No telling how many years the “Soquamis Bay” has been a port of call for visitors hereabouts. The old petroglyph known as “Haleelts” on Agate Point bears witness to a few thousand years of comings and goings. But it is unlikely anyone during that time had ever seen two things witnessed there on Feb. 16, 2015.

In one of three 12-men longboats filled with 15 French Canadian and 15 Hawaiian voyagers, one American guide, and five Englishmen of the Hudson Bay Company, was clerk, John Work. He called the bay phonetically for its people, “Soquamis,” protecting his log from rain, Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 8, 1824. Kitsap wasn’t home, so they pushed on north to the Fraser River the next day without their preferred guide. They could never have imagined what we saw last Monday.

Led by Lt. Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploration Expedition 17 years later, surveyors mapped the Island. Also in longboats, they camped at The Sandspit. They slapped their brand on maps of the same bay, naming it in 1841 for the U.S. President who navigated their young nation through the War of 1812. They, too, could never have envisioned what was seen near their campsite on “Port Madison” on Presidents’ Day, 2015.

Fourteen years later, loggers, many from New England, established an international export lumber mill with help of Suquamish in the corner of the inlet on the south Port Madison shore. A Suquamish camp on the inlet was called  “Touchukwop” for the way the narrow inlet “crawled up into” the island’s forests and nearly bisected the island.

To help sailing ships find and enter the tiny waterway to the mill, a 0.7-mile-long seawall and pier was built with a large platform protruding far out into larger Port Madison bay. Tall ship and lumber schooner sailors couldn’t miss it. Sea captains learned to maneuver their ships into the narrow inlet by rounding up to the north along the platform, back winding their sails and winching themselves south along the seawall. The existence of the wall was known by “the island’s largest rock collection” — ballast rock from all over the world. Remains are still there today.

Hinted in old photos, historians knew little of the extent of this pier.  It took an 1868 map and the master diving expertise of Jack Welfare, Jr., great grandson of Capt. Alfred Welfare, Sr., one of Port Madison’s prominent sailing masters, to engage 20th century diving tools to locate the bundle of cable and piling definitively marking the long forgotten entry pier to the Madison Port. Yet it is certain that neither mill town residents, tall ship sailors, nor even the old light keeper on the Point Monroe sandspit in the 1890’s witnessed the two rarities that occurred last President’s Day there.

Folks overlooking the broad Port between Indianola, Suquamish and the Island after World

War II were frequently surprised to find Liberty ships anchored in their front yards. The worn out cargo ships flocked home to find Elliott Bay jammed-packed with no room to unload, be mothballed or scrapped. So, it was not uncommon in the late 1940s for a freighter to have to wait on the hook in The Port.

A few times in the decades that followed, Port Madison’s bottom again felt the heavy anchors of a tall ship — this time steel-hulled. The splash of the anchor was quickly followed by dozens of jigs as the young trans-Pacific sailors pulled lingcod and bottom fish aboard and exchanged cheers with the flotilla of small boats that quickly came for a look. The day following, the well-fed crew of the famed Japanese sail training ship, Nippon Maru, upped anchor. They sailed on summer northerlies into Seattle Seafair history, but not into this Presidents’ Day’s.

Word of this day’s wonders spread faster than the Scotchbroom planted by the Catholic Sisters at their convent in Old Steilacoom over a century ago. This President’s Day, my brother called, “You been to the Sandspit? Grab your camera and go!”

With west coast ports closed for a week by labor stoppages and the national holiday, every nook and cranny on the Sound was filling with the largest commercial vessels on the ocean! We photographed two gigantic ones at anchor near the Sandspit — a first for Port Madison! More noteworthy, on the beach of the Port’s former light station, in this winter meteorologists describe as the warmest on record, on Feb. 16, 2015, I found Scotchbroom — in full bloom!