SEATTLE — Have you ever wanted to be in someone’s Seattle vacation highlight reel? No need to land a gig at Pike Place Fish Market or the Space Needle — you can make a cameo just by bobbing in the Ballard Locks.
For local boaters, passing through the Locks is a blasé experience — maybe even a hassle on a busy summer weekend, when there’s a long queue. I don’t own a pleasure boat, so I’ve always stared down into the Locks from the observation deck with a mix of fascination and envy. That was until I found myself in a kayak 12 feet below the tourist throng, listening for the lock master’s orders as the special miter gates closed behind me.
The occasion: a guided tour with Ballard Kayak & Paddleboard, which offers a three-hour jaunt through the Locks ($98 per person plus tax and tip; kayak and equipment included; Friday-Monday and Wednesday). Your role as a supporting actor is just one highlight of the tour, which has something for everybody: fun on the water, dad jokes, a history lesson, an up-close look at local wildlife and more.
On a pleasantly blustery July afternoon, I joined 14 others on W Dock at Shilshole Bay Marina, where the 11-year-old outfitter stocks a fleet of sit-on-top kayaks and stand-up paddleboards.
The tour is suitable for families (ages 4 and older) and beginner kayakers. The 30-minute safety demo and paddling clinic got us on the water, making proper strokes for efficient travel. For guided tours, clients are suited up in life jackets and assigned to Necky Looksha T tandems. These 18-foot plastic kayaks are stable — only one has capsized on a tour in the past four years, when two paddlers leaned out of the same side of the boat at the same time to spot a bald eagle.
The tandems are equipped with rudders and foot pedals in the rear cockpit, which makes steering a breeze, while the paddler up front sets the pace. As our guide Lindsay Maggard explained, “The front seat is the gas pedal and the back seat is the steering wheel.”
Decked out in a wide-brim straw hat and Chaco sandals with rainbow straps, Maggard looked the part of a sun-bleached kayak guide soaking up every ray of the Northwest summer. He matched his laid-back style with Big Dad Joke Energy, delivering a bevy of fun facts and figures about local ecology and history alongside some truly groan-worthy one liners. (“A lifetime of going through the Locks has its ups and downs,” for instance.)
With the wind at our back, we cruised at a leisurely pace — sometimes more floating than paddling — as Maggard and fellow guide Cat Leonowicz led us roughly 2 miles east to the Locks. Along the way, we spotted harbor seals, great blue herons, bald eagles and a sizable jellyfish. These wildlife encounters make the tour about more than just the Locks — you encounter an impressive array of biodiversity on the saltwater side to complement the marvel of human engineering that awaits at the tour’s climax.
We learned about the transient nature of sea lions, the backstory on the century-old tall ship Adventuress, and evidence of glacial till hiding in plain sight on a bluff above Shilshole Bay.
For out-of-town guests, I suspect the whole tour would be a stunner, from the hive of sailboat activity in the marina, to the open water with views of West Point Lighthouse and beyond, to the clutch of waterfront homes and docks in Magnolia, to the heron rookery in Commodore Park.
The showstopper, of course, is transiting the Locks.
The pros at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who run the Locks 24/7 make it seem easy. Kayaks use the small lock and should float to the side until the PA system announces that it’s your turn. Pick up the pace, scurry in and grab onto one of the many yellow metal pegs along the sides of the lock. The higher-up pegs are aligned for boats to tie their lines; the ones closest to the water are easy for a kayaker to reach. Then sit tight as 33,000 gallons of freshwater gush in for every foot of elevation you need to rise in order to reach Salmon Bay. Smile at the tourists, wave to the lock masters and wait for the gates to open. Lather, rinse and repeat in the return direction.
The whole process is over before you know it. That efficiency is intentional. The Locks are a working navigational tool — the busiest locks system in the U.S. and among the only in the world to connect saltwater and freshwater bodies. The Locks are a brilliant necessity that are essential to Seattle’s maritime commerce — albeit with longstanding impacts to Indigenous concerns, from hindering salmon stocks to draining the Black River, a lifeline for the Duwamish.
The guides cover this tension in a fairly cursory fashion. For those looking for more depth, pick up a copy of “Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal” by historians Jennifer Ott and David B. Williams.
But what a three-hour kayak tour understandably lacks in professional historian’s rigor, it makes up for with a fun day on the water that offers a microcosm of our city. As Maggard summed it up on the paddle back to Shilshole: “Here in Seattle, we try to live side by side with nature. The Locks are a symbol of our biodiversity side and our functional, human side.”
