A tranquil oasis in the heart of the nation’s capital.
Eastern Power Boat Club is the first boat club on the Anacostia and a founding member of Historic Boathouse Row, where friends have gathered on the water since 1905. Tucked along the Row near Capitol Hill, the club is equal parts marina and community.
Members share a love of the water, a respect for tradition, and a calendar full of cookouts, raft-ups, and good company through every season.
We welcome boat owners who keep their vessels at our docks, owners of trailered boats, and social members who simply enjoy life on the river. However you come aboard, you’ll find a friendly, close-knit club with deep roots in the District. Our members live in all eight DC wards. Among them are first responders, educators, and active-duty military, alongside doctors, attorneys, accountants, and small business owners.
For much of the city’s history the Anacostia was a line as much as a river, with Wards 7 and 8 set apart on its eastern bank. At our docks that line goes quiet. The water becomes the thing neighbors from across the District hold in common, and looking after it is work that belongs to everyone who ties up here.
A club for the whole city.
Washington was a segregated city for much of its history, its neighborhoods, its clubs, and even its stretches of shoreline divided by race well into the 1960s. The boat clubs along the water were part of that world. When the mariner Lewis T. Green was shut out of the whites-only clubs on the river, he founded the Seafarers Yacht Club just up Boathouse Row in 1945; today it is the oldest African American yacht club in the country, and still our neighbor on the Anacostia.
The club today could not look more different, and we are proud of it. Our members are as varied as the city itself, drawn from all eight wards of the District and brought together by nothing more complicated than a love of the river. That breadth makes Eastern stand out as one of the most diverse organizations in the District today, and we mean to keep it that way: anyone who loves the water is welcome at our dock.
There is more to the club than a century of good company.
A century on the Anacostia
From a 1905 anglers’ gang to a clubhouse floated across the river twice, through the racing years and a river’s decline and rebirth.
Read the club’s story
Looking after the Anacostia
The cleanups, the partners, and the hard industrial history next door that the club has weathered and helped set right.
See our stewardship