Weigh-ins for the Everett Coho Derby are happening this weekend at Harbor Marine, with a $10,000 prize riding on whoever hauls in the biggest fish. It's the kind of event that barely registers outside Snohomish County, and that's exactly the point. The derby has been part of the waterfront's rhythm for years, back when the marina was mostly boats and bait shops. This weekend it's happening a few hundred feet from a Mexican restaurant with a marina-view patio, a wine bar, and a fish market that opened its doors less than a year ago. The contrast says more about what's happened at Waterfront Place over the last twelve months than any single ribbon-cutting could.
The Restaurant Wave, In Order
Between December 2025 and June 2026, six new dining and retail spots opened inside the Port of Everett's Fisherman's Harbor development, known locally as Restaurant Row. Here's the sequence:
- Rustic Cork Wine Bar opened December 2, 2025, with a ribbon-cutting that drew close to 75 people.
- The Net Shed Fish Market & Kitchen followed two weeks later, on December 16, 2025, pulling in about 65 for its own grand opening.
- Tapped Public House opened March 2, 2026, with more than 100 people at the ribbon-cutting. It came with panoramic views of the Olympic Mountains and the marina, plus what the Port describes as the largest open-air rooftop deck on the waterfront in Snohomish County.
- Menchie's at the Marina brought self-serve frozen yogurt to the row that same spring.
- Marina Azul Cocina & Cantina closed out the wave on June 25, 2026, with a ribbon-cutting attended by around 50 people.
Marina Azul's arrival mattered beyond just filling another storefront. Owner Julian Ramos, who has run restaurants since 2002, brought the same family group behind Cava Azul Cocina & Cantina in Woodinville and Agave Cocina & Cantina in Redmond and Kent Station, with his nephew Alejandro and son Esteban now managing the Everett location.
"We're so excited to be in Everett at Waterfront Place."
That's Ramos, at the June ribbon-cutting. It's a small quote, but it captures something true about the pace of the last year: five other operators said some version of the same thing on their own opening day, each one treating a marina storefront as a genuine destination rather than an overflow location.
The Last Open Slot Didn't Go to Food
Here's the part that changes how you should read the last twelve months. As of this spring, one space in the new Restaurant Row buildings still sat empty, and the Port said publicly it was hunting for a breakfast and brunch café to round out the lineup. That search appears to still be open. Nobody has announced a tenant for it.
Meanwhile, the Port's newest headline lease at Waterfront Place went somewhere else entirely. On September 10, 2026, the Port of Everett Commission approved a 10-year lease with Athleisure Collective, a boutique fitness studio known for reformer Pilates and infrared sauna sessions. The company currently runs one location in Arlington, opened in 2024 by founder Briana Bowers, and this will be its second. The Everett buildout is set for roughly 4,000 square feet plus an adjacent patio in Marina Village, on the South Marina Promenade between Anthony's Homeport and Woodfire, with an early 2027 target date.
So the pattern that defined 2025 into 2026, restaurant after restaurant claiming a marina-facing storefront, just broke. The next tenant to sign isn't adding to the food count. It's adding three fitness studios, a retail area, and a cafe of its own, built around movement and recovery rather than another dinner reservation. Waterfront Place pulled in more than 1.6 million site visits in 2025, and that kind of daily foot traffic is clearly enough to support more than one kind of business now. A district that spent a year proving it could fill restaurant leases is starting to prove it can fill other kinds too, while the one plain old breakfast spot still sits vacant.
What's Actually Happening This Weekend
If you're trying to decide what to do with the next 48 hours, the waterfront and downtown Everett both have real options right now, not vague "check the calendar" suggestions.
The Coho Derby weigh-ins run through Sunday at Harbor Marine, with that $10,000 top prize as the draw. Even if you're not fishing, watching what comes off the scale is its own kind of entertainment.
A few blocks away, Schacktoberfest at the Schack Art Center on Hoyt Avenue wraps up its run this weekend, closing out three and a half weeks that included a glass pumpkin patch open for free viewing and a Pints and Pumpkins evening earlier this week with local artists, live music, and glassblowing demonstrations.
And if Sunday morning is more your speed, the Everett Farmers Market keeps going on Wetmore Avenue between Hewitt and Pacific through October 25, before it hands the season off to a November holiday market. Produce, artisan goods, and the kind of foot traffic that makes downtown feel busy on a weekend morning it might otherwise skip.
Hockey's back too. The Silvertips opened preseason play in early September, with the regular season now underway at Angel of the Winds Arena, which is its own small marker that fall has fully arrived in Everett.
A Sculpture That Points Backward While Everything Else Points Forward
Not every addition to the waterfront this year has been about opening a new business. In February 2026, the Port installed a new bronze sculpture along the Central Marina esplanade, created by Sultan-based artist Kevin Pettelle. It's based on a 1940s photograph of a young girl looking out over what was then a much smaller Everett boat harbor, in an area that's now part of the Port's international seaport. Pettelle also made the Port's earlier "Fisherman's Tribute" piece near Scuttlebutt Family Pub and Bluewater Organic Distilling.
It's a strange thing to have both a decades-old photograph turned into public art and a Pilates studio breaking ground within the same twelve-month stretch, in the same few hundred yards of shoreline. But that tension, old working waterfront and new leisure destination sitting on top of each other, is exactly what makes this stretch of Everett worth watching right now instead of just visiting.
Next time you're walking the esplanade past Marina Azul's patio, look for the one storefront that's still sitting dark next to it. That's the breakfast café nobody's signed yet, and it's the last piece of a puzzle the Port started assembling almost a year ago.
If you're curious what any of this waterfront momentum means for property values nearby, or just want to talk through what's changing in Everett, Andrew MacGillivray is glad to have that conversation, no pressure attached.
