If your hunger for news on tall ships can't wait, the Peninsula Daily News has an article about the groundbreaking of the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend.

Not much of a crowd yet on the Foss, but some folks are milling around in rain coats, video cameras and binoculars at the ready.

I was surprised to see some construction activity still going on the dock just outside the media center here in the Dock building. It looks like workers are scrambling to finish building some temporary stairs that will apparently be used to board a ship.

There's a fair amount of traffic on the Foss Waterway, too. Sailboats, yachts and small rubber craft are heading out into the bay.

Oh, and there's plenty of coffee here at the media center, Brian. Beth Sylves, who I know from her days at the Tacoma Dome, was gracious enough to bring me cup. That's probably not in her job description as a Tall Ships volunteer. But it was much appreciated.

If you’re watching a reenactment of a cannon battle during Tall Ships Tacoma this week, just remember one thing: Those charges could’ve made some buttery, fluffy biscuits.

Tim Jovanovich and Avio Brooklyn spent much of Wednesday sitting aboard the Bounty of Krister and building cannon charges for the reenactments. They wrapped aluminum foil around a wooden cylinder to create the shape, removed the wood and filled the foil with about 30 cubic centimeters of black gunpowder.

That creates the boom. Bisquick creates the show.

“Bisquick’s a pretty good filler,” said Brooklyn, 15-year-old student at Vashon Island High School. “It makes more white smoke the charges explode.”

Jenny Davis had already beaten the crowds for a prime spot. That was the easy part.

The moon’s gravitational pull flustered her a bit more.

“If I sit here, I’ll have a great spot,” she told me. “But if the tides come up, then I’ll have to move. But is this low tide? High tide? I just don’t want to screw this up.”

The 52-year-old from West Seattle was trying to determine the perfect spot near Dockton Park upon which to plant a blue canvas camping chair. She has been waiting for this day – when the participating boats in the Tall Ships Tacoma festival pull into Quartermaster Harbor – for more than three years. She had planned to be on Vashon Island during the 2005 festival but caught a stomach bug and missed the entire event.

“I was so disappointed,” she said, clutching my right arm for emphasis. “So, so disappointed.”

That led to her early arrival this year. She was one of only a handful of people at the park which sits on the northwestern coast of Maury Island. The low tide had sucked away much of the water, leaving an expanse of gushy mud underfoot. The legs of Davis’ camping chair sunk in the muck, and her shoes were caked with the stuff.

She didn’t mind all that. She just didn’t want the water to rise again and rob her of what she believes will be the prime ship-viewing spot.

“I don’t live on the water,” she said, “so I’m not sure how to figure this out. But I’m going to make it happen.”

Tacoma's Murray Morgan Bridge will be raised at 7:30 a.m. Thursday and stay that way for five days, the Washington state Department of Transportation announced today.

But it's got nothing to do with the condition of the beloved but rusting span that DOT officials may lock in the upright position later this or early next year.

This particular opening will allow ships to navigate the Thea Foss Waterway during the Tall Ships festival without repeatedly raising and lowering the bridge, according to the press release.

The bridge was closed to vehicles in October, and only about 40 pedestrians per day are using it now, the DOT said.

To read the full release, click for more:

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I talked with Tall Ships Tacoma spokesman Matthew Erlich about the festival’s planned attendance of 700,000. Exactly how, I asked, did they arrive at that number?

The answer: They looked at 2005’s attendance.

Organizers planned for 400,000 people during the inaugural festival, Erlich said, but no one kept an official attendance. Based on police estimates at the Parade of Sail, the length of lines and the number of personal watercraft in the area, organizers estimated between 700,000-800,000 people attended the event.

“We hope the number of 700,000 visits will be met,” Erlich said, “and I’m pretty confident there will be that number of visitors coming to the festival.”

I just finished talking with David Doxtater, the executive director of Tall Ships Tacoma. They’re in the home stretch of preparing for July’s festival. The office was certainly busier than any other time I’ve visited, and Doxtater told me he recently moved into a Tacoma hotel so he can spend more time in the office and less time in his car commuting from Bainbridge Island.

Jason Hagey and I are working on a story for this weekend that catches the readers up with what the latest is with the event planning.

The number of ships is down to 31 from 32. The Army Reserve barge has dropped out. Event spokeswoman Lorraine Ralston said its place in the festival was tentative from the start, but the other 31 are still on schedule to pull into the Thea Foss Waterway on July 3.

“We’re bringing in a broader range of ships,” Doxtater said. “We have premium ships. We’ll have the Nina, the Bounty, the Kaisei, the Eagle.”

The anchor will be the Eagle, a 295-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter. And it wasn't easy to book its appearance.

