Saltwater People Log

Schooner WAWONA "A Lucky Ship"

2012-03-12T16:01:00.027-07:00

"Ships of the sea, particularly those graceful sailing ships now finally slipping into the limbo of the past, have always been endowed with distinctive individual characteristics. No ship ever built has been exactly like any other. Once down the ways each ship has acquired not only a name but a soul of its own in an amazingly short time. And a reputation.
One would soon be known as a dry ship, another as a wet one. This one would be called a "stiff" ship, that one "easy". One would be labeled "steady", her sister a "roller". She might be known as a "happy" ship or a "workhouse". Some ships cruise like a millionaires' yacht, while others get into all sorts of trouble.
Sailors have only one definition of a ships character. The wet, uncomfortable, cantankerous workhouse they would call an "unlucky" ship. The other kind would simply be known as "lucky".
A "lucky" ship has been the WAWONA, a three-masted fore-and-aft rigged schooner owned and operated by the Robinson Fisheries Co. of Anacortes, WA. If ever there has been a ship worthy of the appellation, the WAWONA is it. For she has been serving faithfully and well for nearly fifty years, in many parts of the world, and is still making money her owners. From the days of Capt. Matt Peasley, one of her first masters, to the present, she has been every inch a lady, well behaved, and the pride of the men who have sailed her.

Original vintage postcard from
the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

In the offices of the Robinson Fisheries they actually speak in reverent tones of the WAWONA. Jack Trafton, the company's president, and E.N. Trafton, his son, could scarcely find words to tell of the old schooner's long service in the N. Pacific codfish trade, of the masters, mates, and men to whom she has been home and career, of the part she played in both world wars. But the company watchman, who has known the WAWONA a good part of his life, expressed it in a few words:

"She has always been a lucky ship, and has always landed
a good trip of fish."
Postcard reproduction purchased from the Anacortes Museum.

The WAWONA was built in Fairhaven, CA., in 1897, by the famous [Hans Bendixsen] yard. Her registered dimensions are 468 G. tons, 413 N. tons, 156-ft. length, 36-ft. beam, and a depth of 12-ft., 3-in. One of her first masters was Capt. Matt Peasley of "Cappy Ricks" fame. In that era Peter B. Kyne's stories in the Saturday Evening Post were widely read, and Matt--the fellow who, in fiction, wiped up the deck with the "Big Swede" and who finally married the attractive daughter of Cappy Ricks"--was identified with the life-sized skipper. Captain Peasley, now 80-years of age, retired from the sea a few years ago, and now lives in Aberdeen, WA.
The Robinson Co., purchased the schooner in 1914, and she has made a least one trip to the Bering Sea every years since, except when she was in government service. She is the largest fore-and-aft rigged sailing ship on the Pacific Coast, and she is one of the few sailing ships that have served through both world wars and is still in active service. In 1917, during WW I, she made a voyage from Vancouver, B.C., to Suva in the Fiji Islands with a full load of lumber, and served with the U.S. Army from 1941 through 1945. Between wars she has landed a tremendous tonnage of codfish for her owners.
Captain Charles Foss was her master from 1914 through 1935, which was one year when misfortune overtook the hard-working ship. While clearing Unimak Pass on her way home from the 1935 codfishing season in the Bering Sea, Capt. Foss suddenly passed away. The ship was put about, and Capt. Foss was buried by his sorrowing crew in Lost Harbor, AK. The first mate, now captain Tom Haugen, took command, and has been her master ever since, except when she was in Army service. On her first trip north in 1936 she carried with her a monument to mark Capt. Foss' grave, and each year on her way north the WAWONA stops at remote Lost Harbor, Akun Island, so that her crew may pay their respects to Foss and care for his resting place.

The 1940 burial of Capt. Richard Allen Trafton, M.V. DOROTHY,
at Lost Harbor, Akun Island, AK., next to the grave of
Capt. Charles Foss, who died on board WAWONA, 1935.
Courtesy of Bruce Trafton for Saltwater People Historical Society.

The WAWONA has always been a proud ship, but she has never been prudish. At sea, she has always been as graceful as a bird, yet during the late war, stripped of her masts and gear, she served without shame as a lowly scow. Since then her former beauty and accoutrements have been restored in shipyards at Friday Harbor and Bellingham. Once again the grime of war service is gone. She is scrubbed and shined and polished. Three 114-foot "sticks" were brought down from the woods and stepped in. With Tom and his crew of 36 men she sailed this spring for another season in the Bering.
The WAWONA has always been a "lucky" ship. Her reputation is still good. And when that can be said of such a ship, it is like saying of a fair lady, "here is a useful and honorable life."
Above words by Leon M. Swank
Pacific Motor Boat
October 1946
Archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society
Typed verbatim.

1963: An organization known as "Save Our Ships" was organized with the intent to purchase the WAWONA, one of two remaining sailing ships in Puget Sound. The other, FALLS OF CLYDE, was purchased by a fast, fund-raising campaign in Honolulu, where the vessel was taken in 1963 to serve as a floating museum. All of the other sailing ships either have been broken up for scrap or sold to other ports for maritime museums.
1968: Not quoted in this log but a fine tribute to WAWONA is featured in Westcoast Windjammers (Superior) by Jim Gibbs.
1981: The president of the National Maritime Historical Society, Peter Sanford, sent out an SOS to save the WAWONA, owned at that time by Northwest Seaport who moored her in Lake Union, Seattle, WA. Sanford described the WAWONA as an international maritime treasure that deserved better treatment than decrepitude.
2009: After 46 years of volunteer effort, the WAWONA was towed to a Seattle scrapping yard.
2011: Archived on this Log we are on the trail of some of those scraps in Schooner WAWONA's Bones , written by Roy Pearmain, posted 15 June.

Steam tug BRICK ✪ ✪ Capt. James Tarte by June Burn

2012-03-03T14:09:00.020-08:00

Steam tug BRICK with captain/owner Jim Tarte on rail on R.
C.C. Fisher is standing on the pilot house. Location, Bellingham, WA
after a return from a trip to B.C. The houses behind were known
as "Captains Row", along the Boulevard on the waterfront.
Date unknown.
Photo courtesy of the Whatcom Museum of History.

"How, before there were docks, did the passengers get from ship to land in the old days? I asked my captain that and he replied that when the tide was high, rowboats or light-draft scows took them in. But when the tide was out and several hundred yards of mud lay between ship an shore, the passengers waited for the return of the tide or were taken to land pig-back.

'I've carried many a squealing woman on my back, her squeals getting me so tickled I'd all but drop her into the oozy mud. When the ship would anchor, every man in the crew would shoulder his passenger, set her down on the beach, return for another until passengers and their luggage were all safe ashore. I never dropped a passenger, but after carrying a few through soft mud I've nearly dropped, myself, with fatigue.'

During the years of 1881 and 1882 Captain Tarte (1849-1932) piloted, first the HOPE, and then the EVANGEL, the latter the first passenger boat between Seattle, Vancouver, and New Westminster.

The EVANGEL was owned by a Mr. Ludlow, of Seattle. One time the pilot was taking a boatload of passengers to Victoria for a May 24 celebration. There was a storm and everybody got seasick. On board was the owner's daughter, Miss Ludlow. She was seasick, too. But she must have been pretty plucky about it. Or maybe seasickness was becoming to her. At any rate the confirmed bachelor pilot of the EVANGEL fell in love with her then and there, and nine days later was betrothed to a girl who wouldn't marry an Englishman under any consideration. They were married a year later.

In 1883 Captain Tarte bought one of the first tugboats ever to run on the Sound--the 55.6-ft steam tug BRICK which was later lengthened several feet. He carried freight and towed all manner of things with his little boat. He was one of the first to tow logbooms for the first big sawmill. It was owned by Eldridge & Bartlett and was on site of the old E. K. Wood mill, which burned a few years ago. In storms the captain of the BRICK used to pour oil on the troubled waters, calm his stampeding logs, and so bring them safely to the mill.

It was a custom of Captain Tarte--one of the earliest and most popular mariners on Puget Sound--to treat 20 school children from the Fairhaven and Sehome schools every Saturday to trips to the islands free of charge. One day Captain Tarte was surprised on his arrival to see a great crowd of people, most of whom were children, at the dock, under the escort of the principal of the Fairhaven school. In recognition of his kindness in giving free outings to the kiddies the skipper was presented with a set of silverware.

The captain ran the BRICK for nine years, later as a passenger vessel around this part of the Sound. But at last he lost her, never having made enough money to pay more than the interest on the money he stilled owed on her.

Tarte's last active service was as mate on the tug DANIEL KERN during two trips to Clallam Bay at 80-years of age."

Text above by June Burn
Bellingham Herald
April 1930
With notes added from:
Lewis & Dryden's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest
E.W. Wright, editor
Antiquarian Press Ltd., 1961

Island Sounder Newspaper

April 1896

"The steamer BRICK came into port [Friday Harbor] with a scow loaded with 24,000-feet of lumber from the Whatcom Falls Mill Co., of Whatcom, for Mr. J. L. Farnsworth. This is part of an order for 100,000-feet to be used in the construction of the new cannery buildings and also for the new scows for the Island Packing Company."

The Ship THERMOPYLAE, Victoria B.C.

2012-02-24T14:07:00.009-08:00

Detail of a painting by Robert McVittie.
THERMOPYLAE off the west coast of British Columbia.
The ship in her later years, in cut down barque rig.

"To have been the home port of one of those queens of the seas, the speedy tea clippers of the later half of the eighteenth century was an honour for any sea town. To have been able to claim, as Victoria could from 1891 to 1895, that on her port register was one of the two fastest ships afloat is an honour of which this city has perhaps never been sufficiently aware.

The question of whether it was THERMOPYLAE or CUTTY SARK that should have the pride of first place is one that even today is good for an argument in sailing circles but certainly at the time THERMOPYLAE was berthed in Victoria there was one old veteran sailing ship captain who was not afraid to write in the local press of "the THERMOPYLAE which, I believe, is still the fastest sailing ship afloat."

THERMOPYLAE picking up the pilot at the mouth of the Columbia R.
Photo by Robert Reford, her agent.
Courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library.

She was beautiful...and she was glamourous... with an aura which rubbed off on to those who sailed on her so that they were said to be "not like other men."

Small wonder then that when a group of retired sailormen in Victoria looked for a name for their seas-lovers' club they decided to call it "The Thermopylae Club."

Many have written of this famous clipper, Basil Lubbock among them. "How sweetly she sailed!" he wrote, "able to fan along at seven knots in an air that would not extinguish a lighted candle, yet she was both comfortable and easy to handle when running over 13 knot under all plain sail."

Even those she defeated applauded her. On her first passage, when she passed H.M.S. CHARYBDIS off Port Phillips Heads, her captain hoisted the warm-hearted message, "Good-bye. Your are too much for us. You are the finest model of a ship I ever saw. It does my heart good to look at you."

To use bald figures about such beauty seems sacrilegious, but then that is the practice of the day, so here in all their starkness they are: Length from stem to stern 212-ft, beam 36-ft, depth 21-ft, displacement when loaded 970-tons. From keel to topside her hull was rock elm, above that India teak.

In rigging this vessel--planned to be a winner in the days when the earliest load of tea to reach London commanded the premium price--her builders made some changes from designs already in use. Mast height was lowered, sails widened, her mainyard a great 80-ft spar from which dropped a mainsail 40-ft deep at the bunt. Thirty-two hundred square feet of canvas in that sail alone!

The THERMOPYLAE was built to make records--and she did. Her speedy passages helped by her first captain, the daring, driving Kemball. It was under his command that, in the dim of early morning in Nov. 1868, she left the London docks. By the time she returned to them she had broken many records, including making in one 24-hours 380 miles and cutting two days off the record for the Foo Chow, China to London run.

THERMOPYLAE then was the talk of the docks.

It is rather sad to have to add that this record was not hers for long. Within two weeks the SIR LANCELOT had shortened the passage by a further two days!

But the THERMOPYLAE continued to pile up other records until rivals were driven to build the CUTTY SARK to challenge her reign.

Finally it was steam that put an end to all sail in the tea trade and the ships moved to other uses.

THERMOPYLAE was sold to the Montreal firm of Reford who planned to use her on the Pacific to bring rice from the Orient to Puget Sound.

At midnight, on 24 June 1891, by the light of a moon just over full, she sailed for the first time up the Juan de Fuca Strait and anchored in Royal Roads.

Later in Victoria she as taken over by Nova Scotia-born Captain J.N. Winchester and added to her crew a number of men from the sealing schooners, as well as three apprentices.

On her runs to the Orient the THERMOPYLAE had some rough times, the worst, that reported in the Colonist of 24 March 1892.

They arrived here 101 days after leaving Bangkok. Water spouts had menaced them and winds had been so destructive that captain Winchester had felt the had to excuse his vessel's battered and untidy appearance when she reached Victoria with the words "though we left Bangkok with three suits of canvas, she now has not one presentable or serviceable sail!"

They had also run out of food and for the last ten days had been subsisting on rice, this while they were enduring two weeks of struggling to make the entrance into the Strait.

How different another voyage from China in a record 29 days!

