Walk the Des Moines waterfront on any October evening and you will eventually find someone standing under a pier light with a jig in one hand and a bucket in the other, waiting for a shadow to dart into the glow. That ritual never stopped in this city. What changed this year is where else it can happen.
On June 13, 2026, the City of Des Moines held a ribbon-cutting for the rebuilt Redondo Pier, closed since 2019 when inspectors found the timber pilings rotting from the inside out. Seven years is a long time for a structure that used to draw, in the words of the marina's own headmaster, hundreds of people a season. The headline write-ups treated the reopening as the finish line. It is closer to the starting gun. The pier's first real test as a public gathering spot will not be the crowd that showed up for cake and speeches in June. It will be the crowd that shows up after dark once squid season sets in, because that is the use this pier was actually built for, and the city has not run it through that test in nearly a decade.
The Ribbon-Cutting Wasn't the Real Test
The numbers behind the rebuild are worth sitting with for a second. The original Redondo Pier went up in 1980. By July 2019 the city closed it outright over structural concerns, and early assessments put a full three-structure fix, covering the pier, the restroom facility, and the adjacent bulkheads, somewhere between $5.9 million and $7.2 million depending on how the work was sequenced. The city eventually approved a combined $3.8 million construction bid in July 2025, and when you add design, permitting, and the years of planning that preceded it, the total project cost lands at about $5.8 million, according to the Redondo Community Association's own project update.
Construction broke ground on November 3, 2025, with the underwater phase wrapping by mid-February 2026. The pier officially opened to the public on June 13, with the City of Des Moines calling it the return of a beloved waterfront destination after years of planning and construction.
None of that tells you whether the new decking, the new lighting, and the new outlets can handle a Friday night in November when the squid are running and forty people are lined up along the rail. That test hasn't happened yet, because squid season in South Puget Sound doesn't really get going until late fall.
A City That Already Had One Working Pier
Here is the detail that most coverage of the reopening skipped past. Des Moines never actually lost its squidding access during those seven years. The Redondo Pier is one of two public fishing piers in the city. The other sits at the Des Moines Marina, about a mile and a half north, and it stayed open the entire time Redondo was fenced off.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife guidance on the fishery notes that squid typically arrive in Des Moines and Tacoma in late November and December, migrating down from Elliott Bay and the Seattle waterfront earlier in the fall. During the Redondo closure, the city leaned on that marina pier to absorb the demand, going as far as promoting a $25 fishing pier pass that gave anglers in-and-out access to the marina grounds after hours. It worked as a stopgap. It was also, by most accounts, more crowded than it needed to be, because a fishery that used to have two access points was running on one.
What reopens this fall isn't squidding in Des Moines. That never stopped. What reopens is the second location, and with it, some relief for a marina pier that has been absorbing a decade of pent-up demand on its own.
The Marina Runs on a Program. The Point Runs on the Tide.
The other thing worth understanding about this waterfront is that its two piers operate on completely different clocks, and residents who only pay attention to one tend to miss the other entirely.
The Des Moines Marina runs on a published calendar. The Waterfront Farmers Market has been setting up every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. since June 6, and it closes out its 2026 season on September 26. Right behind it, the Des Moines Marina Oktoberfest returns for three days, September 18 through 20, centered at the Quarterdeck. This year's edition adds something new: Prost! The OktoberCrawl, a Friday evening walking tour through Marina District restaurants that starts at 5 p.m. and pairs German-inspired bites with a limited-capacity, ticketed format. Saturday and Sunday shift into the more familiar version of the festival, with the Ted Lunka Polka Band and the Bonnie Birch Trio playing the Quarterdeck stage, a chicken dance contest, face painting, and a raffle benefiting Lighthouse NW, a local nonprofit serving survivors of domestic abuse. The event traces back to Pat and Marianne Nardo, longtime Des Moines residents who hosted the original Oktoberfest celebration at the Quarterdeck. Pat, now 97, still supports the festival as a sponsor.
That whole calendar wraps by the third week of September. Redondo Pier's busy season hasn't even started by then.
The pier at the end of Redondo Beach Drive doesn't care about a printed schedule. It runs on water temperature and squid migration, which means its peak crowd shows up on whatever late-November or December night the bite happens to be on, announced by nothing more than word of mouth among anglers and a line of headlamps along the rail. If you're timing a visit to this waterfront around one calendar, you'll miss the other completely.
| Event | Location | Dates |
|---|---|---|
| Waterfront Farmers Market | Des Moines Marina | Saturdays through Sept. 26, 2026 |
| Des Moines Marina Oktoberfest | Quarterdeck / Marina | Sept. 18-20, 2026 |
| Squid season (typical arrival) | Marina Pier & Redondo Pier | Late November through December |
What This Means If You Live Near the Water
If you live in the Redondo neighborhood or anywhere along the Des Moines waterfront, the practical takeaway is simple. The programmed part of the season, the farmers market and Oktoberfest, is compressed into the next two weeks. Show up for those on their actual dates, because they don't drift.
The unprogrammed part is still ahead of you. If you squidded at Redondo before 2019, expect a different physical experience this time. The new structure uses concrete piles and beams built for a longer service life than the old timber pilings, similar to the approach the city took with the Redondo boardwalk after storm damage in 2015. Bring a light setup as always. Squid feed at night and are drawn to illuminated water, which is exactly why public piers like this one are the preferred spot for jigging in the first place.
For anyone weighing a move to this stretch of the South Sound, the two-pier setup is a small but real piece of neighborhood texture that a median home price won't tell you. A waterfront lifestyle here isn't one amenity, it's two access points running on two different clocks, plus a marina district that layers restaurants, a farmers market, and a fall festival on top of all of it. That kind of daily-life texture is easy to undersell in a listing description and easy to overlook until you've lived a full year through it.
If you're weighing what a home near this waterfront actually gets you, from proximity to the marina district's dining scene to walking distance from a pier that's finally back in service, Anthony Prado and the team at AMP Properties Group NW can walk you through current Des Moines listings and what the market looks like right now. Get an instant home valuation or ask about a fast cash offer if you're on the other side of that decision. Either way, start the conversation before the next tide brings the crowds back to Redondo.
