Port Angeles woman breaks duck sales record

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 15, 2026

PORT ANGELES — It took a little longer than she expected, but she did it.

Gail Ralston of Port Angeles has topped a record set seven years ago by Bill Littlejohn for lifetime ticket sales for the Olympic Medical Center Foundation’s Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby.

The 37th annual rendition of the longstanding fundraiser will be Sunday at the Port Angeles City Pier, 315 N. Lincoln St., with activities beginning at 11:30 a.m. and the main event at 1:30 p.m.

On Thursday, Ralston sold her 37,489th duck to local legend Howard “Scooter” Chapman, surpassing by one the record set by Littlejohn before his death in 2019. She had hoped to set her record last year, but family matters intervened.

“Scooter and I started selling ducks when (the duck derby) first began” in 1989, Ralston said. “There are just a few of us left.”

Chapman, who retired in 2022 from KONP Radio after 70 years as “The Golden Voice of Port Angeles,” bought the ticket at the KONP office in Port Angeles.

He now is among those who have chances to win one of 37 prizes, including the top prize of a 2026 Toyota Corolla donated by Wilder Toyota.

As of Thursday morning, nearly 25,000 duck tickets had been sold, said Bruce Skinner, executive director of the OMC Foundation, who began the duck derby 37 years ago.

Chapman won’t be the last to buy a ticket. Sales will continue up to the beginning of events on Sunday.

Volunteers are selling ducks daily at Safeway, this year’s Top Duck, with its three locations at Third and Lincoln streets and off East U.S. Highway 101 in Port Angeles and in Sequim as well as at Swain’s General Store and Wilder Toyota in Port Angeles, First Fed Bank and Sound Community Bank locations in Port Angeles and Sequim, and Walmart on Saturdays and Sundays.

Ralston will sell duck tickets at Swain’s from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday with Chapman at her side.

Single ducks are $7 each. An investment of $35 for a Quack Pack will allow “adoption” of five ducks, plus one for free.

The VID package is $350. Participants get one large VID duck for the cash-prize VID race as well as 60 ducks in the main race and two invitations to the Bub & Alice Olsen VID Party at 48 Degrees North at Red Lion Hotel just south of the City Pier.

An expanded VID package is $700 and includes two VID ducks, 120 main race ducks and four party invitations.

Over the years, the fundraiser, which has raised some $3.9 million for OMC, has evolved from a rubber duck race on water, with prizes awarded to those who had “adopted” the first ducks over the finish line, to a rubber duck pluck.

Winning ducks will be plucked from Wilder Auto trucks on City Pier.

The Duck Derby, which is presented by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, will begin at 11:30 a.m., with the opening of the Kids’ Pavilion and the start of the Bub & Alice Olsen VID (Very Important Duck) Party.

At 1:15 p.m. is scheduled the VID race, with cash prizes for first ducks, and at 1:30 p.m., the main event will begin.

Ralston is one of dozens of volunteers who support the fundraiser through ticket sales. Her record is only for sales by a single person.

Bill Littlejohn’s widow, Esther, began selling ducks in 2020. She has since sold 10,485 ducks, so the combined total of the couple is 47,973.

Ralston can be found at Safeway and at Swain’s, often working six-hour shifts.

“I love seeing all my classmates come by and buy from me,” she said earlier this week.

Selling ducks, she catches up with people she ordinarily might not see.

“I get to hug them,” she said. “Every time somebody comes in, they want a hug.”

Many have bought from her each year, Ralston said, some from out of the area, even from as far away as China.

“They tell me stories about what the hospital means to them,” Ralston said.

Ralston’s longtime support of OMC stems from working at the hospital as a candy striper when she was 15 — she is now 71 — and by her gratitude for emergency room personnel’s life-saving response after her son Alex broke his neck falling from a whale ship onto a dock when he was 17, an accident that led to him becoming a quadriplegic.

OMC doctors and nurses “quickly stabilized his neck and flew him over to Seattle,” Ralston said. “He would not have been able to survive an ambulance ride.”

Ralston plans to sell duck tickets next year, but with fewer hours — “not as crazy as I have been,” she said. She’s contemplating retirement from her part-time job with Clallam County and is looking forward to spending time in her lakeside cabin, which she has had built to be accessible for her son, now 38, who plans to visit from Arizona.

Proceeds from the annual Duck Derby are used to purchase needed equipment and to support departments at Olympic Medical Center, including the OMC Cancer Center and Cardiac Services Department, as well as the OMC Healthcare Scholarship fund.

For more information, see omcf.org, call 360-417-7144 or go by the OMC Foundation office at 1015 Georgiana St., Port Angeles.

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Leah Leach is a former executive editor for Peninsula Daily News.