THERMOPYLAE loading lumber through ports cut in her bows.
The size of the pieces being loaded is 24" x 23" x 100'.
The figurehead of Leonidas stands proud at the bow.
Courtesy of the Vancouver City Achives.

In 1895 Victorians had their last sight of her cloud of white canvas coming up behind Race Rocks and she was once more off for Europe, this voyage being the only one, I believe, on which she rounded Cape Horn. In her holds then she had some of British Columbia's great forest harvest, including monstrous balks of Douglas fir, a hundred-feet long and 24-inches square!
So ended Victoria's connection with a world-famous ship, a jewel in this city's history for long overlooked but now recalled by the plaque which the Thermopylae Club added to the Parade of Ships embedded on the Causeway wall in 1962."

Text by Ursula Jupp

Home Port: Victoria

Published by the author in 1967

Victoria, B.C.

The Great Solo Circumnavigator ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ Robin Knox-Johnston and SUHAILI

2012-02-19T21:15:00.001-08:00

Painting of SUHAILI by Melbourne Smith.
Published by Rudder magazine
September 1974.

In early afternoon on 14 June 1968, Robin Knox-Johnston had a final beer in a local pub before stepping onto a small heavily laden sailboat rising gently to the swell in Falmouth Harbor. As usual when important events are in the wind, last minute preparations were still being done and two friends of Knox-Johnston's busied themselves forward bolting down a final deck fitting. With his departure imminent, the loneliness and doubt of the passage ahead seemed to suddenly press in on the young Englishman, threatening to undo all the resolve built up during the long months of preparation. Finally he called out, "Okay, I'll finish that, I'm off."
And so he was. Off on one of the truly epic adventures in nautical history; one man and his small vessel would sail 30,000 miles non-stop around the world.
At age 29, Knox-Johnston had 11 years of experience in the British Merchant Navy behind him with a passage from India under sail to toughen him mentally and physically for what lay ahead. But to many observers, his little 32-foot wooden ketch appeared to be a most singularly unqualified candidate for such an undertaking.
Basically slow, with antiquated gear, a high cabin trunk, and a rickety self-steering system, the boat had not been the one Knox-Johnston had had in mind when a chance remark first started him thinking about attempting the passage. But as is often the case, money, or the lack of it, is the final determinant for the vessel many a sailor sails. And besides, there was more to SUHAILI than met the eye. Named after the Arabic word for southeast wind, she had been built in Bombay using handhewn Indian teak for stringers, frames, floors, and deck. Completed in 1965, even her planking was 1 ¼-inch teak and, with the exception of the high cabin coaming which would cause trouble southwest of Cape Town, she was a sturdy craft.
Shortly after Knox-Johnston made his decision to go, an English newspaper announced a $12,000 prize for the first man to do the circumnavigation non-stop. Suddenly SUHAILI had seven competitors, and nearly all much faster. So it was a race against the clock, the solitude and the elements, as the SUHAILI sailed into the Southern Ocean and its wailing winds and crashing seas. The specter of failure and total disaster was continually raised as fitting after fitting packed up. SUHAILI nearly lost her high cabin when smashed flat in a knockdown. Later her hull began leaking badly and had to be repaired under water. The steering vane broke, battery acid splashed into the skipper's eye. The gooseneck sheered off, water became contaminated, and the sextant took a severe jolt. Two tillers broke, and the boat was temporarily grounded on a sand bar south of New Zealand. A jibstay parted, and the engine seized up. The sails and even the skipper's clothes disintegrated as the gallant little vessel weathered gale after gale in the austral waters. It was a marvel of courage and endurance. At last as the competitors dropped out one by one, it was SUHAILI alone that laid claim to the prize.
On 22 April 1969, after 313 days at sea, a heavily reefed SUHAILI entered Falmouth Harbor in half a gale. The ship and crew had accomplished what no boat and no man had ever done before. Together they had encircled the world non-stop under sail.

Englishman Robin Knox-Johnston aboard his 32-ft SUHAILI
following his single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation 1969.
Photo from the book A World of My Own by R.K-J,
published by William Morrow and Company, 1969.

"Where from?" The English customs man asked the time-honoured question as the skipper stepped aboard.
"Falmouth" Robin Knox-Johnston replied. The long journey into history was over.
Text by Jerry Cartwright
Rudder
September 1974
Knox-Johnston donated his prize money for being the fastest competitor in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race to the family of Donald Crowhurst, who committed suicide after attempting to fake a round the world sailing voyage.
The sailor of long-standing, with a big heart, was knighted in 1995.

The Good Ship ✪ ✪ ✪ IMPERIAL ✪ ✪ ✪ of 1972 by L. W. North

2012-02-13T11:46:00.000-08:00

M.V. IMPERIAL
Original photo from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©
Photograph donated by William B. Evans.

"Rosario had a hundred guests coming up to Anacortes to be transported to their Orcas Island resort on the M.V. IMPERIAL. Fog had come in during the night and by morning visibility was down to only a few feet. The little ship had very limited navigational equipment, being primarily a sightseeing type boat in her mature years. It seemed not a good idea to leave until the fog had raised a bit, but Gill Geiser, owner of the resort, encouraged me to at least try with his comments that there was going to be some pretty upset people in Anacortes if I didn't show up, with a veiled suggestion the same might be true on his end.

Idling along at 3-knots, bouncing whistle blasts off the bluff a hundred yards away and counting the time it took for the echoes to return, in total isolation from any other part of the world, the first conclusion only seemed more valid. That was not what an excursion boat was supposed to be doing.

1972 Route of the IMPERIAL, Captain "Corkey" North and son Chet.
Photo from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

At Obstruction Pass we got a break and the north side appeared briefly a couple hundred feet away, confirming that the world did exist and we were about where we should be. The east-end light fretted out of the blanket and then hid again. Tide was ebbing fairly strong and Strawberry Island in the pocket of the south end of Cypress Island should be the next landfall. Long minutes with no echo and wondering if the guess at the current speed was even close. My fifteen-year old son stood on the bow, fog dampening his cherubic face, and dripping off his curly hair, intent on hearing the first echo. A stripe of sun hit the boat and then opened to haze around us; all too soon the thick blanket settled on us again. Chet yelled and pointed ahead. He had heard an echo, eventually the south end of Strawberry Island toyed with us, so we turned south to parallel Cypress with hopes of finding the bell buoy. Suddenly we were in beautiful morning sun and Anacortes was where it should be; it seemed we raced along at our normal 9-knots again and would be in time to pick up the passengers while they still had a smiles on their faces.
Son Chet pointed behind us where maybe ten boats streamed out in our wake as the fog lifted and sun brightened the morning. Some one called on the marine radio "good job, skipper". Much later I was informed that voice had been one of the investors following behind us in the fleet since we had left Rosario.
In Anacortes passengers rushed to get aboard, some of them looking in every box and compartment, even in my own day-bag and passed theories on everything. Not all theories of a correct nature as we cruised back to the resort among wisps of fog in the warm, fall sun.

Rosario Resort, Orcas Island, WA.
Undated photograph by F. Wear.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

After the tie-up I went up to the resort's front desk and helped check-in part of the one hundred new guests where I heard comments on how long it took to get to Rosario.
One can only smile and say "maybe we will do better next time you visit".

L.W. North, historian and long time Orcas Island resident
For the Saltwater People Historical Society
January 2012.

1907: HUNDREDS OF LOBSTERS PLANTED in Puget Sound ✪ ✪ ✪

2012-02-09T16:27:00.001-08:00

"The nucleus of what may prove to be a very important industry in this county was started Thursday when hundreds of eastern lobsters were 'planted' at various points in our waters by an agent of the government, acting under instructions from the fish commission.
A carload of lobsters arrived on the Sound a few days ago direct from the coast of Maine, having been only seven days enroute.

They were packed in seaweed and crated and came through from coast to coast in fine condition. They have been distributed at various points along the Sound where natural conditions seemed to be most favorable to their propagation. A great many have been placed in the waters of this county [San Juan] in well sheltered bays. They arrived on the steamer ISLANDER Thursday and were simply dumped overboard in varying numbers wherever the man in charge of them thought best. Some were 'planted' at Decatur Island, quite a number of crates of them were put in the water here [Friday Harbor, San Juan Is., WA.], and many were turned loose at various points along the shores of Lopez and Orcas islands. Little doubt is expressed by those in charge of the work that they will thrive and propagate rapidly.
Lobsters are the best known and most valuable for food of all the Crustacea. The lobster industry is an important one on the coast of Maine, centering chiefly at Portland and Eastport, and there are several hundred lobster canneries along the coasts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. As long ago as 1889 nearly eleven million pounds of lobster were canned in Canada and nearly four thousand-tons were sold fresh; since then the industry has assumed much larger proportions.

Quite a number of years ago--about 1889 or 1890--a few lobsters were planted near Port Townsend, WA, but the experiment was not an extensive one, or very thoroughly made, and was not a sucess. It is said that some of the lobsters were soon afterward caught by Indians and sold in Port Townsend."
Above words from The San Juan Islander
November 1907
Typed verbatim.

1917: "Government Believes in Policy of Keeping at It"
A car load of live lobsters arrived over the Great Northern for distribution among the waters of the San Juan Islands. They left Booth Bay [Maine] last week and came through in fine condition with a loss of less than 2% enroute. There were 6,000 in the lot, packed in cartons with sea weed, wet straw, and ice to keep the temperature as near 42 degrees as possible. Capt. Halm of the National Fish and Game commission, personally conducted the crustacean colony on their Western tour and superintended the placing after their arrival. The State Fish and Game department came to Anacortes when the car arrived. The Coast Fish Co. cannery boat, the SOUND, was commandeered for use in distributing them. This is the fourth shipment that has been made from the east coast and from well authenticated stories it is believed that Puget Sound will soon have more lobsters than can be eaten. The lobster is a great traveler, however. Plant him here today and tomorrow he may be miles away. Southern California or China may benefit by the efforts of the commission, but here's hoping.
Anacortes Citizen
November 1917

✪ ✪ ✪ THE LONE SEA ROVER ✪ ✪ ✪

2012-01-26T22:34:00.001-08:00

Photographer and date unknown. Original from
the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

The initial "Captain Thomas Drake" ephemera to slip into the historical collection came recently with the arrival of two vintage postcards. Drake had these cards printed in Seattle to sell at speaking engagements to help fund his sailing adventures. The puzzle starts unfolding when brief references to Captain Tommy were recently noticed in Andrews and Kirwin's This was Seafaring and High Tide by newspaperman R. H. Calkins that indicated Drake was a sailor friend, sometimes staying in the Pacific Northwest, but known around the globe.

