BOAT Fest Kicks Off For 4th Time

    Beginning on February 20th and running through March 3rd, the Bellingham Theatre Guild is hosting the Bellinghamster One-Act Theatre (BOAT) Festival. Unlike other shows at the Bellingham Theatre Guild which are produced internally, the BOAT Fest serves as a venue for regional artists to perform.

“This is the 4th year of the BOAT Fest, the first one was in 2004. We also did it in 2006, 2008 and this year,” Festival Coordinator Sean Walbeck said. “If the world was perfect it’d be annual.”

Walbeck has been the festival coordinator each of the four years, but recently financial constraints have impacted the festival and how often it can be organized.

“It doesn’t really make money, it’s a break even kind of thing, which is why we can’t afford to do the BOAT fest every year. Bellingham is still a small town,” Walbeck said.

Plays for the festival aren’t selected critically, as Walbeck wants the BOAT Fest to remain very open to the public for participation.

“It’s a non-jury, non-invitational festival. We have a core contingency of groups that we contact when the applications are out. About one-third of this years acts are put on by returning groups,” Walbeck said.

Local theatre companies have about two months to write and direct their own works, and perform their productions three times over the two week timespan. For Kari Lee the BOAT Fest is rare opportunity to perform in a play rather than improv.

“I have been doing improvisational theater as part of the Upfront Theater's mainstage ensemble for about 6 years. I have only periodically done scripted work, mostly sketches in Upfront shows and a few projects at the Idiom,” Lee said. Lee makes up one half of S & K Productions, along with Sally Unger, and this is the first year S & K productions have participated in the BOAT Fest.

    Although some shows are completed and performed long before the BOAT fest begins, many aren’t rehearsed until after the December entry deadline.
    “Sally Unger and I started to write ‘The Devil In Room 12’ a couple months ago. Admittedly, we procrastinated fine-tuning it until a few weeks before showtime. The first time we performed was last week at the BOAT fest.”
    While some performers honed their skills at workshops and theatre companies, others came directly from WWU.
    “I went to WWU trying to play soccer and they told me that I would be able to play after a couple years on the team, on the bench and stuff. I knew a couple people that were in the theatre department and I decided to try out for a play. I got a part, and I didn't have to wait on the bench to act,” Matthew Riggins said.
    The BOAT fest is the first opportunity for Riggins to produce work under his new Mount Vernon business, Redfoot Theatre Company.
    “We started Redfoot Theatre Company about a month ago, I wrote some plays so I didn't have to pay royalties. It's like living the dream a little bit. I have to give Western a lot of credit for the knowledge I have and the stuff I'm able to teach people,” Riggins said.
    One obstacle posed by the BOAT festival is the difference in subject matter between all twelve shows. The mature nature of some productions has caused a unique rating system to be instituted.
    “As with any sort of fringe show, there are people who want to see some vulgarity and others who don’t. We ask people in the play to rate them on the “chili scale”, which is 0 to 4 chilis. We tell them that if someone complains that the rating wasn’t appropriate, we will point you out to the person complaining. We also start the kid friendly shows earlier so that parents can leave right after the show,” Walbeck said
    Walbeck says the BOAT Fest not only provides a cheap venue for aspiring playwrights, but can ideally create new theatre fans.
    “This crosses off a lot of long term goals for the theatre guild, and it brings in people who normally don’t watch theatre,” Walbeck said.
    According to Walbeck, few WWU students participate in shows at the Bellingham Theatre Guild, which is a problem for directors like Riggins who need actors.
    “I was just lucky in that I was able to find actors very quickly. Unless directors have people they know, it's hard to find people sometime to fill the slots, because those actors are wanting to be in bigger shows.”

Aside from performing whenever possible, Riggins has advice for theatre majors at WWU.

“In college, we learned a lot of good rules and things to follow, but when you get out there, people are in theatre and do theatre for different reasons. There's great theatre everywhere. Look for theatre in your church. There's great theatre in the courtroom. My advice would be to look for theatre in places that you wouldn't expect,” Riggins said.

Tickets for the BOAT Fest are available at the doors of the Bellingham Theatre Guild, located at 1600 H Street. For more information, contact Sean Walbeck at 360-647-9242.

Whatcom Creek Hatchery Enters its 36th Year

The Whatcom Creek Hatchery building has 20 vertical stacks of trays, each stack holding roughly 100,000 eggs. Roughly two million salmon begin their lives each fall in the hatchery, located in Maritime Heritage Park. Earl Steele is an instructor at Bellingham Technical College, and runs the hatchery.
    “I’ve been the instructor and hatcher manager here for 33 years,” Steele says, in an office painted with documents and maps of fish populations. The Whatcom Creek Hatchery was established in 1976, and Maritime Heritage Park was established two years later to boost area salmon populations.

Chum, coho, and chinook salmon are all native to the Whatcom creek area. Hatcheries spawn fish based on what species are native to the area in order to avoid negative impact on the existing fish population.

“We released 1.1 million chinook salmon a year at one point, but politics changed that,” Steele says.

Although chinook salmon are on the endangered species list, Steele is not allowed to spawn them due to federal restrictions.

    “We haven’t raised fall chinook here for about six years. The federal government stepped in and told us not to spawn anymore, because they may stray and go into the nooksack river. Then they could spawn with spring chinook and create a hybrid, which could potentially mess up their genetics.” Steele says.
    Regulations are imposed by a yearly “brood document”, which determines target fish production goals and imposes restrictions on the production of certain species of fish.
    “The state has recently told us not to spawn anymore coho salmon, which is a problem because this is a college program and we want as many species as possible,” Steele says. “I think some of the tribes and the state are still battling over that.”

The educational impacts are not the only concern for Steele, as coho population can be impacted significantly by both commercial and sport fishing.

    “Whatcom creek was dead when I started here. There are a lot of coho now, but fishing pressure would eliminate the entire coho stock within a cycle or two,” Steele says.
    Steele doesn’t have to leave his office to how popular fishing is in this area, and knows how quickly salmon populations can dwindle.
    “We get about 200 people down here fishing at a time in the Fall,” Steele says.
    All of the work at the hatchery is done by students taking the fisheries program at Bellingham Technical College. Steele also manages the hatchery at Whatcom Falls Park.
    “That’s where we spawn rainbow trout, which isn’t for the state but for our own projects,” Steele says.
    Spawning and raising fish is a multi-layered process, beginning with the fertilization of eggs.
    “Female salmon are cut open to get the eggs,” says Bellingham Technical College student Fernando Martinez. “Then you have to squeeze the male salmon to get the milt, which contains the sperm. The eggs are kept in trays until they hatch into alevins, which is a fish with the yolk sack attached.”
    Fish are killed after spawning because they will die anyways as a result of spawning. The carcasses are then donated to a company which processes the fish and then distributes them to local food banks. The amount of time it takes for a fish to mature after hatching depends on the species.
    “Coho and steelhead trout need a year and a half to mature, pink salmon take about 60 days and chum salmon take about 30 days,” Steele says.
    The survival rate of fish spawned in a hatchery is much higher than in the wild. Of every 3,000 eggs fertilized in the wild, 300 make it past the egg stage, while 2,700 eggs successfully hatch in the hatchery. Only 2 of every 3,000 eggs in the wild survives to become a spawning adult while roughly 20 hatchery salmon become adults, although this number can vary tremendously.
    “I’ve seen returns as low as 0.1 percent before and as high as 3 percent, but typically we see a 0.7 percent return,” Steele says. The hatchery produces roughly three million fish per year, putting the spawning adult fish return totals as low as 3,000 and as high as 90,000.

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