Seattle Maritime Festival: All hands on deck — it's playtime!

A week after the recreational boaters had their fun on opening day of boating season, along Seattle's waterfront Saturday it was the turn of the working mariners.

Aboard the Prudhoe Bay — a small, slow bargelike vessel with no chance of winning its Seattle Maritime Festival tugboat race — a full deck of marine workers and their friends partied all the way.

Operated by Global Diving & Salvage, of West Seattle, the Prudhoe Bay boasted an on-deck BBQ with hot dogs, hamburgers and beer, lots of happy children, flying water-balloons, a small but deafening cannon, and young women posing Kate Winslet-style as if on the prow of the Titanic.

"Man, we're really going now," shouted Global Diving co-owner Tim Beaver above the noise inside the wheelhouse as his vessel hit 7.7 knots and fell back to dead last by a big margin.

It was smiles all around and time for another round from the cannon.

"Family Fun Day" at the Seattle Maritime Festival was a treat for tourists lining the piers, but the real fun was on the water.

On the edge of Puget Sound, near the enormous Norwegian Star cruise ship looming over Pier 66, little black tugboats danced with one another.

Showing remarkable speed and agility for such worn and aged harbor workhorses, they touched prows, moved together delicately, then swung around 360 degrees and sped off to play with other working boats.

Drawing a crowd of onshore spectators, a Seattle Fire Department fireboat sounded its horn and sprayed water in a high-flying fountain of celebration.

From a standing start on the dock, competing teams of divers donned survival suits, jumped into the water and raced to a life raft.

A Coast Guard helicopter dropped a rescue swimmer in the water just off the pier, hovered overhead without wavering for five minutes, then winched him from the water back to safety.

Afterward, tugboats including the Prudhoe Bay raced from the Seattle Aquarium north to Elliott Bay Marina, churning through the waves, their decks loud with the cries of the chase.

The jobs of more than 111,000 people depend on the Seattle port. The Prudhoe Bay crew and guests, party crowd though they were, provided a snapshot of what serious maritime work entails.

Global Diving is the largest diving company on the West Coast and does more than $60 million worth of business a year. Its typical heavy-duty work involves constructing bridges, piers and dams; removing fuel or environmentally-hazardous cargoes from sunken ships; and laying and maintaining undersea oil pipelines.

The company helped build the Interstate 90 floating bridge. It's working now on the Hood Canal Bridge repair.

In 2002, it helped recover a Boeing Stratoliner that had ditched in Elliott Bay.

Mike Bradshaw, 29, is a diver for Global. Think of construction work, like pouring concrete. Now think of doing it underwater in a diving suit. That's Bradshaw's job.

"I love it," he said. "You have to do a lot of thinking, a lot of problem solving, underwater. You never know exactly what you have until you get down there."

The maritime professionals didn't have everything entirely their own way on their day of fun.

The survival-suit race was won by Compass Courses, a maritime training company based in Edmonds, which beat out competition from the Coast Guard, the Seattle Propeller Club, tugboat company Foss and, from Canada, the Queen's Harbour Master team.

But the four-man Compass team included only one actual employee: instructor Jason Svendsen. He recruited three young friends, gave them an hour's training swimming in the rubber suits, and their time of 1 minute, 15 seconds won the trophy Saturday.

"Thursday was our first time in a survival suit," said Compass team member Josh Zimmer, a 29-year-old carpenter from Edmonds.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com