Nothin But Net

Somebody bought a boat and named it Nothin But Net. It is out of Anacortes, it is moored in Portage Bay, and there is a whole personality in those three words that no amount of caption writing improves on. Boat names are the last widely practised form of public wit in this country and most of them are terrible, which is the point.

Portage Bay is the stretch of water between Lake Union and the Montlake Cut, and it is as close to fully occupied as water gets. Floating homes along the shore, a yacht club, and moorage packed tight enough that the boats read as one continuous structure. Nobody is going anywhere in this photograph. The tarps are on, the covers are lashed down, and a working Tuesday afternoon in July looks like a parking lot that happens to float.

The compression is doing the work. This was taken at about 260mm from across the water, which stacks everything into flat layers: dinghies, then the cruiser, then the far dock, then the houseboats, all apparently touching. Stand where I was standing and it looks nothing like this. It looks like a bay with boats in it.

There is a Kodak point and shoot behind this, incidentally, which is worth knowing next time somebody tells you what they could do with better equipment.