“Twenty-four times a day, a ferry pulls into the Bainbridge dock. Each time it does, it potentially carries a cargo of money for the island – money in the form of tourist dollars. A lot of merchants on Winslow Way aren’t certain tourism does them a lot of good, said Jack MacArthur, executive director of the Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce. But when I had an antique store, our business was 35 percent higher from May to September than during the rest of the year.Team Winslow’s Sandy Martin did a one-shot survey, and found even more striking results.We asked two local businesses to keep track for one weekend and a weekday during May, she said. On the weekend, they found that 50 percent of their sales were to non-islanders, and on the weekday, it was 30 percent.The participating businesses asked not to be identified, Martin said. Both were on Winslow Way – one a clothing store and one a gift, furnishing and jewelry store, she said.MacArthur and Martin aren’t the only ones who thinks tourist dollars are an untapped resource. A new task force plans to look at tourism in a systematic way, and hopes to increase the island’s yield of and from visitors.The potential is clearly there, according to Grant Griffin, executive director of the Kitsap Peninsula Visitor Information Bureau. The ferries bring some six million people a year to Bainbridge Island, he said. A lot of them are commuters, he said, but as many as half of them are not, and he believes many of the non-commuters are visitors.Griffin’s job is to generate interest in visiting Kitsap County. Using some $200,000 annually in money generated by the hotel-motel tax, the Visitor Information Bureau produces radio and magazine ads touting Kitsap to visitors.Our emails have gone up every year, and the hits to our Internet site are going way up, which happens right after a radio ad airs, he said.Griffin reported those results to the Bainbridge City Council recently, a report made necessary by the fact that the Bureau’s efforts are directed to other markets, and do not show up locally.People here don’t hear and see what we do, he said. We’re not terribly visible to people right here, and that’s by design.Counting visitors?One problem is that nobody keeps track of how many people actually visit Bainbridge or Kitsap County.Marian Holt McClain, recently named director of Bainbridge Arts and Crafts, is leading the tourism task force. She says one of her group’s tasks will be to generate that kind of data.I know visitors make a big difference in our sales, because they are higher in July and August, she said. I’m in the process of documenting it.Working with McClain on the task force are MacArthur, Martin, Bainbridge Performing Arts executive director Joanne Ellis, parks department staffer Sue Hylen and Mickey Molnaire, representing the island’s bed and breakfasts.Before McClain took the BAC job, she was director of the convention and visitor’s bureau in San Jose, Calif. She thinks visiting Bainbridge is just the sort of thing Seattle convention-goers would enjoy, and she plans to work with Seattle convention officials to promote Bainbridge.In this day and age, a lot of us have enough stuff, so instead of collecting more stuff, people are collecting experiences, she said. Riding the ferry boat and coming to an attractive community like Winslow is the sort of thing people would like to do if they knew about it.Martin has been working for some time to prompt Seattle visitors to include Bainbridge is their itineraries, distributing brochures about the island in Seattle hotels.Team Winslow produces two brochures, Martin said, one on a walking tour of downtown, and another called Escape to Bainbridge. Each year, she said, 50,000 copies of the walkabout brochure and 30,000 copies of Escape to Bainbridge are printed and distributed.Each year, I get calls from Seattle properties asking for more, so I know they get used up, she said.Martin thinks local businesses fail to appreciate how important visitor dollars are.Merchants may say that off-island sales are only 20 to 30 percent of their business, she said. But I ask them whether they could survive if they made 20 or 30 percent less income.I think tourism plays a crucial role in whether they stay in business. “