On a cold Thursday morning in early February, Port of Chinook commissioner Preston Devers climbed into the cab of a new dredge and started pushing years of Columbia River silt out of the marina's boat basin. The machine cost $468,000. It arrived just before Christmas, giving the port only a short window to get it running before dredging season closes in February. None of that sounds like a headline. But for a harbor that had spent years waiting on someone else's equipment and someone else's schedule, it was the first time in a long while the Port of Chinook could just start.
If you've tied up a boat here, launched from the ramp, or bought bait at the port's coffee shop, that distinction matters more than the dollar figures making the rounds this year. The Port of Chinook sits on the north shore of the Columbia, tucked behind Cape Disappointment on Baker Bay, with 300 slips and a working fleet that runs salmon, crab, and black cod. The story this year isn't just that money showed up. It's that the port finally stopped depending on somebody else's dredge to keep its own harbor open.
Four Years, One Sunk Dredge
The marina had gone four years without a real dredging, according to port director Richard Wright, who has called that stretch dangerous for a harbor sitting at the mouth of a river that dumps millions of tons of sediment into Baker Bay every year. The last time crews got equipment into the basin, Wright says it barely covered the job.
Wright put it plainly to the Chinook Observer: the previous effort was limited to the main fairway, and then the dredge they were using sank. From there, the port basin kept filling in, one Columbia River flood season at a time, while the port waited for the next opportunity to borrow, rent, or contract for equipment that wasn't its own.
That's the part of this story that doesn't show up in a press release about federal dollars. A small port district competing for shared dredging equipment is a port district at the back of a line it doesn't control. Chinook's basin wasn't silting in because nobody cared. It was silting in because fixing it depended on someone else's calendar.
Why Owning the Machine Mattered More Than the Money
Commissioner Nicholas Matson started working the problem differently in 2024. Instead of angling for another turn with contracted equipment, he began building a case for the port to own its own maintenance dredge outright. Heading into the 2025 legislative session, he worked with Eric Fitch, director of the Washington Public Ports Association, to get a funding request built into the state's capital budget.
Once that money was approved and signed into law, Matson set out to find the right model and manufacturer, port staff processed the invoicing, and the Washington State Department of Commerce distributed the funds. Wright described the whole arc, from starting the process to running the dredge, as something the port pulled off in about a year.
"We initiated the process, got the grant and got the equipment in the water within 12 months. It was absolutely critical."
That's not a timeline most small port districts get to claim, and it's the real hinge of this story. The fix here wasn't that Chinook found money. Lots of small coastal infrastructure projects find money eventually. The fix was that Chinook decided it would rather own the tool than keep asking to borrow one, and that decision is what turned a years-long bottleneck into a 12-month job.
What the Money Actually Paid For
The funding behind this split into two distinct pieces, and knowing the difference tells you where the port is headed next:
- $500,000 in state capital-budget funding bought the port its own dredge outright. That's the $468,000 machine now sitting in the marina, an asset the Port of Chinook owns and can deploy on its own timeline going forward.
- $2.7 million in federal funding, announced Feb. 2 by Sen. Maria Cantwell as one of 50 community projects she requested across the state, is earmarked to fund the actual dredging work in the marina basin, supporting both commercial fishing and recreational boating in Baker Bay, the lower Columbia, and the adjacent Pacific.
Put together, one number bought the tool and the other pays to keep using it. Matson has framed the payoff in plain terms: he's connected the dredge directly to revenue increases, growth in the local seafood market, job growth, and public enjoyment of the harbor. That's not abstract for a working port this size. A basin that's too shallow to use isn't a minor inconvenience. It's slips that sit empty and a fleet that has to go elsewhere.
The timing lines up with a decent year on the water, too. Washington and Oregon fishery managers set the 2026 forecast for upriver spring Chinook at 147,300 fish, below last year's return but above the 10-year average of 126,248, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. A harbor with a functioning basin is a more useful harbor in a season like that than in a lean one.
The Building Across from the Park That's Still Waiting
Walk two minutes from the marina and you'll pass the other landmark that defines Chinook's short stretch of Highway 101: a former Methodist Episcopal church built in 1906, later reborn as the Sanctuary Restaurant, sitting directly across from the town park. It served candlelit dinners inside the converted sanctuary, known for fish cakes and Swedish meatballs on a short, seafood-heavy menu.
The Sanctuary has been closed for years now. The building and its lot, four parcels totaling roughly 0.9 acres with the original 4,768-square-foot structure plus a 1,440-square-foot manufactured duplex, has been listed as commercial real estate, with asking prices in recent listings running from around $699,000 to $749,000 depending on the source. It's zoned Community Commercial, which leaves the door open for a restaurant, a brewery, a fish market, a coffee shop, or a gift shop to move back in.
The building's last chapter has a name attached to it. The chef who once cooked there got his start in that kitchen, working alongside his mother, Joanne, who ran the restaurant. He later opened his own place in Cannon Beach, Anna's Table, named for his daughter and his mother, according to The Astorian. That kitchen is still sitting on Highway 101, waiting for whoever decides to do for that building what the Port of Chinook just did for its harbor.
That's really the throughline here. The marina didn't get fixed because Chinook is a lucky town this year. It got fixed because a commissioner spent a year building a specific, ownable solution instead of waiting on the next opportunity to borrow one. The church on the highway is still empty for the same reason the basin used to silt in: it's waiting on someone to make that same kind of move.
If you're the kind of person who already checks the tide charts before heading down to the port, none of this is news you needed a real estate agent to tell you. But it's worth knowing exactly what changed this year and why, because the next chapter for that empty church on Highway 101 is going to depend on somebody making the same call Chinook's port commissioners made about the harbor.
If you're curious what a building like that, or a home anywhere along this stretch of the lower Columbia, might be worth right now, the team at PNW Real Estate Experts knows this waterfront block by block. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation or just to talk through what's changing in Chinook this year.
