listening.”

Kruger, who just got back from the Arctic, decided to offer the audience some of his recent adventures paddleboarding the Race to Alaska and the Northwest Passage.

“The nut of it is that I wanted to do the cleanest, purest, not necessarily the most difficult, but the most tapped-in way possible,” he said.

“What I realized in coming in to Ketchikan is that I was capable of a whole lot more,” Kruger continued, making sure to say that it wasn’t easy, but that it left him driven to take on his latest adventure into the Arctic.

“It puts you in this space of absolute, unhinged joy to be that free,” he said of his time alone in that most remote of regions.

Calder brought the humor back as he described a dolphin knocking his daughter off the ladder she was climbing to get back on the boat when the dolphin wasn’t done playing with her in the water, and another time observing a dolphin obsessed with making a love connection with a dinghy.

After the panel ended and the afternoon wound down, local favorite Uncle Funk and the Dope 6 took to the main stage and made sure the festival ended on the right foot with dancing late into the dark.