The MV Plover is a 32-foot, 17-passenger wooden ferry that sails a route so short it takes about the length of a phone call to cross. It runs Friday through Sunday from Gate 2 at the Blaine Boating Center, hourly on the hour, from July 3 through Labor Day. That schedule is the quiet variable most Blaine weekends are built around, whether the people building them realize it or not.
Once you notice the pattern, August in town starts making a different kind of sense. The festivals stack on the ferry's operating days. The market lines up with them. Dinner reservations get easier or harder depending on whether the boat is running. A weekend here has a shape, and the shape has a source.
The ferry is the clock
The Plover was built in 1944 to shuttle cannery workers from Blaine to the Alaska Packers Association operation on Semiahmoo Spit. It ran that route until 1964. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, operated today by the nonprofit Drayton Harbor Maritime under the City of Blaine's ownership, and it holds the claim of the shortest ferry run in Washington at roughly a kilometer across Drayton Harbor.
Practical version: it costs $9 for adults and $4 for kids ages 3 through 12, sails hourly from the Blaine Visitor's Dock, and departs on the half-hour from the Plover Dock at Semiahmoo Resort. Tickets are mobile-only through FareHarbor, up to five minutes before sailing. If the harbor is rough, the day cancels.
What that means for your Saturday:
| If you want to… | The Plover-side anchor time is… |
|---|---|
| Catch the market and then cross | Board by 1 or 2 PM after the 10 AM–2 PM market wraps |
| Do the APA Museum on the spit | Arrive Thu–Sun between 1 and 5 PM |
| Ride back for dinner in town | Watch the last eastbound departure, roughly 7:30 PM Fri/Sat, 5:30 PM Sun |
| Skip the ferry entirely | Save it for Tuesday through Thursday when it isn't running anyway |
The reason this matters: nearly every named August event in Blaine is scheduled inside the Plover's window. That is not a coincidence. That is the town organizing itself around the boat.
What August 1 actually looks like
The first Saturday of the month is the busiest single day on the Blaine calendar. Three things happen at once. The Drayton Harbor Pirate Festival takes over the Blaine Harbor Boating Center from 11 AM to 4 PM with more than 40 food and craft vendors, sea shanty performances, and the Anything But A Boat Race. The Blaine-Birch Bay Park & Recreation District 2 runs Pirate Daze at the Marine Park playground from 10:30 AM to 2 PM with a noon costume parade. And ten miles south at Birch Bay Beach Park, the Birch Bay Sand Sculpture Competition, presented by WECU and hosted by the Birch Bay Chamber, has sculptors on the sand by 10:30 AM, People's Choice voting from noon to 3, and the awards ceremony wrapping around 4:30 PM.
If you live here, the interesting question is not which one to attend. It is how to sequence them:
- Morning: sand sculpture at Birch Bay while the tide is still out
- Midday: back to downtown for the raft race launch at the public boat launch
- Afternoon: Plover across to Semiahmoo for the APA Museum
- Evening: dinner on the spit or back on Peace Portal Drive
The Birch Bay stage that day includes Ian Dodson Steel Drums at 11 AM and the Jenn-X Band from 1 to 3 PM, so the music is loudest exactly when the pirate festival is thinnest. Locals figure this out. Visitors don't.
The Saturday that isn't a festival
Every other Saturday from late May through September 26, the anchor is quieter. Blaine's Market by the Sea sits on the G Street Plaza at 601 Peace Portal Drive, 10 AM to 2 PM, hosted by the Blaine Chamber of Commerce. It runs weekly, and the Chamber has been booking live music most weeks this season. The vendor mix is small and made locally: plants, jams and jellies, pottery, embroidery, baked goods, tree soap. Booth fees are $15 for Chamber members and $20 for non-members, which is one reason the vendor list stays close to home.
The market's location on the H Street corridor puts it inside a walkable loop that includes the Blaine Welcome Center at 546 Peace Portal, the Drayton Harbor Oyster Company patio at 685 Peace Portal, and Ttowa Sushi at 658 Peace Portal. If you skip the ferry and stay downtown, that block is the weekend. If you take the ferry, the market becomes your last stop before the 1 PM sailing.
