Westport Maritime Museum — Attraction in Westport

Fabulous local maritime museum with very friendly and welcoming staff. Great exhibits on marine creatures and archaeology at kid level and ideal for instructing youngsters on the oceans and their wonders. Don't miss the huge whale skeletons in the adjoining glass-fronted buildings. Gem of the collection is the massive and awesome, French-made, first order Fresnel lighthouse lamp salvaged from the famous and now abandoned Destruction Island lighthouse. This magnificent piece of world-beating French high-tech optical machinery (circa 1890), illuminated and turning, gets its own well-deserved building and is surrounded with fascinating maps, charts, photos, and artifact displays evoking the terrestrial and marine history of Westport and surrounding communities in Western Washington. Go right now and wonder at what the French alone in that era could successively build, export, and install at great distances from the precision workshops constructing the very finest optical machines...

The information online said we would have an hour to visit the museum when we arrived. Unfortunately the young lady said the museum closed in 15 minutes. We spent a lot of money in the gift shop and asked if maybe she could give us BOGO for admission since we only had 10 minutes to look around. She said “No it would be 2 full price admissions.” Honestly she could have had better sense since we just dropped a good deal of money in the gift shop and could have fostered a positive experience with a BOGO admission. Instead we walked away with a very negative feeling...

A well thought out museum with interior exhibits packed into the former Coast Guard duty station building. Whaling history, Coast Guard history, curiosities, and a interesting set of natural history displays. Outside, there is a extremely informative and well thought out marine life and whaling station display which is free but which I think should include a Venmo card, as it's awesome and open 24/7. The museum also includes the option to see the old light house entire moving carriage and...