Photographer and date unknown.
Original from the SPHS archives©

Miles McCoy of Orcas Island, WA, remembers seeing a photo of Drake on the wall at Broom's sail loft in Seattle when he worked there as a young man. To bring this a little closer to home, McCoy was told that Captain Tom had sailed up to Orcas to visit with a Boede family member in the distant past; the salty character has thus earned an entry in our Log.
The below text by Glen Carter was published in the Seattle Times in 1973.
Thanks to the Northwest and Special Collections Librarian at the WA. State Library, Olympia, WA.
Herein a long-winded story of one tough, deep-water sailor.
"If Seattle ever establishes a Hall of Fame for extraordinary old men of the sea, Captain Tom Drake would get my vote. Should somebody form a Tom Drake Fan Club, I'll be first in line to register.
A man who would roam the seas alone for more than 120,000 miles--as late in life as 76--deserves a tip of the watchcap. Consider also that he built the boats he sailed--none longer than 37-feet.
If you've never heard of Tommy Drake, you're not alone. He didn't make big headlines--even when he went down to the sea in his last little ship in 1937. Captain Tom just went away for awhile. He was last seen headed out from San Francisco, bound downcoast for San Diego and ports beyond.
Drake favored double-enders--those boats pointed at both ends. He built or worked on all of them at Stanwood, Snohomish County, which he also called home. He sawed his own timbers and scantlings there.
Captain Tom was some sea-going man. He was only 5-feet tall, moustached; the grin into a camera's lens was ever-ready.
A tough little guy, he was. At 70 he pulled into the Seattle harbor from Hawaii after battling mountainous seas for part of 53 days. His 37-foot PROGRESS was limping with sails shredded and bowsprit gone. Tommy also was battered. His right arm hung loosely at his side. The hand was broken and the arm badly sprained. He had caught them in the boat's spinning wheel-spokes.
'I'm going into Marine Hospital to get patched up, then I'll head out again,' he told a reporter. Tommy said he had steered and sailed left-handed for 20 grueling days.
Who WAS Tommy Drake? The records are sketchy but complete enough. He was a peppery little man who talked with a Cockney accent in short, clipped sentences. He limped badly on a leg shortened 4-inches by a shipboard fall in his youth. He began sailing out of England at age 13.
Old newspaper clippings describe him as The Lone Sea Rover. He never traveled with a companion. Newsmen repeatedly said he had roamed the seven seas, calling on 117 ports and logging 120,000 miles out of Puget Sound. He had sailed in windjammers and rounded Cape Horn as a matter of life. The last two tall ships on which he was mate were the bark IFIFIA and the brig TARTER.
Men here knew him well. He was a member of the Seattle and Queen City Yacht Clubs. His oil portrait, done by Peter Jordan Savage, was a prize adornment of the Seattle Yacht Club.
In 1935 a newsman wrote: ' Tommy Drake, venerable seaman and nautical hermit, is gone again.. He left at dawn yesterday and pointed his schooner's bow outbound from Lake Union. Where was he going? Nobody knows, except perhaps Tommy himself.'
Tommy was that way--chatty and congenial but close-mouthed about his destinations. One summer he shoved off and didn't return for more than four years. During those absences he wrote to friends such as 'Doc' Freeman, Harry Kirwin, Jacob Lough, George Broom and others.
It was Lough, a druggist, who traveled to San Francisco August 1937, and on to Pescadero Point to sadly examine beached wreckage of a boat identified as Captain Tom's.
In October 1926, it had been Lough who received a letter from the lone skipper who said he had arrived safely in Balboa, en route to his boyhood home in England by way of Cape Horn. There had been no word from him since his departure from Seattle four months earlier in his 36-foot schooner, the PILGRIM.
He did battle his way around the Horn, up to the Bahamas, made a good passage across the Atlantic, sighted the Azores without putting in, and arrived off the English coast in a gale that forced him to heave to. Blown back out to sea, he had to beat for nearly a week before he made Fowey after 52 days at sea.
He called at coastal villages, then sailed up the English Channel and entered the Thames, happy and triumphant to revisit the river waters he had left 50-years earlier. But his joy was marred when he luffed into the moorage of a Gravesend yacht club and was told he could not tie up, being a nonmember of a yachting fraternity.
Drake explained that his lame hip was painful, that he had voyaged a long distance and was tired. Club officials still denied him mooring, so he went to a less prestigious club and told officials there he was a member of a Seattle yacht club. After confirmation by Atlantic cable was made, Drake became a celebrity of the London waterfront. The yacht club that had denied him moorage sent a delegation to offer the club's apologies. The press reported that he received the apologists cordially and invited them aboard.
He left England for leisurely touring of Scandinavia and Holland. Then came a press report out of Amsterdam that described how the Lone Sea Rover had been shipwrecked and was rescued by fishermen.
Tommy worked his way in a ship to the East Coast, rode a freight train cross-crounty and arrived in Seattle's railroad yards.
Drake, then 66, was back from the seas in Seattle after four years and six months.
In all, Captain Drake sailed 4 of his home-built ships out of Puget Sound. His first schooner, the SIR FRANCIS, was completed in 1915. She was 32-feet, a double-ender, and drew less than four feet. The vessel was lost in a storm on the east coast of Mexico after he had logged 31,000 miles in the Pacific, Atlantic, South American, and Caribbean waters.
The followed the 35-foot double-ender, SIR FRANCIS II, lost off Cuba.
But the PILGRIM, which he sailed to Europe and lost off Holland, probably was his best-liked boat. After he arrived on the freight train, he went to work on his last ship, the PROGRESS, 37-feeet, with inside ballast of 5-tons and draft of 4-feet. To shake her down, he sailed down-coast and across to Hawaii. It was on his return passage to Seattle that he broke his hand.
In the fall of 1936, Drake shoved off--again down the coast and not announcing his ultimate destination. In March, his Seattle friends began to voice apprehension. For him not to mail letters for months was not unusual. But uneasiness was growing.
His last-known whereabouts was San Francisco, where he had headed outbound under the Golden Gate Bridge in November 1936.
The skipper's age then was reported in the press as 76.
The Seattle Times on 16 May 1937 reported:
'The aged skipper's fraternity of friends are afraid that when Captain Drake stood proudly erect at the PROGRESS's wheel during the marine parade through the Lake Washington Ship Canal last summer, Seattle had its last look at him. They hope he'll turn up--in Hawaii, India, in the South Seas or somewhere.'
Occasionally you find an old-timer who knew Tommy Drake well, and he talks about his long-ago friend. But there ought to be a memorial or some kind of remembrance in Puget Sound country for Tommy Drake. He was a champion of sorts."
Glen Carter
Seattle Times 1973
We are interested in archiving additional published articles about the sea life of Captain Thomas Drake if you have any to share. One essay has come into the archives from a 1926 issue of the Literary Digest when Drake was 63-years old.

BOOK REVIEW by Allison Hart Lengyel

2012-01-18T15:01:00.000-08:00

N by E

Rockwell Kent (Wesleyan University Press, 1930)

Block print by Rockwell Kent from N by E
Weslayan University Press, 1930.
From the library of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

If N by E had been written recently, or by someone else, it would be a very different book. The account of a trip by the author and two comrades in 1929, sailing a 33’ wooden boat from Nova Scotia to the west coast of Greenland, and of the ultimate shipwreck and rescue that ensued, would be, above all, full of detail. We’d know why the young men decided to set out and why they chose Greenland. We’d know their full names and brief autobiographies. (As it is, we surmise that “Skipper Sam” must be Arthur S. Allen, Jr; the first mate is known to us only as “Cupid.”) We’d be given clear information about the planned route of travel and day-by-day events, with journalistic explanations as events unfold, leading in an orderly path from departure to disaster to an extended stay on Greenland for the author (and the swift exit of the skipper and first mate). But the book was written by Rockwell Kent, painter and illustrator, woodblock print maker, and free spirit as well as author (and incidental navigator and cook).

Block print by Rockwell Kent from N by E
Weslayan University Press, 1930

There is, in fact, an alternate version of the story available. After the later untimely death of the voyage’s skipper, Sam Allen’s ship’s log and other documents were compiled and privately published by his father’s friends as Under Sail to Greenland, Arthur S. Allen, Jr., (The Marchbanks Press, 1931). The book was republished in 2002 by DN Goodchild (http://www.dngoodchild.com/0218.htm). (As it is not part of the story of the voyage of the DIRECTION, Kent doesn’t tell us how Allen died, only that he did.)

N by E, as written by Kent, tells its story as a kind of extended prose poem, with the tone of a tale perhaps translated from another language, such as the Odyssey. Indeed, interspersed with the narrative are retellings of Danish and indigenous folk tales from Greenland. Although the relevance of the tales to the adventure at sea may not always be clear, as Kent tells the reader in his preface, these stories and the voyage as he recounts it make sense to him. “And if an author in recording what has interested himself differs from editors—so everlastingly concerned with what may interest others, he may no less…hope that a hundred thousand souls will see him as the mirror of themselves—and buy his book.” Not a very pragmatic attitude to producing and marketing a book, but one that sets Kent’s story apart as a timeless work of art rather than an evanescent memoir.

Block print by Rockwell Kent from N by E
Weslayan University Press, 1930.

The best part of N by E may be Kent’s woodblock and ink and brush illustrations. Again, in Kent’s own words, “The full page ‘illustrations’ of this volume are less illustrative of the text than supplementary to it.” They can stand alone—and frequently they do. Kent often uses them to illustrate a metaphorical idea or to express the emotional meaning of a scene rather than to describe the narrative. Characters in the illustrations are presented in classical attitude, often naked, and abstracted in form, a beautiful example of late Art Deco graphic design. Kent’s prints demonstrate the beautiful potential and expressive geometry of the line itself. Among his other works, Kent provided the illustrations for a 1930 edition of Moby-Dick published by the Lakeside Press, a work that sold out, was rapidly reissued in a trade edition, and contributed to Moby-Dick’s rehabilitation from obscurity to a recognized classic.

But what is N by E about? Ostensibly it’s about a sea voyage but more than that it’s about the possibilities of being young and alone on the ocean, with ample time to contemplate the night sky. “In the half light of the early morning of July the fifth all hands bestirred themselves, got up; we came on deck. It was cold. The silent town lay dark against the eastern sky; the land was black, and stranded bergs glowed pale against it. Clear heavens strewn with stars, and a fair wind S by W! Noiselessly, as if stealing away, we hoisted sail, weighed anchor and bore out. And so, without tumult and the clamor of leave takings, quietly as the coming dawn, we entered the solitude of the ocean. And if we were not annihilated by the contemplation of such vast adventure it was by grace of that wise providence of man’s nature which, to preserve his reason, lets him be thoughtless before immensity.”

So the book is about existential contemplation. But it is alternately about moments and days of terror, freezing water, unpredictable tides, dense fog, exhaustion, and complete concentration on the object of survival. And about rumination on the historic voyages taken by earlier travelers, such as Leif Ericsson. About the limits of technological advancement. And about the difficulties of living in a very small space with two other men, one of them characterized as having the expression of a “petulant potato” and grating in his every word and deed (culminating in his being asked, by the governor of Greenland, to leave the island immediately upon his rescue).

Block print by Rockwell Kent from N by E
Weslayan University Press, 1930.

Although Rockwell Kent occasionally confides in the reader (such as sharing his opinion of the first mate), he doesn’t always tell the reader everything. We’re left a bit at sea at times, like the DIRECTION, adrift in fog but still out adventuring. A neat trick and beautifully done.

This review is kindly submitted to our Log by Allison Hart Lengyel, writer and mariner from San Juan County. Please scroll down to 13 November 2011 to read her piece on The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea by Philip Hoare (HarperCollins, 2008)
Examples of Rockwell Kent's artistic illustrations coming soon.

Steamer ISLANDER ✪ ✪ ✪ Sails for Mexico

2012-01-15T15:35:00.000-08:00

Text from:
The Friday Harbor Journal
7 June 1917
Front Page.

Steamer ISLANDER cruising through Pole Pass, Orcas Island, WA.
Original undated photo from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

Commanded by Capt. S.A. Leffingwell, the steamer ISLANDER will say good-bye to Puget Sound in a few days and sail for San Francisco to enter the Mexican west coast trade.
The ISLANDER was built in 1904 [by J.A. Scribner] for Capt. Newhall at Newhall, Orcas Island, for the Bellingham-San Juan Islands-Anacortes run. She is 162 gross tons, 72-feet long, 18-feet 9-inches beam and draws 9-feet of water. After her sale to the San Francisco firm she was taken to Seattle and given a thorough overhauling, the texas removed and other alterations made which will add to her sea-worthiness for an ocean voyage.
Commenting on the risk of the trip, Capt. Leffingwell said: 'that is where you're all off. Columbus crossed the ocean in a ship not half as good as the ISLANDER. I'd just as soon take a run over to Australia on the ISLANDER if I could carry fuel enough. In fact, I'd rather take her down the coast than a big steamship. The big ship business is a cut and dried proposition, leaving and arriving on schedule. With the ISLANDER I may make a quick trip, and then again, I may not. That's what appeals to me.'
Those San Juan Islanders who have traveled on the old boat in all kinds of weather know that Capt. Basford used to take her out on the Island run on days when the regular Seattle steamers remained tied up at the dock in Bellingham, and that while rather slow, she always arrived right side up and on time regardless of rough seas and high wind. While not exactly an up-to-date passenger steamer, she is a well-built and staunch little vessel and a great deal better than the average steamer that has been on the west coast run for the past fifty years or more.

Wreck of the ✪ ✪ ADMIRAL BENSON ✪ ✪

2012-01-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Pacific Steamship Company's ADMIRAL BENSON
Wrecked 15 February 1930.
Captured on film by the well-known Charley Fitzpatrick of North Beach.
Original from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

"What was first reported on 15 February 1930 as a minor stranding turned out to be a major steamship disaster.

With thirty-nine passengers, sixty-five crew members, and a cargo of citrus fruits and general freight, the liner ADMIRAL BENSON, of the Pacific Steamship Co., stranded on the sands at Buoy No. 6, near Peacock Spit. It was 6:45 pm, and the vessel was inbound for Portland, Oregon, when she shoved her nose on the spit in the foggy channel entrance. The stranding appeared so minor that Captain C. C. Graham did not send out an urgent appeal for help, but asked assistance only. The USCG cutter REDWING was ordered out to stand by the BENSON, but her boilers were cold and she was unable to leave from Astoria until several hours later. The freighter NEVADA also received the call for assistance and stood by the liner while the Coast Guard lifeboats from Point Adams and Cape Disappointment handled the evacuation of passengers. Many of the tourists were compelled to slide down wet ropes to the rescue craft.
By noon on 17 February, most of the passengers had been removed and all efforts were directed towards saving the crew who had remained with the ship hoping to refloat her. The situation appeared less hopeful as a high wind approached and kicked up a nasty surf. By 9:06 am the following morning the five remaining passengers were taken off, followed by the steward's staff and the ships orchestra.
The wreck was located 400 yards west of the north jetty directly in view of the remains of the LAUREL, which served as a grim reminder to those still aboard the liner.
The following day, Captain Graham watched the last of the crew go ashore by breeches buoy, and he alone remained aboard the vessel. The holds had been pumped full of water to keep the ship from pounding, but when a 40-mph gale arose, the BENSON was given a salt bath by mountainous breakers. On the morning of 20 February, the riveting began to pull loose and the ship showed signs of breaking up. The decks cracked, the engine room was flooded and the surplus water saturated the cargo in the holds.
On 21 February, the redoubtable captain was still aboard, his spirits warmed by the friendly bonfire that was kept burning night and day at Cape Disappointment. It wasn't until four days later that Graham abandoned his vigil, and signalled the Coast Guard for assistance.
A line had been made fast between the wreck and the shore and the ship's master began an arduous journey through the air on a lifesaving conveyance.
The passengers and crew had been landed at Astoria and each had a version of the disaster. Several agreed that the wreck of the LAUREL had been mistaken for a range buoy, which may have misled the liner to the spit in the fog. Though the loss of the BENSON was attributed by some to faulty navigation, existing conditions on the Columbia bar can be confusing to the most experienced navigators.

