By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com

It’s a brilliant, sunny day but Greg Shocklee and Ella Geffey are in the lower kitchens of the Ona Restaurant & Lounge slicing potatoes and making German chocolate cake for the upcoming international dinner that fills the restaurant with locals.

But they know the real crowds – and a big jump in work hours – comes this weekend and the start of Oregon’s Spring Break.

“There’s a gradual buildup,” says Shocklee, in his third year as one of Ona’s cooks. “We’ll have some beautiful weekends to give us a taste of the crowds … to work out the kinks so when it really gets busy we’re all ready to go.”

Depending on the weather – and apparently the amount of snow in Central Oregon – this weekend kicks off the coastal tourist season that slowly builds through June and then peaks from July through September.

It’s a time when locals complain of crowded restaurants and busy crosswalks. But it’s an important seasonal change in a town that depends almost entirely on tourism to keep its businesses open and government operating.

“We go from dead to not dead any time the kids are out of school,” said Anthony Muirhead, general manager of the 110-room Adobe motel and restaurant, the town’s largest. “Our entire month depends on what we’re going to do next week.”

And Yachats goes all out to attract and entertain visitors the next two weekends. To complement its ocean views. The city is offering two arts and crafts shows, a pancake feed, talks and walks on Cape Perpetua, a yearly library book sale and restaurants with expanded hours and live music.

Depending on the weather, motels expect to be at 70 percent to 80 percent of capacity next week – a nice number compared with the 20 percent to 30 percent in January and February.

Even the local state parks feel the Spring Break effect — especially if the weather is nice.

“If it’s a beautiful weekend it’ll look like summertime,” said Dylan Anderson, Oregon State Parks and Recreation manager for the central coast. “If it’s raining, then it’ll look like a regular March week.”

So far, Anderson has seen a 30-50 percent Spring Break increase in reservations for the 260 campsites at South Beach and 78 sites at Beachside campgrounds. He expects even bigger increases in numbers to day-use areas.

At the Drift Inn in downtown Yachats, owner Linda Hetzler says the week usually means a 50 percent bump in business.

“Always during Oregon Spring Break we get very busy,” she said.

That also means increasing staff work hours that have been pared back during the winter and asking college students who help during the summer to give up their vacation to bus tables or seat guests.

“It’s like summer time,” Hetzler said.

Across U.S. Highway 101 at Ona, owner Michelle Korgan opened for lunch starting Thursday and will keep those hours through Sunday, March 31, including staying open Wednesday and Thursday during Spring Break.

The added hours and days results in nine additional shifts and increased hours for her 25 employees. This week, for example, Korgan said she gave one cook an extra day off so he could work seven days next week.

“We stretch everybody and bring in staff that help during the summer,” she said. “Overall, when it’s nice we see a big jump in business.”

The numbers tell the story

Travel Oregon, the state’s tourism promotion and development agency, does extensive surveys to get detailed information on visitors and their activities.

In 2017, the last year for which numbers are available, 34 million people visited Oregon – and 30 percent of those (or 10 million) spent time on the coast. Of the state’s seven designated tourist regions, the coast drew the second-most visitors only slightly behind the Portland area.

Those 10 million people spent $1.9 billion — 41 percent on lodging, 26 percent on food and drink, 14 percent on retail and 10 percent on recreation.

Of all the visitors to the coast, 59 percent came from within Oregon, 17 percent from Washington and 8 percent from California. They spent an average of 3.7 days visiting the coast.

Researchers said 21 percent of coastal visitors came in January through March, 21 percent from October through December, 26 percent from April through June and the highest – 32 percent – from July through September.

In Lincoln County, lodging, restaurants and bars are the single largest employer with 4,220 workers employed – out of 18,630 total — in January, according to the Oregon Employment Department.

The city of Yachats collects a 9 percent lodging tax on motel and vacation rentals, last year bringing in $1.04 million – almost double what it collected four years earlier. A 5 percent tax on sales of prepared food and beverages – Ashland is the only other Oregon city with such a tax — brought in another $375,000.

The food and beverage tax is paying off the cost of building the city’s sewer plant; lodging taxes cover about two-thirds of the city of Yachats’ operating budget.

The local effects

Oregon’s Spring Break follows a good January for most Yachats motel businesses, but a bleak February when heavy rain on the coast and snow in Portland and the Willamette Valley discouraged people from making the trip over the Coast Range. Restaurants and bars also close intermittently for cleaning or to give staff time off during the slowest time of year.

Muirhead is curious about the upcoming week because he has found that when there lots of snow in Central Oregon – like there is this year – it siphons Spring Break visitors away from the coast. And, according to Travel Oregon figures, Central Oregon saw the biggest growth in visitor counts last year.

“I’ve worked in Bend and I’ve worked on the coast and there is a snow ‘effect’ if there is still a lot of snow in Central Oregon,” Muirhead said.

Like the restaurants in town, Muirhead is expanding employee hours next week. He’s also taken steps to keep housekeepers on staff year around, calling it “hiring when others are not,” because of the difficulty of finding and keeping hospitality workers in the area.

But Shocklee and Geffey, who both live in Yachats, are finding a way to make a living here.

Shocklee’s wife, Betsy, is a bartender at the Sea Note just up the road from Ona. He said they are “careful with their money,” saving during the summer to make up for more time off in the winter.

Geffey, who is also in her third year at Ona, started as a hostess but jumped in to learn baking to help expand her hours to more than 40 a week during the busiest times. She enjoys the “significant differences” of the two jobs — the social aspects of hosting and then the solitude baking in off hours.

“In the service industry you know right away how you’re doing and you can really affect the customer experience in a positive way,” Geffey said. “We can help make their vacation awesome.”

And during Spring Break in Yachats there should be lots of opportunities for that.

 

 

 

Yachats Spring Break events

• Yachats Ladies Club Spring Craft Sale and Luncheon: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Friday-Saturday, March 22-23 and Friday-Saturday, March 29-30, Yachats Ladies Club, 286 W. Third St.

• Yachats Original Arts & Craft Fair, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday-Sunday, March 23-24, Yachats Commons multipurpose room.

• Cape Perpetua Speakers Series, 1 p.m. Saturday, March 23. Retired park ranger and naturalist Michael Noack will talk about migrating gray whales.

• Lions Club pancake feed, 7:30-11 a.m., Sunday, March 24, Lions Club, 344 W. Fourth St.

• Friends of the Yachats Library annual book sale, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday-Saturday, March 29-30, Yachats Commons multipurpose room.