Scheduling the Oak Harbor Hydroplane Races involves navigating through tide charts and watching out for other conflicting events.

Unable to find a weekend in August when those two forces would align, the race’s organizer canceled the event for 2016 with plans to bring it back the following year.

“We’re taking a forced year off and coming back bigger and better in 2017,” said Michelle Curry, the event’s owner.

Curry brought back hydroplane races to Oak Harbor in 2014 after an absence of nearly 40 years.

She said she’s been happy with the event’s progress and positive feedback from the community, claiming 12,000 to 15,000 people attended the two-day event in each of its first two years.

Fifty boats competed this summer, up from 42 racers in 2014.

Curry said she has been working for two months trying to secure a weekend next August that would work with Oak Harbor’s tide forecast and not compete with another event, but was unsuccessful.

She reviewed tide charts with Chris Sublet, Oak Harbor Marina Harbormaster, and found that the two optimal tide weekends in August fell on dates that conflicted with other events.

One conflicting event is the Oak Harbor Pigfest, scheduled for Sunday, Aug. 14.

“I don’t want to compete with the Pigfest,” Curry said. “The goal is to add an event, not compete with another.”

Another optimal tidal weekend was the last weekend of the month, but that fell on the same dates of a long-established boat race in Pateros.

Curry said she tried to see if Pateros might change its race date to accommodate Oak Harbor but understood it had a long tradition.

Time was a factor because the American Power Boat Association starts putting its schedule together in November.

Curry also was up against deadlines for funding such as Island County’s 2 percent lodging tax.

“This is completely beyond my control,” Curry said. “I have been fighting to get a race date for two months.

“It’s not a quick decision. It’s been long thought out, thinking about how it affects the town and sponsors and everyone investing their time. It’s hard.”

Curry, a real estate loan officer with Peoples Bank in Oak Harbor, said she plans to organize other events in the city during 2016 while the hydroplane races are on hiatus. She said she is exploring a paddlefest event, another boat race, and is also taking a serious look at an Octoberfest for Oak Harbor.

She likes the idea of an event that isn’t dependent upon tides in the shallow bay.

“The beauty of Oak Harbor is we have the bay so we can sit up and look down on the race course. There’s nothing like it in the entire country,” Curry said.

“The ugly part of it is we depend on Mother Nature when we want to fill the bay with water.”

Longtime Oak Harbor resident Skip Pohtilla said he liked the hydroplane event and hates to see it go away even for a year.

“I enjoyed hearing them and seeing them scoot by,” he said.

As an organizer of several community events in the city, Pohtilla said it can be tricky to bring back an event after a year’s absence.

“I don’t like seeing any event that we’ve gotten established, no matter how recent it may be, going by the wayside,” he said. “Part of the problem is, once you cancel one, restarting one is actually twice as hard.”

Yet Pohtilla understands the issues with tidal dependancy. Driftwood Day, an event he and his wife K.C. founded, requires extreme low tidal conditions, so when he schedules that event in the late summer, he must consult the tidal charts as well.

“We have to deal with that every year,” Pohtilla said.

“We want just the opposite of what they want.”