Ten days later the captain comes ashore in the breeches buoy.
Original photo by Wesley Andrews.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

The first passenger to be evacuated was Mrs. A. B. Reynolds of Portland, who rode a breeches buoy placed on a line between ship and shore by the Coast Guard. She had a hectic trip, swallowed plenty of salt waster and lost her new hat. It was then that boats were used to evacuate passengers. But the Reynolds woman was a good sport and in spite of all said, 'I always did want to ride in one of those things.'
After the captain was evacuated, a salvage crew using Coast Guard lines, ran a tram gear to the wreck and removed some of the cargo which was trucked to Astoria.
Though the BENSON was sucked into the sand stern first, part of her bow was still visible at extreme low tide two decades after her loss".

Text by James A. Gibbs, Jr.
Pacific Graveyard
Courtesy of Oregon Historical Society
Binfords & Mort, 1950

The Steamer TOURIST ✪ ✪ ✪ By Captain Ed Shields

2012-01-05T23:15:00.000-08:00

The TOURIST
Inscribed by the Marine Salon Photo Studio, undated.
Original from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Scty.©

The TOURIST by Seattle photographer James A. Turner, undated.
Original from the archives of the Saltwater People Hist. Society.©

"The TOURIST was a sternwheel steamer used to transport passengers and freight to various points in Puget Sound. She was shallow draft with dimensions of 156.8' x 27.9' x 7.6'. She was built in Port Blakely in 1907, owned at that time by the Puget Sound Navigation Co. When new, she was placed on the Bremerton-Port Orchard route. She was a handsome vessel with a tall, slightly raked smoke stack, huge sternwheel and high pilot house at the forward end of the upper deck. She was painted white. The upper deck was fitted with comfortable chairs and benches while freight was confined to the lower deck.
In 1929 she was extensively rebuilt to serve as a freight vessel. Her shallow draft, requiring only four-feet of water, made her fitted for the Seattle-Mt. Vernon run, where she could navigate up the shallow reaches of the Skagit River. An elevator was installed on the forward deck; she also operated in the cross sound auto-passenger runs during the early days of auto ferries. The cars were loaded via the elevator with the TOURIST being moored alongside the wharf. The auto was driven onto the elevator by one of the crew members, the elevator lowered and the auto driven back into the freight area. The same scheme was employed in off-loading. The auto passengers were not in the car when loading or unloading.

The INDIAN owned by P.S. Freight Lines,
at Roche Harbor, San Juan Islands, WA.
House from the sternwheeler TOURIST.
Archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

In 1937 she was laid up for the last time. The pilot house was removed and installed on the new motor freighter INDIAN of the Puget Sound Freight Lines Co.

The TOURIST was typical of several early freight and passenger vessels, being fitted with a sternwheel instead of with propeller as present vessels are equipped. Vessels of this type operated with a very low-pressure boiler, and the exhaust steam from the engine was discharged out the smoke stack, in a manner similar to the exhaust system used by steam railroad locomotives. She did not have condensers. In the early days the boiler fires were stoked with slab wood from the many saw mills in the area."
Text from: About the Boats
Captain Ed Shields 1994

RELOCATION OF THE SMITH ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE LANTERN ✪ ✪ by Captain Leiter & Ruth Hockett

2011-12-15T23:48:00.000-08:00

Events take place July 1959.
Story mailed to web admin., in 1997.
Published in Water Work, Hockett, L.W. (Trafford), 2005.

Color photo by Bernie McNeil.
Published by Smith-Western Publishing Co.
Saltwater People Historical Society archives.

"Smith Island is at the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The lighthouse stone work, materials, cast-iron lantern- house, lens, and auxiliary equipment were shipped from the east coast around Cape Horn. The structure was built in 1857 and the lamp lit 18 October 1858.
After a century of wasting waves at the confluence of currents, a recorded Haida attack, and numerous earthquakes, the Coast Guard replaced the lighthouse with an unmanned airway-type light on a steel tower set farther east. The solid stone block house was about thirty-feet from the edge of the bluff at the time.
Jim Gibbs, former editor of the Marine Digest and former Coast Guard lighthouse keeper had acquired the lighthouse and asked me to remove the lantern from the tower, set it up on his property on the bluff above Skunk Bay, several miles northwest of Point No Point.
While raising the F.V. MIDWAY, in June 1959 near Partridge Bank, I had the tug AMAK take me to Smith Island to check it out. On 4 July 1959, we left Ballard with my 88-foot crane barge, the MV- 41. Jim Gibbs was aboard with Bob Butts and Ralph Mote.
Arriving at the island we anchored in four-fathoms near the bight on the south side of the Island. That night a southeast blow caused us to weigh anchor and shift into deeper water; we returned inshore in the morning to work.
Jim went ashore to look over the tower and lantern with me; he did not want the floor plate or railings. I radioed Bob Monroe to send a float plane for Jim. When the plane arrived in the afternoon he wished us well and departed.
The brick light tower was approximately forty-feet high. On top was the ten-sided lantern housing from which the window glass, lens, and auxiliary equipment had been removed. It was made of cast iron segments bolted at their bottom to a circular cast iron floor, eight-feet in diameter and 1.8-inches thick. Inside, a square hatch opening was cast at the side of the floor with a hinged cover at the top of the spiral iron stairway.
The lower part was made of solid panels with ventilators in the center of every other one. On the outside of the panel, at the ventilator openings, was an integrally cast box open on the bottom. Inside was a radial disk damper that could be adjusted from open to closed to accommodate the original oil lamp. Op top of each intersection of these panels was a mullion that supported the conical top and framed the window glass. The top was made of ten triangular shaped castings that, when bolted together, formed a conical roof of approximately half-pitch that was fitted with a finial ventilator.
Around the outside of the lantern was a brick walkway with eight forged-iron railing stanchions, equally spaced and mortared in. They supported three one-inch round iron railing rods that penetrated the stanchions. These rods were joined by tubes slipped over the ends and riveted. We had rigged an "A"-frame to hang over the side with a block and a manila line to lower the lantern parts. They had been assembled with 5/8-inch bolts, with pump rod threads and cast iron square-nuts on each end. Disassembling the structure was as easy as if it had been installed the previous month.
Having lowered the thirty-one components of the lantern we cut the railing rods, dug the stanchions out of the brickwork, and threw them down. We dug the floor casting loose from the brickwork, pried it up, blocked it, then tied a line on a toggle through the hatch hole and prevailed upon the Coast Guard to yank it off of the tower with their Jeep.
The back porch was of three granite steps, 7.5" x 11.5" x 48". The Coast Guard obligingly transported the pieces to the water's edge where we loaded them with my crane at high tide in about one-fathom of water and right in the kelp.
Loaded, we moved to the ferry dock at Kingston. Arriving on 7 July 1959 at 0530, we off-loaded onto my crane truck then delivered the load to Jim's site above Skunk Bay. There we assembled the lantern of the floor plate on the ground.
The granite back porch and steps were sandblasted of what appeared to be a yearly oat of hard, coast-guard-gray paint and are now on the patio in our back yard forming a solid and child-proof table.
The lantern has been installed on a wood frame small scale lighthouse. It is named Skunk Bay Memorial Lighthouse, privately maintained, and showing a continuous, low-power, red light in the USCG Light List. The lens is part of the collection at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. The house and tower are rubble at the bottom of the bluff on the west side of Smith Island".

Business card from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society.

✪ ✪ ✪ Boats We Knew ✪ ✪ ✪ STUBBY OLD BEAVER, the First Steamer to Ply North Pacific Waters

2011-12-11T01:07:00.000-08:00

The BEAVER, London register No. 154 of the year 1835.
Location, date, and photographer unknown.
Original from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

" The first steamer in North Pacific coast waters rounded the Horn and came chugging into Puget Sound in December 1836 [175 years ago]. She was a sturdy, stubby, little craft named the BEAVER, only 101-feet with a beam of 20-feet and of only 100-tonnage.
She was built on the Thames and from the day when her keel was laid until she was launched and set out for her remote destination she was an object of keen interest and speculation. When she was launched King William IV, and 150,000 persons of all classes were present and it was a gala event indeed. Almost nothing was known of steam navigation at that period and still less of the faraway coast of the North Pacific. It seemed an heroic and almost daredevil venture for so small a craft to set out for an almost unknown land on the other side of the world.
She was, of course, a wood burner and, as sufficient fuel could not be carried for the voyage, her side wheels were not attached and she was fitted with sails and rigged as a brig under the command of one Captain Horne. The bark COLUMBIA sailed as a consort, but the BEAVER out-stripped her by nearly a month and arrived at the mouth of the Columbia, via the Hawaiian Islands 10-days from London.
Her arrival at Fort Vancouver was announced with a broadside from her batteries, which raised echoes from the surrounding forest and brought everyone at the fort rushing to the waterside. Carpenters set to work putting her side wheels into place and soon her paddles were resounding down the river on a trial run.
Almost at once the BEAVER went into the service of the Hudson's Bay Company, which then controlled virtually all of the Pacific Northwest country. She left outward bound, never to re-enter the Columbia. For years she ran up the coast as far as Sitka and in and out of virtually every bay, river, and inlet between Sitka and Fort Nisaqually. Men were kept busy chopping wood for fuel.
Her paddle wheels were small and set far forward. She carried a crew of 30 men (one wonders how they found quarters in such a little craft), had an armament of four six-pounders, and was liberally supplied with small arms. Her decks were protected by boarding nettings to prevent access by the natives except by the gang planks. More than 30 natives were never allowed on board at one time unless they were accompanied by their wives and children as an evidence of their peaceful intentions.
After paying for herself several times over, she was considered too small and too slow for the company's increasing business, so the OTTER, a propeller craft, was brought out in 1851; the BEAVER was used as a supplemental vessel, cruising up and down the coast, carrying men and supplies to the various posts and collecting gold and furs.
In 1852 she was seized on a charge of violating United States revenue laws. When the watchman was ashore the BEAVER got up steam and made haste to get out of American waters. The trouble ended there. During the Indian War both the BEAVER and the OTTER were placed at the disposal of the American authorities.
When the Hudson's Bay Company's charter expired the BEAVER passed into the hands of the Imperial Hydrographic Office and for years was in that service, exploring coasts and sounding harbors. With the coming of more modern craft, she degenerated into a tramp, doing odd jobs up and down the coast.
In 1874 she was refitted as a tugboat and sold to a private firm. She served as a tug for 14 years and then was given a license as a passenger boat and went into service on Burrard Inlet. Finally, after 53-years of faithful and valiant service, she went on the rocks at the entrance to Vancouver Harbour in a fog and there she lay for years, with rags of rigging swaying mute appeal for help. At long last in a storm the sturdy old BEAVER broke up and so ended her days. Her boiler is preserved in the Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma".
Just Cogitating column
by C. T. Conover
Seattle Times
29 March 1951

✪ ✪ SALVAGE OF DIAMOND KNOT'S CARGO ✪ ✪ by R. H. "Skipper" Calkins

2011-12-06T22:11:00.003-08:00

Original photo of the DIAMOND KNOT, moored Seattle
by photographer Joe Williamson; undated.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.©

