Bruce Jones sits in the new Mariners Hall at the Columbia River Maritime Museum and tries to explain his profound affection for the new exhibit. He’s the museum’s executive director.

But every time he starts a sentence, someone starts hammering.

“What you’re hearing — all that clanging — is a 52-foot motor lifeboat, ‘Triumph,’” he manages to sneak in as the cacophony continues, “a retired Coast Guard motor lifeboat from Cape Disappointment.”

The gleaming new 24,500-square-foot hall will open to the public on Friday, Nov. 20.

“They’re making final adjustments to its keel in the pit within the museum building. So they need to adjust the boat by about 1 degree,” Jones smiles, “but it’s rather loud.”

The Columbia River Maritime Museum has always focused on boat exhibits and galleries. But the new wing, named Warnock Mariners Hall after a major donor, is about the people who sailed the boats.

For example, one exhibit tells the story of Tim Boehm, the former captain of a little wooden boat called the Duke that used to sail out to the gillnetters at the mouth of the Columbia, collect their catches, then bring them back to the processors.

In a video posted next to the Duke, Boehm tells the story of how he got the captain job at just 15 years old.

“What happened is the guy that ran the Duke was a drinker,” Boehm explains. “He got smashed and put the Duke on the beach with a load of fish on it.”

Boehm had been hanging out with commercial fishers at the time, and one of them took him under his wing.

“He took me out on the boat and showed me the run and said, ‘You’ve got to do it on your own now. You know you can do it, Timmy.’ Can you imagine being that age, not having to go to school, getting to launch this great big launch?”

Each boat exhibit in the new wing is designed to catch the imagination. For Jones, the highlight is the Triumph, which visitors will be able to climb aboard.

The Triumph worked the Columbia from 1961 until 2021.

“So anyone who is a commercial fisherman or a recreational boater … probably saw the Triumph,” Jones said.

And many of them saw the boat when they were in some kind of trouble at sea.

“Thousands of people were saved by the Triumph over 60 years,” he said. “So, to have it on display in the museum now that it’s retired, rather than moldering away in a boatyard somewhere, is something we’re really thrilled about.”

The museum attracts about 110,000 visitors a year. Jones hopes the new wing will add maybe 10% or 20% to that figure. And those extra visitors would be good for the town.

But before anyone gets to see the new hall, several exhibits still have to be installed. Workers in vests and hard hats continued in late October to fill every corner of the museum.

Forensic artist Gloria Nusse is creating nine life-size figures that will stand in the various boat displays.

She’s better known for reconstructing faces for police based on skeletal remains. But here she’s creating scenes, like a man who fell overboard being rescued by a lifeboat during World War II.

“So he’s trying to climb back in,” Nusse explained. “And two of his mates are trying to pull him up at the same time”

The figures are dressed in 1940s clothing and lifejackets. In the background painting is a liberty ship, the kind that was built in Portland in the Kaiser Shipyards at the time.

Nusse said she’s on schedule for the opening.

“The figures are all sculpted and mostly painted. So for him, we’ve just figured out how low he’s going to be under the boat.”

She has already put the finishing touches on a helicopter crew and will soon install the driver of a little wooden 1940s speedboat.

Nusse is from California, but the museum has focused on keeping most of the work local. Jared Rickenbach, for example, runs his own construction company in Astoria. He was pleased to be contracted for the new wing.

“It’s definitely larger than the majority of the projects that we do,” Rickenbach said.

Perhaps the most complex job was the building’s sweeping roofline, which is shaped like a wave and mirrors the wave on the main museum’s roof.

“I wouldn’t say a nightmare,” he said about that part of the job. “But it definitely was complex.”

Plans for Mariners Hall started in 2019, during the museum’s reaccreditation.

By that point locals had donated two warehouses full of boats, documents and tools. After raising $34 million from about 260 donors, the museum now has somewhere to put everything.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/11/07/new-mariners-hall-exhibit-columbia-river-maritime-museum-astoria/