Oakes Ave, Anacortes: The Channel Road Everyone Drives and Few Know

Homes here are defined by the channel. The water-side lots sit on it, and the hill-side lots buy a version of the same view by accepting the road between them and it. I represented the seller of a 2015 home in the Portalis West condominium above Ship Harbor in 2024, a home the county lists with a partial marine view, and that sale taught me how carefully this corridor has to be described: which way the windows face, what is between them and the water, and what the road sounds like at five on a summer Friday.

Here is what the county record says about the water side, block by block. From the 2500 through the 2800 blocks, the channel-side lots are old Northern Pacific Addition lots with homes from 1929 to 2005 that the county describes as medium bank above the water, and on two of them it has adjusted value for bank erosion. Below the 2900 and 3000 blocks sits the Lovric shipyard, which the county names in its view and location adjustments there, along with the traffic. West of the airport the road climbs, the lots on the hill side carry county-noted views of Guemes Channel and the ferry terminal, several of them are on septic inside the city, and one 3900-block lot carries the county's own reminder that it does not own the waterfrontage in front of it. Beach access on this road, in other words, is a deed question, and the bank is a soils question; I answer both from the record before you fall for the view.

Above Ship Harbor, Portalis is two condominium communities of its own: Portalis Townhomes, under a 2005 declaration, and Portalis West, under a 2014 declaration with a monthly association assessment. Neither is part of the Clearidge plats up the hill, which is why Portalis lives on this page.

Roadside Park, a 0.3-acre street end at Jackson and Oakes, is the spot on the corridor to sit and watch the ferries. The Guemes Channel Trail runs along the waterfront from the Edwards Way cul-de-sac about a mile toward town, and community groups are working to connect it all the way from Washington Park to the Tommy Thompson trail. The Ship Harbor Interpretive Preserve is 25 acres of freshwater wetland, five acres of upland, and 2,000 feet of sandy beach with eelgrass beds offshore, between the ferry terminal and the homes near Edwards Way. Washington Park, 220 acres, is farther west on Sunset Avenue.

The Anacortes School District serves the city, and it is a non-boundary district: the district itself assigns each elementary student to Fidalgo, Island View, or Mount Erie on class size, sibling placement, parent preference, and transportation, not on street address, and sends the assignment by email in the summer. Anacortes Middle School, Anacortes High School, and Cap Sante High School serve the whole city, so no address on this page comes with a guaranteed elementary school, and I do not pretend otherwise.

By the road from the middle of Oakes Ave, it is 1.0 miles to the Anacortes ferry terminal, 3.0 to 10th and Commercial, 20 to the Burlington I-5 exit, 44 to downtown Bellingham. These are road miles from OpenStreetMap routing, measured September 2026, by road and not by ferry.