"During the many years I covered the Seattle waterfront, I wrote numerous shipwreck and cargo-salvage stories but none equalled the dramatic recovery of much of the valuable cargo of the Alaska freighter DIAMOND KNOT which sank in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, half a mile from the protected shores of Crescent Bay, 13 August 1947.
It was men against the sea, victory over baffling handicaps in one of the most hazardous and difficult savage operations in the annals of shipping.
On her ill-fated voyage, the DIAMOND KNOT, a motorship owned by the US Maritime Commission, was en route from Bristol Bay, Alaska, to Seattle. The 5,525-ton freighter made her way through choppy waters of the Straits of Juan de Fuca with her valuable cargo of choice red, chum, king, and coho salmon. En route to sea from Seattle was the 10,681-ton freighter FENN VICTORY. This vessel had only 200-tons of freight and her bow was high in the water as she steamed for Cape Flattery and the open sea.
In the early morning darkness, with the Strait of Juan de Fuca covered with a shroud of fog, the two ships collided at a point about three miles off Race Rocks.
The bow of the FENN VICTORY cut into the DIAMOND KNOT a distance of more than 14-ft on the ship's starboard side between No. 1 and No. 2 holds. It was evident that the FENN VICTORY had struck a fatal blow. The decks of the DIAMOND KNOT were awash. The bow of the FENN VICTORY, riding high in the water, had become entangled with the heavy cross tree on the main mast and rigging of the DIAMOND KNOT and the two ships were held in a death grip as they drifted down the strait with the fast-ebbing tide. On the rescue tug SALVAGE CHIEFTAIN, which had answered the distress calls of the two ships, was burning equipment. It was taken aboard the DIAMOND KNOT and the two ships finally were cut free.
The MATHILDA FOSS and FOSS 21, the first tugs to find the distressed ships in the early morning darkness, placed lines on the DIAMOND KNOT and began towing her, stern first, toward the protected waters of Crescent Bay, Olympic Peninsula. It was planned to beach the DIAMOND KNOT and save her precious cargo. However, water rushed into her No. 2 and No. 3 holds, posing a serious problem.
There was further trouble ahead for the rescue tugs. The strongest currents in the Strait of Juan de Fuca are at the entrance to Crescent Bay and off Tongue Point, which forms a gateway to the east of the entrance. Of almost equal strength are the currents that run their course off Crescent Reef, guarding the entrance to the west.
Caught in these vicious waters, the mortally wounded ship rolled over on her side and disappeared in 135 feet of water, only half a mile from the shores of Crescent Bay, at 8:55 a.m. On that 13th day of August 1947, the tired and anxious crews of the MATHILDA FOSS and FOSS 21 watched the sturdy freighter go to her death.
The sinking of the DIAMOND KNOT resulted in the largest collision cargo loss in the waters of the Pacific Coast.
News of the ship tragedy immediately was sent to the Seattle branch office of the Fireman's Fund Insurance Co, one of the principal underwriters, where machinery instantly was set in motion to indemnify those assureds who had sustained economic loss of staggering proportions. The initial Insurance Co. work led to the prompt payment of a claim to one cargo owner in an amount totaling $982,258.55. This payment was made jointly by the Fireman's Fund Insurance Co and the Sea Insurance Co, who with their reinsurers, share this business of the shipper. In quick succession, a second check was issued through the Seattle office of Fireman's Fund in the amount of $2,053,365.68. Four days later, a third principal assured made claim to Fireman's Fund and promptly was paid in the amount of $369,767.10. Under a separate cargo policy, Fireman's Fund provided indemnity to the owners of the fishboat RUTH B. which was lost from the deck of the DIAMOND KNOT. The claim, an amount exceeding $16,000 was paid for the RUTH B, and miscellaneous under-deck shipments. Under a second seaman's form of policy, Fireman's Fund also paid claims totaling $12,000 for the personal effects of the crew of the DIAMOND KNOT.
Fireman's Fund then turned to the possibility of recovering and restoring the lost cargo of much needed food to the world's critically depleted markets. For this task, a salvage team had to be selected.
Walter L. Martignoni, of Pillsbury & Martignoni, was hired to direct salvage operations. Next assignment, as prime salvage contractors to supply equipment and personnel required for the operation, went to the Foss Launch & Tug Co.
Extraordinary daring of 16 deep-sea divers under the direction of Walter A McCray of Seattle, stocky, dynamic, adventurer, who was in charge of all undersea work; and the unexcelled skill of Walter L. Martignoni of San Francisco, who contrived two giant siphon pipe lines, which literally sucked canned salmon cargo from the holds of the DIAMOND KNOT, were responsible for this spectacular salvage feat.
Martignoni's underwater vacuum cleaner brought up from a 135-ft depth where the DIAMOND KNOT was lying on her side, 5,744,496 cans of the 7,407,168-can cargo of the vessel, valued at $3,500,000. Total gross salvage recovery of salmon exceeded $2,100.000 in value.
Walter McCray, a fearless, capable worker below the waters, is known throughout the entire Pacific Northwest for his daring, and there have been few underwater salvage undertakings in the history of maritime disasters in this area in which McCray's ability does not loom high. Fred Devine, master diver of the Columbia River district, was appointed to assist McCray in the undersea operations.
It was admitted that defeat or victory in the battle against the seas covering the DIAMOND KNOT and her valuable cargo was to be determined by these carefully selected captains of the salvage team.
Martignoni decided that cutting out the ships side and removing the cargo into barges by lifting with magnets was impractical, due to the small amount of tin in the cans. Removing the cargo by stevedoring methods also was impractical because of the vicious tidal conditions and the depth of the water at the scene, which would allow divers to work for only limited periods.
There was only one method remaining for the salvage of the cargo--to build two 12-inch siphon pipe lines which would suck the sought-after treasure of canned salmon from the holds of the DIAMOND KNOT. Siphons had been used in removing water, gravel, and small lumps of coal and coin from limited depths, but there was no record to show that such a method would raise one-pound cans of salmon from a water-depth of 135-ft.
The siphon plan required the creation of tremendous volumes of air to be forced into the siphons at great depth. To accomplish this, large air compressors were necessary to free the cans of salmon from their cartons. Powerful Navy fire-fighting jet pumps were obtained for this purpose. Two large caterpillar tractor-crane hoists, secured on a barge, were used to lower the cumbersome siphon pipe lines into holes cut in the ship's side.
McCray sent urgent calls to port cities from Canada to Mexico, bringing the most skillful divers to the scene*.

Al Abrahamsen's lead diving boots each weighing 18 pounds.
Recent accession to the SPHS collection.
With thanks to Susan Bauer of Doe Bay, Orcas Island, WA.

Much equipment had to be provided, including decompression chambers, diver's suits, helmets, lead belts & shoes, and miles of air and communication lines.
Finally, expert divers, including skilled burners from the Puget Sound Navy Yard, went over the side of the salvage-equipment barge and began the work of cutting the ship's skin with the latest development in underwater burning equipment. These tools consisted of a hollow carbon rod through which the diver released a mixture of oxygen passing through the carbon rod, created terrific heat, and burned away the ship's skin.
The ingenious cargo-siphoning plan worked as divers below guided the ends of the pipelines within a few feet of the cartons containing the salmon. Out of the twisting pipes came partially disintegrated cartons and cans--golden one-pound containers of salmon--that glistened in the sun as they fell on the receiving barge.
However, it was far from a one-sided battle. The crews on 12-hour shifts fought the fury of winds and rains that rushed in from the open sea. Lines were snapped and the siphons were bent and buckled by the force of the waves. Many times, divers were forced to the surface by vicious currents that strained on their lifelines and tore at their suits as they clung to the ship's skin. These barrel-chested men would be pulled up in haste, without time to decompress and were it not for the mechanical aid of decompression chambers, their fate would have been the dreaded afflictions resulting from the bends. There were serious cases of this disease before the operation was completed.
When tide and current conditions were at their best, divers remained below to feed the siphons sucking their way into the cargo. Under favorable conditions, each siphon sucked an estimated 1,000 gallons of water per minute and deposited c. 800 cans of salmon on the receiving barge.
More than 90% of the port side of the DIAMOND KNOT eventually was cut away and the two underwater vacuum cleaners were lowered from hold to hold to suck at the canned salmon cargo.
The victorious salvage operation continued until 29 October when air and water leading into the siphon pipeline manifolds were shut off and the work brought to an end. Only 10,000 cases of canned salmon remained in inaccessible sections of the DIAMOND KNOT. One of the most dramatic salvage projects in the history of the maritime industry had been brought to a successful conclusion."

Text from High Tide by R.H. Calkins, The Marine Digest Publishing Company, Inc. 1952.

Canned salmon salvage from the wreck of the DIAMOND KNOT, 1947.
Original photo from the archives of the Saltwater People Hist. Society©

*Al Abrahamsen (1909-1979) born and raised at Doe Bay,
Orcas Island, WA, was one of the divers chosen for the deep-sea work
on the DIAMOND KNOT. He was the last diver to man the business end
of a siphon hose below. Al revisited the wreck site the following year to
attempt more salvage. He succeeded in laying claim to the RUTH-B, that he
renamed the SUSAN-A for his wife, and used for the next 15 years
in his private diving business, often with his brother Harry.
Above photo from the Seattle P-I, 30 October 1947.

MAROONED on San Juan Island ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ November 100-years ago

2011-11-26T20:24:00.000-08:00

The S.S. ALAMEDA, Alaska Steamship Co.,
passing Turn Point Light, Stuart Island, WA.
Photo by Louis Borchers, Light House Keeper for 25-years,
most of that time at the Turn Point Light.
His hobby was taking photos of every passing vessel,
prior to his death in 1923.
Notes from the late historian D. S. Egan, Edmonds, WA.

"On the bleakest shore of San Juan island, miles from the nearest habitation, without food or shelter, a 15-year-old boy, a stowaway aboard the steamer ALAMEDA, was put ashore by Captain Johnson on Friday.
The boy was found in steerage soon after the vessel left Valdez and was put to work by members of the crew. All went well until Captain Johnson learned that he was aboard and determined to put him ashore before Seattle was reached.
Several of the passengers who had learned of the boy's plight appealed to the vessel's master, offering to give double the amount of his passage if he were allowed to continue the voyage, but Capt. Johnson was deaf to their intrusion.

Original photo postcard
Saltwater People Historical Society©

In a life boat in charge of the third mate and two sailors, the boy was landed on the beach, and left to walk without food or money to the nearest ranch.
Soon after the return of the lifeboat and when the passengers learned that the little lad was thinly clad and did not even have a coat, a meeting was called and resolutions protesting against the treatment of the little fellow were adopted. A wireless message was also sent to the Alaska Steamship Company advising them of the action of their employee.

Steamers docked Friday Harbor, WA.
GEORGIA and ROSALIE, undated.
Original photo, Saltwater People Historical Society©

The boy walked across the island to Friday Harbor and took the ROSALIE here at noon for Seattle. He claimed he bought a ticket through to Seattle, but lost it. He appeared to be well dressed and did not seem to have suffered from the experience.
The stowaway, whose name is Albert Swan, reached Seattle Saturday morning, and is visiting an uncle there. It was learned from the crew that the boy refused to work and when reprimanded by the captain, used abusive language. According to the testimony of one of the passengers the captain was justified in putting him off the boat."
The San Juan Islander
Front page.
17 November 1911

✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ The Steamer ROOSEVELT by Captain Ed Shields

2011-11-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

Steamer ROOSEVELT
Original Photo from archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

"The ROOSEVELT was a steam powered towboat that operated on Puget Sound and in adjacent waters for many years. She was constructed in 1905 for Robert E. Peary to transport him and his supplies as far north as possible in Davis Strait and then land on the coast of Greenland. She was of exceedingly heavy construction, being 600 T-burden, 194-ft L x 35-ft B; she was built to withstand the ice flows of Davis Strait.

Two postcards cancelled 1911.
Bottom: "Capt. Bartlett, experienced with Peary in the privations of
the Arctic region, is indicated by the cross. Men who were willing to brave
unseen perils and dangers in the cause of conquest and honor to their
mother country--America--such were these men and so their efforts were
crowned with success."
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

Peary set out from New York in March 1906 to establish a camp on shore, then with dog teams he and his associates headed north. They reached Latitude 87°degrees 6 minutes and were within 174 miles of the pole before they had to return without reaching their goal. Again in July 1908, the expedition headed north and established a camp on the northern portion of Greenland. The waited until February before starting the trip northward. Then Peary and six explorers, 17 Eskimos, 19 sleds, and 133 dogs headed out. The final journey to the pole from winter camp was 413-miles; the North Pole was finally reached on 6 April 1909. He took soundings of water depth and found that it was over 9,000-ft deep.
After Peary's return to New York, the vessel was sold to Puget Sound interests and brought to the northwest via the newly opened Panama Canal. One of the first noteworthy events the ROOSEVELT participated in was the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, on 4 July 1917. She led the flotilla of vessels through the canal that day.
In 1923 the ROOSEVELT was owned by the Washington Tug and Barge Company of Seattle. She was employed in towing three former WW I wood hulls, which were serving as barges, loaded with lumber from Puget Sound to San Diego. They were towed one at a time. One loading on Puget Sound, one unloading in San Diego, and the third at sea. The ROOSEVELT would bring an empty barge to the Puget Sound mill, take the loaded barge in tow to San Diego, and on arrival, the other barge was now unloaded and ready for the return trip. She was able to make two round trips per month and hauled 2,500,000-board feet of lumber each time south bound. She was the best tugboat on the coast for this form of ocean towing.

Mammoth log booms being towed from the Columbia River
down the Pacific Coast to San Diego, CA.
Saltwater People Historical Society archives.

In 1924 the ROOSEVELT, along with two other smaller tugs, took a flotilla of barges loaded with lumber to Miami, Florida. In 1931 the ROOSEVELT was dispatched to Cape Flattery to tow the schooner VIGILANT into Puget Sound. Extreme weather produce violent seas, and several of the ROOSEVELT's pilot house windows were smashed; however, she accomplished her task.

Seattle Tug ROOSEVELT and the Schooner VIGILANT
A 1932 Seattle Times page from the scrapbook of
PNW Captain W. C. "Pappy" Beachum (1906-1980).
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

1932 found the ROOSEVELT towing large ocean going log rafts south to San Diego. On 3 May 1934 the motor ship CHILDAR was outbound across the Columbia River bar when she was battered onto Peacock Spit on the north side of the entrance. The USCG Cutter REDWING succeeded in towing the stricken vessel from the grip of the breakers. They could not cross the Columbia River bar to return Astoria or Portland due to the exceedingly high breakers, so both vessels proceeded north. The next morning the ROOSEVELT took over the tow and brought the stricken CHILDAR into Esquimalt, BC.
The last voyage of this famous tug was in 1937. She was sold to the California Towing Co in San Francisco. She set out on her final trip towing the former USN collier JUPITER from Puget Sound to the East Coast for scrapping. The tow yawed excessively and the tow line damaged the ROOSEVELT. She also experienced engine problems with her old power plant. After departing the Panama Canal the ROOSEVELT became totally disabled, turned the tow over to the New York tug RELIEF, and returned to the Panama Canal. She was laid up, and the crew finally sold her equipment, as they had not been paid. Finally, this former Artic exploration ship rotted away."