“We really led the charge,” he said. “We rallied the other (West Coast) Tall Ships events this summer. We got some congressmen involved. We went back to D.C. and did some lobbying. We helped convince them switch their schedule to the West Coast. They weren’t really planning to come here.”

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Gig Harbor-based Amazing Grace motors towards port to pick up additional crew members in downtown Tacoma with cargo ship Honest Spring moored in Commencement Bay behind. The 83-foot topsail schooner Amazing Grace is heading up to Canada for American Sail Training Association West Coast Challenge event next weekend and will return the following week for the Tall Ships 2008 festival. Russ Carmack/The News Tribune

If you just don't appreciate the combination of engineering and history that make sailing ships so appealing, you're probably going to want to be out of town the first week of July. That's when the boats return for Tall Ships Tacoma 2008.

For the other 700,000 or so of you - judging by the crowds that showed up in 2005 - get ready to have some fun. At The News Tribune, we went a little overboard three years ago with our tall ships coverage - full page posters, pull out guides, saturation festival coverage. Readers loved it and so did we. We've been waiting for them to come back ever since.

We've been plotting this year's tall ships reporting plan for the past six months or so. It's safe to say that this year's coverage will exceed 2005's excessive coverage. Here are some of the highlights:

• We've started this Tall Ships blog to follow the latest about the festival and the ships. As we get closer to the event, it will become our vehicle for live coverage.

• We're creating a Tall Ships web page with archived stories, photo and multimedia galleries and festival information.

• We're sending columnist Kathleen Merryman and a photojournalist to cover the tail end of the Victoria, B.C., Tall Ships festival next week and then sail down from Victoria to Tacoma aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Eagle. You'll recall that Kathleen made a similar voyage aboard the Lynx during the 2005 festival, giving readers a taste of life on board.

• On Sunday, June 30, our major coverage kicks off with a front page preview of the event and a four-page commemorative section introducing the ships and previewing the festival. Our SoundLife section will start its week-long Tall Ships theme, which will include a look at Puget Sound nautical history, modern day pirates and cooking on a ship galley.

• We'll be checking in on the flotilla of tall ships as they head down Puget Sound and assemble in Quartermaster Harbor July 2 in preparation for the July 3 Parade of Sail. During the festival, we'll be offering daily coverage of the event from a crew of about a dozen photographers and reporters.

• Once again, we're planning two-page posters from our award-winning photo staff every day during the festival.

If you have tall ships stories you'd like to see, let me know and I'll see what we can do.

The Sea Scout Ship Odyssey is celebrating its 70th birthday with daylong festivities in downtown Tacoma on Saturday.

The Odyssey, an 88½-foot yawl that will participate in next month’s Tall Ships Tacoma festival, will be docked in the Thea Foss Waterway in front of the Museum of Glass. The celebration is held in conjunction with an exhibit on maritime history at the Washington State History Museum.

Events include:

• 11 a.m.-1:45 p.m.: A chance for the public to view and tour the boat for free.

• 2-4 p.m.: A sailing open to the public. Tickets are $25.

• 4-5 p.m.: Boat tours and a performance by the Shifty Sailors, a sea shanty and maritime music group.

• 5-7 p.m.: A charter sail with the Shifty Sailors

A party celebrating the 20th birthday of the Hawaiian Chieftain will be held in Westport on Thursday at 6 p.m. Tickets for the event are $50.

The Aberdeen-based ketch will be in Tacoma for the July Tall Ship Festival.

Click here for more info on the party or how you can donate gifts like knee breeches to the crew.

If you're hoping to get out on the water on one of the ships during the festival, you should buy your tickets soon. Last I checked, the ships were booking up fast.

There are still prime time sailings available during the Parade of Sail from Quartermaster Harbor to the Foss Waterway on July 3 and during Commencement Bay fireworks on July 4. Those once-in-a-lifetime excursions are going to cost you – as much as $200 a pop to sail on the Kaisei or Nina. On the other hand, there are an assortment of tickets left during other days of festival in the $40 to $100 neighborhood.

You can also go online to buy boarding passes - tickets to get on the ships along the Foss Waterway. A $10 daily general boarding pass will get you on the class "B" and "C" vessels. A $20 premium pass will also get you on the Class "A" ships - Niña, HMS Bounty and Kaisei. You can get a four-day all-vessel pass for $60. (The Coast Guard Eagle doesn't charge admission.)

You'll be able to buy boarding passes during the festival, but you might want to take advantage of the advanced sales, says Matthew Erlich, media director for Tall Ships Tacoma. "Generally, our goal would be to sell as many boarding passes as possible in advance – it would save on the lines people may face at the event and get them in line more quickly to actually board the ships," he says.

To buy tickets or boarding passes, go to the Tall Ships Web site.