The Steamer Virginia V

The Virginia V is an outstanding venue for a wedding. The staff is wonderful including Captain Dale whom preformed the ceremony. The entire staff seemed happy to be there and help share in our special day.The Steamship is also beautiful and provided a wonderful ever changing backdrop for photographs. The ship is a historic landmark and this seemed to add to it's many charms. We had only about 70 at our wedding and this was a great size. You could for sure have more but the small group made this a very intimate experience. This was a perfect venue for our wedding and I can not say anything negative regarding it.

This venue was great, tricky but worked out in the end.
Such a great location you don't need much for decor, etc...
It was tricky dealing with the different floors of the boat and trying to get everyone in one space, but everyone loved it. Especially the kids and all granparents that are so into boats. I recommend it if you are a water nut like us!

When my mother inititally suggested the Virginia V as our wedding venue I shot it down immediately, but we thought about it, and it made so much sense. We had held my Grandpa's birthday party there a couple years previously, and he is a member of the foundation, so we are familiar with the boat. We ended up having the wedding on a Thursday to take advantage of the lower weeknight pricing, plus my grandpa got us an additional discount. We were only officially allowed to have the boat for two hours before departure for set up, but they let us and our vendors come aboard as early in the morning as we wanted to, and we had a shipboard rehearsal with the captain the night before. The boat is super beautiful, with the open engine room and wood finishings, so we did pratically zero decorating outside of table linens and centerpieces and everything still looked amazing.We didn't really get to have a choice of officiants, but having the captain officiate was one of the reasons we chose the boat as our venue. We are not at all religious, so a priest wasn't going to be the right route, and I felt uncomfortable having essentially a complete stranger officiate. While he wasn't a friend or anything, Captain Dale at least went with the boat, so I felt better about having him do it. Through planning he was super awesome, and easy to get a hold of. He is really excited about weddings, and got us to participate in the boats traditions, like blowing the whistle for the send off. He also was amazing at getting all of our guests together for a group photo. He did have a little trouble getting through our ceremony without a prayer, but it didn't really cause any problems.

This was our most extravagant wedding expense and was 100% worth it. We had our ceremony and reception on the ship, which included a 3-hour cruise of Lakes Union and Washington. The Captain and the coordinators were fantastic, especially Kim and Lindsey who answered all of our questions and were super accommodating to let us and our vendors visit the ship weeks before the wedding. The only thing that was a pain was that after we signed the contract, they changed their policy on beverages and now you have to use their bartender. That was fine, and in fact a cost savings, but we weren’t informed until one week before. Also, the bartender doesn’t have Champagne Flutes which was a bit of an-hour-before-the-ship-left-the-dock crisis. But our caterer came through.