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Business Briefs

Dockside Cafe
As part of marina management’s drive to liven up the facility, the Dockside Café will remain open year-round serving three meals a day.

Owners Mark and Helena Furno have in the past responded to slow winter months with reduced hours and seasonal closures, but marina manager Terry Ritchey urged them to stay open longer and offer breakfast in addition to lunch and dinner. “The marina is the economic center of the point and we’re becoming active in that role,” Ritchey said. “The Dockside being open is part of the services we provide patrons and visitors.”

Mark Furno said the restaurant has been open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. since February 1, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Breakfast is a new addition and Point Roberts’ roving chef Steve O’Neill, who cooks from Fireman’s bingo to the senior center and his own Lighthouse Café, was brought on board to help with the expanded menu. “We’re serving a European style breakfast,” Furno said. Menu items include more hearty selections like quiche and fritattas and a variety of O’Neill’s pastries and baked goods.

After 11 a.m. the café’s main menu takes over. “I have everything from burgers to lobster tails,” Furno said. The menu has a special emphasis on seafood, with regular specials focusing on seasonal fish and shellfish. “Everything that comes from the sea, except for geoduck,” Furno said. O’Neill is also adding some of his specialties to the menu and the specials board.

Furno and O’Neill have plans for special events as the season progresses. ‘We’re working on a family chicken dinner Sunday nights, with chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, the works,” he said.

Children's Ranch
Last fall Dot Lofquist took an old dream off the shelf and invited in the children of Point Roberts. Her Children’s Ranch preschool is almost at full enrollment now, and her students do more than play, eat, sleep and learn their ABCs. They feed the chickens and water the goats. They help cook meals and serve at the table. Without exception they say please and put their toys away.

“It’s more than a matter of academics but of the emotional side,” Lofquist said. “How to relate to be good to ourselves and others. Why not teach them the habits that will serve them to go into the world with confidence?”

Lofquist has been teaching small children for half a century and in the late 1950s she had a farm school in Boulder Colorado with a pond and animals. “It was a delightful experience,” Lofquist said. After leaving Boulder she moved often. “Everyplace I stopped I would set up a school and I finally landed here in Point Roberts.”

Twenty years ago Lofquist came to Point Roberts and opened her school on Madrona Place, later moving to Culp Court. “Within a week of arriving I had full enrollment,” she said. When she closed her school a decade later to care for older relatives, many of the stars of Blaine high school and beyond had learned early lessons at her school.

“I tried retirement and it was awful,” Lofquist said of her decision to reopen her preschool. She also kept thinking of the school she left behind in Boulder. “I just put that dream on a shelf and it sat up there and percolated.”

Lofquist said she enjoys the company of children. “I think they are the most tremendous things imaginable,” she said. “I know their intelligence and their goodness, anything else is a misconception,” she said. “There’s no such thing as a naughty child. They’re either bored, sick or tired.”

You can reach Lofquist at 945-0968 to discuss the possibility of children attending her ranch school.

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