Written by Captain Ed Shields
About the Boats
1994

BOOK REVIEW: A Whale Runs through It

2011-11-13T16:34:00.005-08:00

Review written by Allison Hart Lengyel©
Saltwater People Historical Society

The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Philip Hoare (HarperCollins, 2008)

Look around and you’ll find whales are everywhere, swimming through popular culture, in toys, in art, in books and movies. They support coastal communities that once depended on fishing and now put their boats to sea for whale watching charters; they symbolize the aspirations of environmentalists who fear for the integrity of the world’s ecosystems. We are still trying to agree whether it is acceptable to hunt whales, and, if so, by modern or only traditional methods. But even if most of us aren’t hunting whales, we continue to be obsessed by them.

This summer, hundreds of people ditched their cars along Highway 101, near where it crosses the Klamath River, to walk to the middle of the bridge and stand ogling over the side. What held their attention was a 45-foot female grey whale, circling and spouting in the shallow waters of the river, about three miles from its outlet to the Pacific.

Female grey whale, Klamath River, California.
Photo by Allison Hart Lengyel
August 2011

Despite various attempts to help the whale leave, she remained below the bridge for several months. As reported by bluelivingideas.com, “She immediately became a tourist attraction and fascination of locals. Yurok tribal leaders viewed the whale’s presence as both a great gift and a sign our world is “out of balance” www.bluelivingideas.com. Finally, due to exhaustion, stress, an incomplete diet, too much time in freshwater—no one really knows, despite a subsequent autopsy—she began to fail and died, after beaching herself on the shore of the river. Thousands who had seen her or heard of her story grieved.

How can the whale be both a gift and a harbinger of environmental catastrophe, as the Yurok believe? Why do we care so much about whales, despite knowing so little?

Whales have existed for millions of years—long before humans—but they have been known to us in their own habitat for only a few generations. We still understand relatively little about them; the first whale was not photographed underwater until 1975. What we do know: all whales fall into two subclasses of cetaceans, the toothed whales (such as orcas, sperm whales, and dolphins) and baleen whales (including grey whales, humpbacks, and blues). Much as land-dwelling predators, toothed whales hunt their prey (fish, eels, seals, penguins, even other whales) one at a time, working alone or in packs. Baleen whales, on the other hand, scoop up vast mouthfuls of seawater, distending their jaws in the process, to strain out tiny particles of plant and animal life (phytoplankton and zooplankton)—the largest animals on earth subsist on a diet of some of the smallest, in other words. Whales have the longest migration of any mammal—up to 8,000 miles. The largest whales are far larger than the largest dinosaurs. Blue whales and finback whales are also the loudest of any animal, able to communicate across thousands of miles. And some kinds of whales may live to be more than 200 years old—but this is partly conjecture, based on the size of whales observed and what is understood about their rate of growth.

You can learn all this and more in The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea, by Philip Hoare. In his investigation of the whale, however, Hoare was motivated as much by the mystery as the history of cetaceans. Not only scientific facts about whales, and whales’ influence on commerce and settlement patterns, but also the mystical associations people have had with whales and their sympathy—or lack thereof—for the giant sea mammals inform Hoare’s commentary. Running through his book is evidence of a lifelong fascination with whales, from early visits to aquariums to repeated readings of Moby Dick that became the inspiration for a pilgrimage to many of the places mentioned in its pages.

“Nothing else represents life on such a scale. Seeing a whale is not like seeing a sparrow in a city tree, or a cat crossing the street. It is not even like seeing a giraffe, dawdling on the African veldt, batting its glamorous eyes in the dust. Whales exist beyond the normal, beyond what we expect to see in our daily lives. They are not so much animal as geographical; if they did not move, it would be difficult to believe they were alive at all. In their size—their very construction—they are antidotes to our lives lived in uncompromising cities.” (Philip Hoare, The Whale, p. 29-30).

Leviathan or, the Whale, the British title to Hoare’s book (maybe the publishers didn’t believe Americans would know what “leviathan” means, even with the helpful second part of the title), was published in 2008. In 2009 it won England’s most prestigious award for nonfiction writing, the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize; the book became available in the United States in early 2010. Calling it “a classic of its kind,” Rachel Cooke wrote in 2008 in The Observer, that the book “cast a spell…begin[ning] as memoir, then mov[ing] deftly through biography, literary criticism, social history, and, finally, nature writing….” www.guardian.co.uk/books. Dozens of other positive reviews have followed, from the NYTimes and the Washington Post to independent booksellers and online readers’ forums.

Why read a book devoted to whales? Why write one? Whales are both ancient and modern, their lives largely unwitnessed though they reside in all oceans of the world. Whether we regard them as graceful or fearsome, without any natural enemy or vulnerable to a host of dangers—whaling, water pollution, sonar and other noise pollution, global warming—they are everywhere and nowhere. When we look for them, what will we find? Once hunted without mercy and harvested in the tens of thousands for their valuable oil, baleen (“whalebone”), and blubber, whales have now come to represent—at least for those of us who constitute the nonindigenous west—a sort of cosy nostalgia for simpler times. Whales occupy the part of memory where we also keep wooden sailing ships and oilskin overcoats. Whales are evoked to lend charm and credibility to products ranging from kitchenware to commercial watercraft to children’s toys. Take, for example, the Playmobil whale boat, a bathtub toy piloted by an androgynous sou’wester-wearing captain, its cargo a cute killer whale. It’s unclear whether the whale in this case is a product or a pet, but the whale, after all, sits right on deck without a holding tank. Though it looks like the two are out for a pleasure cruise, the brutal reality of what whaling really means has long been shielded from popular understanding.

Even a small whale presented a large logistical challenge for a whaler. Some towed their prizes home for processing, while, in the name of efficiency and to maximize the profitability of a single excursion, others stayed at sea and did their dirty business there. And it was a dirty business—a long, dangerous chase followed by carnage, blood, and slippery muck, and then a tedious and smelly process of reducing the mammals to strips of blubber, rendering the flesh for oil. Baleen was salvaged to be heated and molded into consumer goods such as umbrella and corset stays, Venetian blinds, and brushes. Whales could also be harried into shallow bays and inlets and forced to beach themselves, making their bodies more easily available for processing. Some people ate whale meat, but the greatest value was in the oil, which burned cleanly with minimal smoke. Whale bones were frequently turned into abstract monuments to the whalers’ gristly business—fences, arches, even whole buildings made of bone. Some still survive.

Anacortes, Washington
Whale Bone photo by Allison Hart Lengyel

Ironically, the biggest beneficiaries of the murderous business of whaling in North America were the Quakers—otherwise known for their pacifism. The moral opposition to violence apparently did not extend to fellow mammals. Quaker businessmen owned most of the boats, hired the crews, and profited from the processing and sale of whale products, as well as from commercial development that arose to support the whaling industry. At one time, New Bedford, MA was the richest city in North America, due to whaling.

Pressure on whales in the Atlantic, primarily from Basque, American, British, and Scandinavian whalers, pushed them ever north and south, extending the reach of Western whaling boats into the Arctic as well as into the Pacific; the Japanese had also long been whaling in these waters. Western whalers arrived in the Hawaiian Islands at about the same time as Protestant missionaries, in the mid-19th century.

Whales for processing at the Whaling Station, Grays Harbor, WA.
Original Wolfe Photo, inscribed 1912, from the archives of
the Saltwater People Historical Archives©

The hardest part of the book to read is the long middle section devoted to whaling. We shake our heads at our benighted ancestors who seemed to have no compassion for whales, who were heedless of the rapidly diminishing numbers, other than noticing how scarcity led to longer excursions and lower catch rates. But there is hope after all this. Hoare wraps up his book with an examination of scientific efforts to learn more about whales as well as to save various whale species from extinction.

Commercial whaling continued throughout the west until the International Whaling Commission issued a moratorium on whaling in 1986. By the mid-1970s, saving the whales from extinction had become one of the central missions of Greenpeace (founded in 1971, arising from the peace and anti-nuclear movements). International treaties followed, along with an ongoing debate about what constitutes a fair and manageable approach to our relationship with whales. Despite the moratorium, whaling continues throughout the world, by countries including Japan, Norway, Iceland, and Indonesia. Pro-whaling countries cite the importance of whaling from a cultural as well as commercial point of view, and maintain that opposition to whaling is a hypocritical attempt to limit their economic development, among other things. Anti-whaling countries cite environmental concerns, apparent cetacean intelligence, and the value of whale watching (as opposed to killing) to local economies as reasons to extend the moratorium. Are whales a sustainable commodity or an endangered natural resource? Should we be hunting them, watching them, studying them, or just leaving them alone? We are still trying to agree what whales mean.

The above review introduces the writer Allison Hart Lengyel to our log. She's lived in the islands for ten years and sails with her family on the classic John Alden cutter JOHANNA.

✪ ✪ ✪ ENEMIES ON BOARD ✪ ✪ ✪

2011-11-09T18:28:00.000-08:00

Menu from the ADMIRAL ROGERS with Captain Landstrom 1925.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©
click to enlarge.

Steamer SPOKANE , c. 1910
From the Clinton Betz Ship Postcard Collection
Archived in the Saltwater People Historical Society©

ADMIRAL ROGERS (ex- S.S. SPOKANE)
Blind Bay, San Juan County 1947
Photo by Joe Williamson
Original photo from the Saltwater People Historical Society.

Mr. Joe Williamson (1909-1994) was one of the founders and past presidents of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society. An author/historian, mariner, and highly regarded photographer who owned his own photo shop in Seattle from 1937-1962, he built up one of the largest collections of ship photographs in the US. To add to the collection, on 15 April 1947, he chose to fly low over Blind Bay in the San Juan archipelago to photograph the beached passenger liner ADMIRAL ROGERS (ex-Steamship SPOKANE) resting on the mud bottom following a tow to the southern edge of the bay.

The SPOKANE was originally an elegant passenger steamship launched in 1901 in San Francisco, the first designed especially for the Inside Passage trade between Seattle and Alaska. Her dimensions were 281' x 40.1' x 17.3'. She had a triple-expansion steam engine fueled by two coal-burning boilers made by Babcock & Wilcox. The HP was 2,000; listed speed was 15-knots.The SPOKANE came to Seattle in 1902 where she was acclaimed as the "finest ship on the Pacific" in the press reports of her welcome. SPOKANE was lavishly decorated and steamed to Tacoma in May 1903, where President Theodore Roosevelt and his party embarked on a cruise to Seattle, via Bremerton. Four revenue cutters and sixty other vessels escorted them.

More excitement of a different kind was in store for her that fall on her passage south for the winter. SPOKANE picked up an improvised raft with four survivors aboard who nineteen hours before, had been wrecked on Blanco Reef when the steamer SOUTH PORTLAND went down. In 1907 she continued running north up the Inside Passage with one good season and then striking a rock in Seymour Narrows. In 1912 she underwent major repairs and now looking more graceful, was back sailing with comfortable staterooms and wide berths.

WW I had not meant much to the navigators of the Inside Passage. But SPOKANE got a good taste of it in November 1917; whilst southbound from SE Alaska she struck rocks on the BC coast. It was reported that three enemy aliens had stowed away and fraternized with the crew. When the trio saw their chance they deliberately ran the steamer ashore. The two Germans and one Austrian were arrested when the crew arrived back in Seattle. She was reported repaired yet again and was used for transporting supplies for salmon canneries.

In 1922 the veteran liner was renamed ADMIRAL ROGERS; two years later she came to the rescue of the city of Ketchikan, when she came in close to shore to aid in controlling the flaming buildings along the waterfront. The heroic action lasted two hours with the crew credited with saving the city from destruction. Captain Frank Landstrom and crew were honored with a bronze plaque in appreciation of their assistance.

ADMIRAL ROGERS enjoyed more cruising before she was taken over by the University of Oregon for a floating college.

She spent time laying rather idle and forgotten on Seattle's Lake Union--fourteen years later in July 1946 part time Shaw Islanders--Hal Salvesen and M. Haines purchased her with plans to convert her into a floating resort-hotel. A brief passage in H.W. McCurdy's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, Gordon Newell (Superior 1966) states that this grand dream of the Haines/Salvesen team came true but there are residents to this day who drove daily to the dock for mail but don't remember a chance to stop for a tot of rum with the ADMIRAL.

On the high tide at 2230, 27 April 1948, locals could hear the tug straining to pull the ADMIRAL from the muddy bottom of Blind Bay. She sailed in the dark, under tow to the scrap yard down sound. Circa twenty-two years later when the Shaw Island Historical Museum was launched a Williamson print of the old liner and her wooden wheel were two of the first pieces donated to begin the small, island artifact collection. Rather fitting for the wheel to jump-ship at the vessel's last port of call. No chance for a dance, but she left her heart on Shaw.

