Looking for a Pacific City Dory

I always grab the local newspaper. Always. You never know what you’ll find. You may be passing through a tiny town with a really awesome boat tradition and totally miss it without the local paper. With a little local news luck, we headed into Pacific City, Oregon hoping to see some dory fishing boats. They land them on the beach here — there’s no pier.

Our timing was good and bad. Bad, because we missed Dory Days by a day or two. Good, because we missed Dory Days by a day or two. So we were able to get a parking spot. We spied what was probably a dory off the coast a ways. We saw a few others on their trailers in town. We didn’t see any land on the beach. Luckily YouTube provides:

So they land going at a pretty good pace — they match the speed of the waves, supposedly. And they pull the engine up at the last second so that the prop doesn’t dig into the beach and snap. Must be exciting.

Obviously, I want one. They’re really cool boats. Hand-made wooden ones start at $9,000. $9,000! Insanity. Seemed like a deal, but that’s for the raw boat. You’ll also need it painted and probably covered in fiberglass and outfitted with hardware and stuff (like an outboard engine). It’ll add up. But I still want one.