Most visitors learn Gig Harbor's maritime story at the Harbor History Museum on Harborview Drive, where a restored Skansie net shed and a 1906 gas boat explain how Croatian and Slavic immigrant families turned this harbor into one of the largest purse seine fishing ports on the West Coast. Residents know the shorter version by heart: net sheds, a museum, an annual Blessing of the Fleet. It's a good story, and it's true. It is also not the thing currently deciding whether Gig Harbor keeps a working fishing fleet at all.
That decision is being made in the water behind Ancich Waterfront Park, where the city has spent more than a decade trying to build a single dock, and in a legal argument over who gets to use a strip of leased tidelands next door. Neither of those things will show up in a museum exhibit. Both of them are happening this year.
What's Actually Going Into the Water Right Now
The City of Gig Harbor first proposed a Commercial Fishing Homeport at Ancich Waterfront Park back in 2013, the year the city passed a resolution capturing the community's vision for the park it had acquired the year before. The idea was straightforward: give the harbor's commercial fishing fleet a dedicated public dock, since the boats currently rely almost entirely on a handful of aging private piers.
Getting there has taken longer than anyone planned. The city submitted its first federal permit application in 2022. The Army Corps of Engineers didn't fully engage until late 2023. A mitigation plan got resubmitted, then resubmitted again in 2025, this time with a proposal to plant three acres of kelp in nearby waters to offset the dock's impact on the seafloor. As of this July, the city told its council the project could cost as much as $5.2 million, up from an earlier estimate of $3.4 million, with construction timed to fit inside Washington's seasonal "fish window," the narrow stretch of the calendar when in-water work does the least damage to salmon runs.
When it's finished, the dock will include:
- A 280-foot main walkway float
- Fifteen 60-foot finger floats and two 80-foot finger floats
- An 80-foot gangway
- Moorage for 17 commercial vessels between 60 and 70 feet long
- A sewer pump-out station and the removal of the aging, creosote-treated Jerkovich Pier
City staff say the dock will initially be reserved for commercial fishing vessels only, with no transient moorage for recreational boats, a restriction they've tied directly to the project's current permits and to concerns raised by neighboring property owners. It will also stay open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, doubling as a working waterfront and an educational stop. That last detail matters more than it sounds. The city isn't just building a dock. It's writing rules into the permit that determine who gets to tie up there, which is exactly the question that's dividing the harbor a few hundred feet away.
The Other Dock Nobody Is Calling a Marina
While the Homeport has inched through federal review, a private dock next door has moved faster, and with more friction. The century-old Ancich Dock at 3615 Harborview Drive, in the Millville neighborhood, extends 270 feet into the bay and has been condemned by the state. It has to be replaced or removed. The owner's approved plan would pull 59 creosote-treated piles and rebuild the structure with less impact on the ecology below it, which is the kind of project most residents would wave through without a second look.
Except this dock sits on tidelands the city leases from the Washington Department of Natural Resources, the same leased waters the Homeport is being built to use. Boats using the rebuilt Ancich Dock would need to maneuver through those homeport waters to get in and out. Local commercial fishermen worry that overlap will crowd the very space they've waited over a decade to secure, and neighbors raised separate concerns about street parking at three public hearings held on the project.
Whose Boat Gets the Right of Way
The dispute turned on a legal principle most residents have never had reason to learn: the Public Trust Doctrine, which holds that state-owned waterways should serve the public's benefit. The city and DNR both argued that Ancich Dock's private tenants should still be allowed to transit through the Homeport's leased waters under that doctrine. A hearing examiner agreed, but with a condition that reshapes who actually controls the harbor. Use by the Homeport's tideland lessees was ruled primary. Use by boats from the private marina next door was ruled "secondary and inferior," subject to restriction whenever it conflicts with the public project.
Guy Hoppen, a commercial fisherman who has pushed for the Homeport since 2013 and now runs the nonprofit Gig Harbor BoatShop, put the stakes plainly when the ruling came down.
"I do not believe [the doctrine] is a development tool" to provide access for private ventures.
Hoppen has also said something that explains why this fight matters beyond one dock dispute: Gig Harbor may be the only harbor on the West Coast where a fishing fleet of this size still depends on privately owned moorage rather than public infrastructure. That's not a nostalgic detail. It's the actual vulnerability the Homeport is designed to close.
The Cost Per Foot That Explains Everything
Here's the number that makes the whole argument make sense. Commercial fishing boat owners in Gig Harbor typically pay under $10 per linear foot for moorage. Recreational marinas, by contrast, routinely charge $15 or more per linear foot for pleasure craft. That five-dollar gap isn't trivia. It's the reason private dock space keeps disappearing from under the fishing fleet. Every time a private pier owner has the choice between renewing a low-margin lease to a commercial vessel or converting the slip to higher-margin recreational moorage, the math points one direction.
That's the quiet mechanism behind everything else in this story. The net sheds, the museum, the Blessing of the Fleet, all of it depends on boats having somewhere to tie up that doesn't get priced out from under them. A public dock built specifically to hold that price line, and specifically barred from taking on recreational boats that could outbid the fishing fleet for space, is the only tool anyone has proposed that actually stops the drift.
Where the Net Sheds Fit Now
Seventeen historic net sheds still line Gig Harbor's waterfront, passed down mostly through families of Croatian ancestry who once used them to store and mend the nets a purse seine fleet depends on. Most have been converted into homes, restaurants, or the museum itself. Only a handful still function as working net sheds in the way they were built for. That transition already happened. It's the reason a visitor can tour the Skansie shed at the Harbor History Museum and assume the fishing story is safely preserved history rather than an active concern.
The Homeport is the city's attempt to keep one piece of that story from finishing the same way the net sheds did. Whether it works depends less on the museum's collection and more on whether a floating dock clears federal review, holds its funding together through cost increases, and keeps its no-recreational-moorage restriction intact once it's built.
What to Watch This Fall
This year's Blessing of the Fleet, the ceremony that has sent Gig Harbor's fishing boats out for the season since at least 1972, already ran on its usual first full weekend of June. The quieter, more consequential event is the one without a parade behind it: pile driving and in-water construction at Ancich Park, timed to the current fish window and aimed at a completion date before that window closes again. If you've noticed barges or fencing near the park this fall, that's what you're looking at, and it's the closest thing this harbor has to a hinge point for what it looks like a decade from now.
Gig Harbor's identity as a working waterfront has always been easy to romanticize and harder to actually maintain. The families who built this fleet understood that better than anyone standing at a festival booth ever could. What's happening at Ancich Park right now is the unglamorous, permit-by-permit version of the same fight they've been having since the first net shed went up. It just doesn't come with music.
If you're curious how projects like the Homeport, or any shift in a waterfront neighborhood's character, tend to shape property values and buyer interest over time, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this harbor closely. Morrison House Sotheby's International Realty is based right here in Gig Harbor, and we're always glad to talk through what's changing along the water. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready.
