Editor,

For the past two years, my wife and I donated our time and our boat to the Coast Guard Auxiliary to ensure the hydro plane races were not interrupted by a boater trying to come across the race course to enter the Oak Harbor Marina.

We do this because this is how we serve our country by donating our time and facilities to the Coast Guard. This allows the active duty folks time to deal with more important issues.

While talking to some of the food vendors and some of the competitors, we did hear some disturbing comments regarding the Oak Harbor weekend.

The vendors complained that they were not going to break even because they were so far away from the people that they weren’t selling enough to cover their expenses.

People we talked to in the beer garden complained that the food was too far from the beer garden. Not to mention that our non-alcohol-drinking friend could not even get a bottle of water in the beer garden. He had to leave us, walk across the street and walk back so we could have a conversation in the beer garden. How crazy is that? No water for sale in a drinking place.

This morning I talked to a competitor who was gassing his truck that was pulling his race boat, not in Oak Harbor but at the casino gas station.

When I asked how they liked Oak Harbor they said they didn’t know. Once they arrived and set up their rig to race they were pretty much stuck in the pit/camping area since there was not transportation away from there.

So my question to the promoters is this: how hard would it be to have food and adult beverages within a reasonable distance of each other? How hard would it be to have scheduled transportation from the marina to town? People come here to race but would also spend money in our town if they could get there.

The promoters need to remember that not everyone is in top physical condition and that a walk from the marina to Pioneer Way is just too much for anyone with even minor health issues.

It’s a shame that it’s not made easier for visitors to spend money in our stores and restaurants.

I’ll bet that some visitors would have liked to try the restaurants on Pioneer had they know they were there and got a ride to get there.

Just passing on what we were told by visitors that wanted to talk to a couple in uniform.

I hope that next year the promoters do a better job of making our visitors welcome and making arrangements for them to get around our town without having to disassemble their pits and camps to get to someplace where they can spend some money in our town.

Jim O’Connor

Oak Harbor