Lloyd M. Stadum wrote a piece about the Steamship ADMIRAL ROGERS (ex-SPOKANE) for the quarterly journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, The Sea Chest, December 1981.

"CAPI" BLANCHET OF ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ The Curve of Time

2011-10-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

Of the hundreds of books about sailing and cruising along the Pacific Coast of BC--one of the most enduring bestsellers has been The Curve of Time by M.Wylie Blanchet (1891-1961). It hovers perpetually on or near the list of the ten best-selling non-fiction books in BC. It's a memoir of the Blanchet family's adventures in the 1930s and 1940s condensed as if they were from one extended voyage.
Here is a lovely tribute(abridged)about the author's life from Edith Iglauer Daly, author of Fishing with John, Harbour Publishing (see website below).
This is a good example of the lengthy logs on this site but we have good readership so enjoy or we shall see-you-later.

"When I came to live on the BC coast I was given as a sort of spiritual introduction, a remarkable little volume entitled The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet. The book was an appropriate choice, my summers were spent on a fishing boat, the MOREKELP, with my husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, and the area he regularly traversed partly followed the path travelled by Mrs. Blanchet and her five children on their tiny motor launch, the CAPRICE.

The five Blanchet youngsters, led by their indominitable parent, spent four summer months for fifteen years-- on a 25' boat, travelling around the west coast of Vancouver Island and as far north up the Inside Passage as Cape Caution. They explored the inlets and bays, sometimes following the trail broken by that mariner Captain George Vancouver, with whom they felt a great empathy; their experiences finally written down in a series of sketches that encompassed all the years of their journeys as if they were one.

The Curve of Time is M. Wylie Blanchet's only book, originally published in 1961 when she was 70-yrs old. That same year she died of a heart attack, sitting at her desk where she was found slumped over her typewriter. She had lived just long enough to enjoy being a published author.

M. Wylie Blanchet. At first, she tried using just 'M. Wylie.' M was for Muriel, the author's given name, which she hated; Wylie was borrowed from a grandparent; and Blanchet was acquired by marriage. Altogether it was the impersonal sound that she intended: she hoped the author would not be recognized by the people up the coast about whom she was writing, who knew her simply as "Capi" Blanchet. As to the nickname-- wasn't she the Captain of the CAPRICE?

In the last chapter of the book, entitled 'Little House,' Mrs. Blanchet comes off the CAPRICE to write about the family's land base on 7 secluded acres of Vancouver Island's coast, from which they departed each June and to which they returned in October. The Curve of Time manages to be sentimental, imaginative, and often strays into whimsy, but it is reticent about the hard facts; it reads like an impressionist painting. Its characters, whose physical appearances are never really described. We know what they do and how they feel but not what they look like or who they are other than a mother and 5 children.

Despite the reticence we do know the important things about this remarkable woman. She comes through as extremely courageous, innovative, and as a kind of mechanical wizard compared to most women. Yet readers close her book with a scratchy feeling of curiosity.

Her Canadian publisher Gray Campbell, was both neighbour and friend, has described her as having 'a delightful shyness, as a serious person with a delicious, dry, sense of humour.' Campbell first became acquainted with her when the CAPRICE was berthed next to his boat at Canoe Cove, a short distance from the Blanchet house, which was 5-miles from Sidney. He too was writing, and Capi used to sit in the cabin of his boat and read the chapters of his uncompleted manuscript. He has said since that it was the lack of success of the first edition of The Curve of Time, whose English publisher never bothered to see that it was stocked in bookstores either in Victoria or Vancouver, that helped to convince him that there was a need for regional publishing.

Muriel Blanchet was born Muriel Liffiton in 1891 in Lachine, Quebec, into a well-to-do family with High Anglican principles. The Liffitons were English but the Snetsingers, on her mother's side, were pre-Revolution Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley. They crossed the border into Canada during the American Revolution, settling in the St. Lawrence valley with a land grant downstream of the town of Cornwall. Grandfather Snetsinger was a Member of Parliament for the area, and left a considerable inheritance whose final distribution was made only a year ago [c.1979]. The ancestral home is now under sixty feet of St. Lawrence river water and all the original land has been sold.

Muriel was the middle one of three sisters and something of a tomboy. The results of her 4-yr scholastic campaign are still evident in a row of small red leather Temple Volumes of Shakespeare. Each volume was given her as a prize for top honours in a different subject, and she never stopped until she had the whole set, inscribed to Muriel Liffiton in the heavy black script of R. Newton, Rector of St. Paul's, and bearing the motto Non Sans Droit with the school's coat of arms. Between 1905 and 1908 Muriel Liffiton repeatedly captured first prizes in Latin, French, spelling, astronomy, history, geography, geometry (Euclid), algebra and English, beginning with a modest two her first year and winding up with 6 at graduation.

Muriel Liffiton was expected to go on to university but instead at 18 she married Geoffrey Blanchet, the brother of a school friend-- a decision she is said to have regretted later.

Geoffrey and Muriel Blanchet started married life in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The family grew to include four children, they packed them all into a Willys-Knight touring car which, according to one of the children, 'had flapping curtains and a great top that folded like an elephant sitting down,' and started driving across the country looking for an island to live on.

The Blanchets were able to buy 7-acres at Curteis Point, overlooking the Gulf of Georgia, and they kept it until Mrs. B. died in 1961, although Little House was torn down in 1948. It was an unusual house, a strangely mystical English cottage covered with ivy, with a big fireplace and a billiard table on the first floor and four bedrooms up a rickety flight of stairs on the 2nd floor. 'It was designed by a celebrated architect, Sam McLure, and built by a crook,' said David Blanchet, who was born there.

Their boat the CAPRICE was purchased in 1923 for $600. It had been built the year before, a cold year, and the Brentwood Ferry, near which it was anchored, managed to shove a cake of ice into the side of the boat, sinking it. She was hauled out on a nearby dock and the Blanchets bought it on the spot, with water still dribbling out of it. 'This was probably when my mother learned to deal with engines,' David has commented. 'It had to be cleaned out immediately, once it had been in salt water. We had that same engine for 20-years, until it was changed in 1942.'

Peter B. remembers the first time his mother took the CAPRICE out on her own. It was in March, on his sixth birthday, and she had promised to take him to Shell Island, a favourite spot where she liked to say she would spend her 100th-birthday. She and Peter got in the boat, which they kept at Canoe Cove, and 'she cranked and cranked that darned engine, and still it wouldn't start,' Peter recalled. 'She could see my father sitting on the Point watching to see if we would get off and she had to go and get him, which really irked her. Then she and I went fishing for the day off Sidney Spit. We caught a couple of fish which we cooked over a fire on the beach at Shell Island.'

The second summer after the death of Geoffrey, Mrs. B rented Little House and took the children off on the boat for the first of the venturesome trips that as a composite memory became the substance of The Curve of Time. With the money she received from renting Clovelly in summer and her own small income, she was able to manage.

The three younger children, Joan, Peter, and David, were educated almost entirely at home, by correspondence, by their mother, and by a Scottish engineer who was a mechanic at the Canoe Cove boat works, who taught them math, chemistry, and physics. Joan, known as the rebellious member of the family, went to art school in Vancouver and then continued her art studies in New York. When she left Vancouver, she bought an old Indian dugout canoe for five dollars and paddled home. It took her five days, and she crossed the Gulf of Georgia at night, to avoid traffic and heavy seas, a remarkable feat since it required at least nine hours of steady paddling. Frances King vividly recalled hearing about her sister's arrival. 'When she rounded the point in her dugout, wearing an old red sweater, Capi and the boys were sitting on the bluff, wondering who the Indian was! Joan had expected some commendation, and was amazed at Capi's anger. 'Just because I'm a fool doesn't mean you children have to be!' Capi said.

In appearance, Capi Blanchet was of medium height, with very fine blonde hair brushed upwards so that it formed a kind of haze around her head. Her normal attire was a pair of khaki shirts, an Indian sweater, and sneakers that sometimes had holes in the toes. She had begun wearing shorts in the 1920s, long before they were fashionable, and her daughter Elisabeth has recalled that a journalist writing about people he had met on the BC coast in The Saturday Evening Post 'commented on her shorts and how suitable they seemed for what she was doing-- running a boat.'

Mrs. B's children and friends were enormously fond of her, somewhat in awe of her all-around competence, and thought her fair-minded but domineering. She could do almost anything that men did, and still be feminine.

'She had a lot of courage or self-confidence, but she did not over estimate her mechanical ability,' a writer friend, Hubert Evans, has said. "On a run from Sidney to Vancouver, the CAPRICE was overtaken in the Gulf by a late season southeaster, and the little boat took quite a dusting,' he related. 'Capi had several children aboard. 'I told the Lord I could take care of the boat but would he please keep the engine running,' she said to me afterwards.'

Capi Blanchet does not seem to have been particularly light-hearted or spontaneous, and she was somewhat arrogant about anyone she considered her inferior. She had a slightly Church-of-England attitude, even talking to fishermen, who were never sure how to take her. She had a good sense of humour but a rather studied laugh.

A description from her daughter Frances exemplifies the quality of character her children and friends remember best: 'she was capable of handling any situation. If she was worried she didn't let us know.'

On the boat Mrs. B was even-tempered under what must often have been trying conditions at such close quarters; her method of discipline was to separate her children, not argue. David remembered his mother losing her temper with him only once, when he was about twelve. 'It was some silly mistake, something about an anchor, that I did my way instead of what she wanted,' he said. 'Normally her eyes were brown, but suddenly they were a turquoise colour and blazing. It was unbelievable!'

She was one of those rare women who are mechanically inclined, and enjoyed tinkering with engines and working with tools. Every so often she took apart the CAPRICE engine, a 4-cylinder Kermath, cleaned and painted it and put it back together again, grinding the valves herself.

An intimate friend of Mrs. Blanchet's, Kathleen Caldwell, has described her as 'not excessively domestic, but interested in people and politics, which she loved to discuss. Her house was comfortable and pleasant, and Capi could produce a beautiful meal with what looked like no effort.' In their close circle Capi was renowned for her roast beef, yorkshire pudding and mouth-watering pastry. Oddly enough, although she liked to eat fish, she never cooked it except outdoors on a beach because she couldn't stand the smell.

Mrs. B liked to draw sea creatures in pen and ink, and once illustrated a fairy story she wrote with drawings in the margin. She was also a fair pianist, and in later life enjoyed playing a violin that her grandfather gave her when she was 12. It now hands on the wall of David's living room, but his mother used it often; she had joined a small orchestra at Deep Cove, playing second violin, reputedly a quarter-tone flat.

David fell ill before the interior of Mrs. B's new house was completed and it never seemed to advance beyond that half-built stage. She lined the whole interior with vertical cedar planks herself, but doors were a late addition to the bathroom and kitchen and knobs usually came off in hand. Her firewood was never quite dry; Kathleen Caldwell once delighted her by bringing a gift of Presto logs. When Capi's doctor prescribed a drier climate for a cough that later developed into emphysema she ignored him and instead sat with her head as far into her oil stove as she could get it for 20-minutes a day. 'That's my high, dry climate,' she said.

As for the CAPRICE, it was never meant to have any other owner than Capi B. After the war she planned to build a new boat and sold the CAPRICE for $700 -- a hundred more than she had paid for it--to the owner of a boat works in Victoria, who hauled it up for repairs. While it was on the ways the entire boat works burned down, including the CAPRICE. Mrs. Blanchet did have another boat after that, the SCYLLA, but she never really used it.

'I loved the summer journeys but I doubt if any of us appreciated quite how unique our childhood was. We just knew Capi was doing something unusual,' daughter Elisabeth writes from England. 'She used to get a bit tense if we were taking green water over the bow, wallowing about in a following sea, or running the Yaculta Rapids. Otherwise she took everything in her stride-- whether crossing the Straits at 4 am to beat the sou'wester or exploring new territory.'

'Only fools seek adventures,' David has remembered his mother as saying at one time or another. However foolish Mrs. B's adventures may have seemed to her (which is doubtful), they have a dreamlike charm for an increasing number of readers. The Curve of Time has had a separate and ongoing life of its own, achieving its own small immortality."

Thank you to author Edith Iglauer Daly

Raincoast Chronicles Six/Ten, 1983
Courtesy of Harbour Publishing
www.harbourpublishing.com
The Curve of Time, Fishing with John, and Raincoast Chronicles (Six/Ten) are archived
in the maritime library of Saltwater People Historical Society.

✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ STERLING HAYDEN ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ Wandering Windship Man

2011-10-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

RUDDER
November 1968
By Hoyt Barnett

Sterling Hayden
Hal Painter, Photographer.