Second Saturdays also line up with the downtown Art Walk, which means August 8 is a quieter but denser afternoon than August 1. The energy is different. The overlap is deliberate.
Where dinner actually lands
The three dinner options that keep coming up in local conversation are all tied to the harbor in different ways.
Drayton Harbor Oyster Company at 685 Peace Portal Drive is the shortest supply chain in town. The Seymour family grows the oysters less than a mile away in Drayton Harbor. If you took the Plover, you crossed the beds on the way over. Grilled, fried, or raw on the half shell. Open noon to 8 PM daily, closed Tuesdays. The patio is small and fills up on festival Saturdays by 5 PM.
Great Blue Heron Grill at Semiahmoo Golf & Country Club is the ferry-side answer. It sits on the Arnold Palmer course roughly 3.2 miles from Semiahmoo Resort itself, and it is open to the public for lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch. This is the reservation most people forget to make on Pirate Festival weekend, and then can't get.
Ttowa Sushi, at 658 Peace Portal Drive, is the newest sit-down option downtown. Owner Justin Kim opened it in June 2025 in the former Peace Arch City Café space. The menu runs about 100 items across sushi, bento, yakisoba, and ramen. It is open 11 AM to 8 PM daily, which is the same window as the Plover on Fri/Sat, and that is not an accident either.
Add in Packers Kitchen + Bar at Semiahmoo Resort for bay views on the spit, Gateway 1890 Taphouse & Grill at 459 Peace Portal on the traffic circle by I-5 Exit 276, and The Vault Bistro, Wine Bar & Event Space as the downtown's only wine bar, and you have the full working set. Paso del Norte reopened after a kitchen fire kept it closed for nearly a year, which is worth knowing if you had written it off. Aloha Cafe, run by Drisana Horton and her husband, added a Pacific Island menu to the mix.
The Plover used to carry cannery workers to a job. Now it carries residents to an oyster patio and a museum. Same route, same wooden hull, entirely different reason to board.
The kid-anchored weekend
August 14 is the counterweight to August 1. Splash Day happens from noon to 2 PM at the corner of 3rd and Martin Streets, when the city Public Works Department closes off part of the street and sets up inflatable sprinklers. Blaine-Birch Bay Park & Recreation District 2 hosts it, the Sugar Shack ice cream truck shows up, and hot dogs are handed out free. No registration, no ticket. It is a two-hour event that turns a residential intersection into the busiest block in town for one Friday afternoon a year.
If you have kids, the sequence for that weekend is often: Splash Day Friday, market Saturday morning, Plover Saturday afternoon, playground at Marine Park to run off the ferry ride. Semiahmoo Spit for a picnic if you brought one. Back before 5:30 PM Sunday if you want the last eastbound sailing to work in your favor.
The short list for a resident August
For anyone already living here, the weekend calendar reduces to a handful of decisions:
- First weekend of the month: Pirate Festival plus sand sculpture. Bring cash for the food vendors, since the booths are small operators.
- Second and fourth Saturdays: Market at G Street Plaza. Combine with the Art Walk on August 8.
- Mid-month Friday: Splash Day if you have kids at 3rd and Martin.
- Any Fri–Sun through Labor Day: Plover to Semiahmoo. The APA Museum at 9261 Semiahmoo Parkway is open Thursday through Sunday, 1 to 5 PM. Free and small, roughly 30 minutes end to end.
- Reserving dinner: Great Blue Heron on festival weekends, Drayton Harbor Oyster if you are staying downtown, Ttowa if the patio wait is too long.
The one item that is not calendar-driven: the Plover schedule ends the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. After that, weekends re-shape themselves around the market's final Saturday on September 26 and the shoulder-season events like Gateway 1890's Oktoberfest on September 19. August is the last month the pieces stack this cleanly.
If you spend enough Augusts in Blaine, you stop reading festival flyers and start reading the ferry's operating hours. That is the real local knowledge here, and it is the same instinct that makes buying or selling a home in this town go smoothly instead of not. When you are ready to talk through a move on either end of it, Donita Dickinson and the team are here to listen first and advise second. Reach out for a free home valuation whenever the timing feels right.
