Sometime in the next three years, progress will winkle Tacoma’s Sea Scout program out of the vast building at 1129 Dock St. that has been its sea base since 1982.

Before that, the Scouts had bounced from a wooden shed to a 150-foot barge to the municipal dock. Then a machine shop on the Thea Foss Waterway went bankrupt. The 100-year-old building that housed the business passed to the city, which wisely rented it to the Sea Scouts for $1 a year.

Vast, wooden, with lofts and recesses and a sliding door onto the Foss docks, the 15,000-square foot building has been perfect. Sails hang to dry from its beams. A sailboat, motorboats, a lifeboat awaiting restoration and racks of kayaks don’t begin to fill the main room. The bay where shipwright Phil Lantz and the Scouts built the Bantry Bay gig Vérité in 1998 still has the hull’s forms hanging on the wall. There’s a uniform bank set into a corner, and engine repair facilities and clothes lines stuffed with life jackets through another sliding door.

As good as the deal has been for the Scouts, it’s been better for the city and the Foss. The building has never fallen derelict, sucking up money and attracting squatters. Instead, it has brought the scenic bustle of hundreds of good kids maintaining and using lovely vessels.

The place is seldom quiet. It’s one of the largest Sea Scout units in the nation, with 85 kids linked to the retired Coast Guard Cutter Charles N. Curtis, 40 sailing on the sloop Odyssey, 10 learning the ropes with Corinthian Youth Sailing and 25 rowing and sailing the Vérité. On top of that, about 70 adults work with them.

“We are now one of the largest youth programs on the water on the West Coast,” said Commodore Hank Hibbard.

The Scouts are not arguing with the Foss Waterway Development Authority’s notice that they must move out to make way for condos and business. They knew it would happen eventually.

They simply want to be prepared.

“With the gentrification, we’ve been told we have to move,” Hibbard said on a Wednesday evening, before the Vérité crew rowed out onto Commencement Bay for a sunset sail.

As the kids carried their sails and oars to the boat, a planning committee of adults retired to a conference room – more of a cubbyhole, really.

They spread out a map of the Foss and set about plotting the sea base’s future. They made a list of property owners, figured out who they knew, assigned members to make contacts, talked about the viability of sites up and down the finger of deep water. They imagined partnerships – a combination public market and sea base, for example.

If you have anything to do with the waterway, you’re on a board member’s to-do list. Likewise if you have anything to do with the significant money it could take to make a move. When they call you, listen to them. They’ll be giving you the chance to make the investment of a lifetime, an investment in remarkable kids.

“We need to be on the Foss,” said Tom Rogers, who skippers the Curtis.

The Scouts could not get to the inner waterways.

“Quite a few kids take public transportation and walk here,” committee member Sally Slater explained.

“We have kids who live with foster parents, single parents, grandparents,” Hibbard said. “We partner with Catholic Community Services and have kids who have no parents at all. The traditional family today is not traditional. We have kids from a wide variety of backgrounds, but they are all held to the same high standards.”

Though the Scouting itself is affordable – $20 a year to crew on the Vérité, $45 on the Curtis – the kids have ways to earn the thousands more it takes to maintain the program. During football season, for example, they meet on Dock Street at 6:30 a.m. Sundays, then carpool to the University of Washington to clean Husky Stadium after home games. They are sick of peanut shells, but they bring in $7,000 a year.

They volunteer at Maritime Fest, Freedom Fair and, this summer, worked the Tall Ships Festival.

All of that changes them, Claire Blain said later that evening, in the Vérité.

Strong and disciplined, a dozen teens pulling in strict unison had rowed the boat out of the waterway into the bay, then put up its three masts and raised the sails.

Blain, 24, and Vérité’s skipper, talked about her teen years. Her parents divorced, then her mother died. Blain moved from Tacoma to Seattle, struggled with high schools, then dropped out. She got back to Tacoma, joined Sea Scouts, and found the structure she needed. She has a GED now, a full-time job and her volunteer work with the Vérité kids. She studies navigation and seamanship, and, with the crew, has competed in the Atlantic Challenge international gig races. Next year, she intends to earn her captain’s certification.

None of that, she said, would have happened without the leadership and companionship she found with the Sea Scouts.

There are others like her, Hibbard said. Four kids have won Gates Scholarships.

Any time the boats go out, there are children finding something they can get nowhere else.

Hiked out over Commencement Bat to steady the Vérité in a brisk wind, teenager Samantha Larson flew her hands over the water as the boat sped back toward the Foss.

“This,” she said. “This is what I live for.”

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677

kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com