Northwest Seaport Maritime Heritage Center is a nonprofit organization in Seattle, Washington dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Puget Sound and Northwest Coast maritime heritage, expressed through educational programs and experiences available to the public aboard its ships.

These vessels are used as platforms for a variety of public programs, ranging from tours and festivals to restoration workshops and vocational training.

[1] Northwest Seaport is adjacent to the Center for Wooden Boats and the Museum of History and Industry on the south shore of Lake Union in downtown Seattle.

The decline of its flagship by the early 2000s, however, prompted the board of directors to focus on hiring professional staff to manage the ships and the organization.

Northwest Seaport offers programs ranging from public tours, festivals, and story times for toddlers to vocational training in the marine trades and traditional maritime music sing-alongs.

In 1898, in response to the Klondike Gold Rush, she transported barges full of gold-seeking miners and supplies up the Inside Passage to Alaska.

In 1904–1905, LV-83 steamed around the tip of South America to her first station at Blunts Reef in California, where she saved 150 people when their ship ran aground in dense fog.

It served as an armed patrol boat in WWII, then returned to lightship duty, and then in 1951 was transferred to Seattle and assigned the station name Relief, operating as the alternate, or relief vessel, for the newer primary lightships on the Columbia River bar, Umatilla Reef, and Swiftsure stations.

Her aids to navigation include a 1,000 watt primary light, a 140-decibel Diaphone foghorn, and a 1,000 pound foredeck fog bell.

They re-rigged Tordenskjold as a longliner again and for the next three-and-a-half decades, Marvin Gjerde fished halibut and black cod again.

The three-masted, fore-and-aft schooner Wawona sailed from 1897 to 1947 as a lumber carrier and later as a fishing vessel based in Puget Sound.

After conferring with many experts in the maritime heritage field, locally and across the nation, Northwest Seaport created a plan to preserve key artifacts from the vessel.

Graduate students from East Carolina University's program in nautical archaeology documented the Wawona during the Wooden Boat Festival on 4–6 July 2008.

In March 2009, the vessel was carefully deconstructed in a local shipyard and artifacts (including wooden knees, beams, and paneling) removed for storage and later display in on-land exhibits and memorials.