"Sterling Hayden has made his choice. Political activism, like his arrest early this year at a draft protest, is behind him. Eight years of writing and watching San Francisco Bay from the Sausalito hills have taught him what he is: ' A windjammer man, a wandering windship man, and that's what I'll be until the day I die.' He's decided that the sea, and all the sea brings to a man, will have to come first.
The big (6-ft.5 in.), craggy man is prematurely gray, perhaps from the times he's left the sea for what he calls 'the world of social struggle.' The last time was in 1960, when he sold his 96-ft, 100-ton schooner, WANDERER, and took a home in Sausalito.
'It's a sailing man's port,' he says, not a good harbor for a man who wants to keep the hook set. So his friends were not surprised when he left for Spain this past summer, to act in a film he knows nothing about in order to 'get bread to buy a boat.'
When Hayden gets his boat, she'll be a schooner, the eighth tall-masted split-rig he's owned. He doesn't count sloops or 'small stuff like Tahiti ketches.'
'I've had seven beauties,' he said, sitting in the 1890 railway car he uses as an office, 'and twice I owned WANDERER. If I had those seven beauties now, I'd anchor them in a row so I could see them every morning--lined up like a harem.'
Some no one will see again. WANDERER was lost in the Pacific after Hayden sold her to Oklahoma engineer Joe Price. Gone, too, is his first real ship, the 161-ft ALDEBARAN, once the yacht of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm.
Others are almost painfully in evidence: from his railroad car Hayden often sees the OSCAR TYBRING, one of two 45-ft. Norwegian life-saving ketches he has owned. He doesn't recall when he bought and sold the TYBRING, but he wishes he'd kept her.
'I bought her for $2,300, did some work on her and sold her. Now she's on the market for $24,000. I loved her so much I never changed the name she carried 73 years.'
Hayden hesitates to single out the vessel he liked best.
'I loved 'em all,' he said, 'and all for different reasons. If I had to make a choice I'd go with the schooner I bought in Maine and renamed BRIGADOON. She was a husky 50-foot designed by that grand old sailor Mr. L. Francis Herreshoff. She did everything I ever asked of her --a real windship.'
Hayden doesn't know precisely when he decided to return to the sea. He believes the decision slowly formed as he took his daily hikes in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay.
'Sometimes I'd go see 300 or more little plastic boats darting aimlessly about,' he said. 'Their presence is floating television, like an image on a mirror held up to our society. And you and I both know our society is 90 percent crap.
Now and then I'd see a gaff. When I do, I break out my binoculars and take a good look at a sailor. When I see a ship like that I want to get aboard a husky schooner and shove off westward, to the equatorial precincts of the Pacific. That's the proper place for a man to ponder life and liberty and the question of vindication.
The windship man started life as Sterling Walter on 26 March 1916 in Upper Montclair, N.J. His father died when Sterling was nine.
One of the family's frequent moves was to Maine's Boothbay Harbor, where Sterling, 13, first smelled the sea. After that, nothing was the same for him. For most of a year young Hayden poked about the harbor in his dory, getting to know the fishing schooners and the derelicts, and dreaming of sailing to some far-away harbor where there would be no bill collectors or landlords demanding rent.
It was also in Boothbay that young Hayden discovered libraries. From then until today he has had little formal education. But he has read voraciously, particularly of the sea; Melville, Conrad, London, Dana. Two landlocked authors also helped shape his philosophy. The first was Rockwell Kent, specifically Kent's N x E. The other was Thoreau, and Hayden quotes him still, particularly the line, 'Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.'
Hayden stepped to his own music in the winter of 1933, and rode a freight train to New London, CT to spend his 17th birthday in the foc'sle of the fishing schooner PURITAN, bound for San Pedro, CA and a new owner.
Paid off in Pedro with four $10 bills, he beat his way East on freight trains, finding his family in Boston, and, for the moment, affluent. In Boston he decided to become a writer, and enrolled in night school courses in short story writing, typing, and French. The French, he says, 'was to make me couth.'
But the Hayden family's good fortune melted with the spring thaws, and a hotel manager seized the family's possessions. 'Daddy Jim' Hayden went out for cigarettes and never came back.
Sterling and his mother had two one-doller bills, enough for bus fare to Gloucester. There Sterling called on Captain 'Old Ben' Pine, a gentle sailor who owned Atlantic Supply Co. and the schooner GERTRUDE L. THEBAUD. Capt. Pine lent Hayden $50 and gave him a letter that got him a job on the beam trawler MAINE, first of several trawlers he worked on the Western Banks.
After a year on the trawlers, Hayden moved ashore again. A Christmas season job in Filene's, a Boston department store, however, persuaded him that landsmen were 'no damn good,' and back he went to sea. That winter he saved his money and when he signed off in April he bought a 30-ft sloop and moved aboard. He named her HORIZON, and she was a rotting, leaking 'slab.' But she couldn't have been as bad as Hayden describes her now. Even in the 30s a $400 sloop couldn't have leaked 'so fast I had to sleep with my arm hanging over the side of the bunk so the rising water would awaken me and drive me to the pumps.'
Better times were coming, Hayden quickly sold HORIZON and signed aboard Capt. Irving Johnson's big, white-hulled, North Sea pilotboat YANKEE for two years in the round-the-world tourist trade. He returned, a season sailor, to navigate the GERTRUDE L THEBAUD in her now-famous series of races with the Canadian 'salt-banker' BLUENOSE. THEBAUD lost the series, but Hayden's work was beyond reproach, and it won him, at age 22, his first skipper's berth, delivering the 89-ft barkentine FLORENCE C. ROBINSON to a copra trader in Tahiti.
'A hurricane caught us off Hatteras on our way to Panama,' he remembers.. 'We were laying-to, wheel lashed, for maybe fifty hours. It was there I learned what every sailor must learn: there comes a time when you must let the ship take care of you.'
After they made the Canal, winds were fair and the crew--the oldest was only 30--wanted to do some sight-seeing along the way. But Hayden, impelled by an urge he still cannot explain, drove his ship and crew to an 86-day passage over the 7,000 miles to Tahiti.
'That, was a mistake--driving through to Papeete. All it got me was a ride home on a Danish freighter that put me into New York in mid-winter, short of money and looking for a job. It may be the story of my life.'
The days he enjoyed at sea were different: indolent, contemplative days,

Sch. WANDERER (ex-GRACIE S.) when owned by the Kennell family
of Seattle, WA.
Photo courtesy of John Kennell.

like the run to Tahiti aboard WANDERER when, some seven degrees north of the line the wind failed.
When Hayden returned to New York after delivering the brigantine to Tahiti, he had publicity from the THEBAUD-BLUENOSE races going for him--but no cash. A promoter helped him get ALDEBARAN, Kaiser Wilhelms's old yacht, but a storm battered her to a pulp, and he was back in Boston, broke.
It was then that an artist friend, Larry O'Toole, arranged for a screen test in New York which got Hayden a job with Paramount, and eventually led to over 40 pictures, most of them pretty bad. A boatless Hayden was working in Hollywood in 1941 when he saw the big Glousesterman schooner ORETHA F. SPINNEY. He needed a boat as much as he needed a dent in his profile, but he cajoled Paramount into buying her for $18,500 from MGM, who had bought her to film Captains Courageous. Hayden paid half, and later his wife, Madeleine Carroll, bailed out the rest. A year later, with the country at war, he freelanced his own war effort by loading SPINNEY with 125-tons of general cargo, a deck load of 15-tons of hardware, and sailing for Curacao.
He lost the deck cargo in a squall, but reached port where 'misunderstanding' briefly jailed him, so he sold the vessel and returned to the US. Back home, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, and went from boot camp to officer candidate school, and finally to the OSS, father of today's CIA.
As one of the few Marine Corps officers in Europe, he organized a schooner fleet to move supplies from Italy through the German blockade to partisan forces in Yugoslavia. The operation won him a Silver Star.
Back in the US after the war, he became aware of his obligation to the 'world of social struggle.' One dull morning late in 1946, he borrowed an ice-pick and hammer, surveyed the 65-ft schooner-yacht WETONA, bought her for $14,000 cash, and changed her name to QUEST. In the afternoon he joined the Communist party.
'She was the only yacht I ever messed with. Six months later I sold her for $17,000, and quit the Communist Party. I got rid of the vessel because I don't like yachts--nor yachtsmen who play with their little ships and call it cruising. And I quite the Communist party because I'd rather be wrong on my own than right on somebody's else's say-so.'
Hayden the social critic is only slightly different from Hayden the windship man. When he started his novel two years ago he looked for a place to work where he wouldn't be distracted by 'a houseful of kids.' His first thought was a railway caboose.
'There's something complete and self-contained about a caboose. Like a ship, only cheaper. About $600, but I couldn't find one.
Then the CB&Q railroad in Chicago offered me an executive car built in 1890. The price is a secret between me and CB&Q. The date of the car's origin struck me as significant--only six years prior to the year (1896) my novel deals with.'
An executive car is about the size of the private railway cars built for the tycoons of that era, but less ornate, more functional. The one Hayden bought has an oil-burning heating system, a brass bed secured to the bulkheads of the master stateroom, two smaller staterooms, something railroaders call a 'Kitchen' and a spacious office area aft.
Hayden arranged to have his car towed to Sausalito behind a freight train. He calls it 'the best land voyage I've ever made.' He also arranged to park the car on a Sausalito railroad spur hidden by a building and an embankment, giving him almost complete privacy, but with a view of San Francisco Bay and the rotting GALILEE, a dismasted bark killed off the Australian trade in her prime by the coming of steam.
The workroom reflects Hayden's character--his things are sturdy and old, like the teapot he uses to brew tea so strong a mouse could walk on it. One of his two typewriters, an ancient Underwood, is reminiscent of clicking telegraph keys. The other is a modern machine on a desk so high the big man can stand before it as he works.
'I'd rather sit, but my war-time back (he was hurt in a parachute jump) bothers me if I sit for any length of time.'
And there he looked at the bay and worked for two years on his novel. It deals with the social and moral revolution he sees attuned to 1896, the year of Bryan, silver, and social evolution. That was a year, too, of windjammer men, wandering windship men. It may have been a very significant year.
Hayden thinks so."

The Coast Guard's Most Famous Vessel

2011-10-12T11:30:00.000-07:00

From the deck of the BEAR looking to sea.
Undated, original photo
from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

The Cutter BEAR

by R. H. (Skipper) Calkins

"From the time I began my career as a waterfront newsman, the historic old cutter BEAR, Uncle Sam's most widely known mercy ship in Alaskan waters, fascinated me. Perhaps it was her barkentine rig which gave her an appearance unlike any of her fleet mates, and her glamourous service as an Arctic whaler, before she was purchased by the US government. For years she was pay dirt as I panned the waterfront in quest for news and feature stories, some concerning the fabulous gold strikes of the Klondyke.
At that time, my rival on the marine beat was a stocky fellow with an English accent who had reached our shores from Australia. He was a pompous individual, a two-fisted drinking man, who made the bar of the old Rainier-Grand Hotel, where many waterfronters gathered, his often-frequented club.
I had bumped the fellow from down-under with a story concerning the purchase of a ship by the Pacific Alaska Navigation Co., and was told he was gunning for me.
One day I picked up the rival sheet and read under screaming headlines what purported to be a story of the rescue of a freighter afire at sea, by the "famed" cutter BEAR. Such extravagant expressions as "a blazing torch", "blistered decks", and "seafaring men periled" were used.
When the BEAR reached Seattle, I was the first man aboard. I questioned every one from the captain to the cook and discovered that my rival on the marine beat had not allowed the lack of facts to spoil a good story. The freighter "rescued" had a bunker fire, the BEAR was nearby and convoyed her to Dutch Harbor where she discharged part of her bunker supplies, reloaded, and proceeded.
However, from that time on, I never missed a sailing or arrival of the BEAR. I made friends of the officers and crew and praised the service of this old mercy ship.
The Seattle waterfront long will remember the historic old cutter BEAR, which ranks as the Coast Guard's most famous vessel. Retired by the government under the stigma that she was too old and too slow, the BEAR was converted into a motorship for her part in the second Byrd Antarctic Expedition.

Original postcard from Byrd's Antarctic expedition on BEAR.
Saltwater People Historical Society archives. ©

The stout little barkentine-rigged wooden-hull vessel had her steam engines removed and replaced at Boston by a six-cylinder 600-HP Diesel. The tall stack from which black smoke billowed as she arrived off the Arctic coast of Alaska, giving her the name of "big smoke ship" among the Eskimos, was removed. A power plant which saved valuable space, due to the smaller fuel supply needed, was installed in the BEAR, one of the world's oldest vessels.

During her long service in the Bering Sea and the Arctic, the BEAR was driven by a two-cylinder compound steam engine. Until 1912 she was navigated by a two-blade propeller, installed by her builders 38-years before.

The BEAR's 'black gang' experienced plenty of grief when the old cutter sailed from Seattle each spring bound for Point Barrow and the little settlements near the top of the world.

The coal-fired steam plant required 392 tons of fuel, part of which was stored on the vessel's deck. With her steam engine going at fullspeed, the old BEAR was able to log about nine knots. Under canvas alone, which she carried for her barkentine rig, the vessel, in a spanking breeze, could make about eight knots.

I remember seeing the old BEAR each fall after her annual cruise to the Arctic. We were welcomed aboard by the genial skipper, a heavy-set bespectacled man, who took us to the officers' quarters. Here, seated at a table drinking steaming hot coffee and eating rolls, we received the news of the long Arctic cruise. Captain Cochran usually called for the log book in order to give newsmen details of rescues and assistance rendered the natives of the far-flung Arctic coast. After the interview was over, the captain would present trinkets of ivory made by the Eskimos.

The BEAR was built in Greenock, Scotland in 1874 for the Arctic whaling industry. In 1884 she was purchased by the US and assigned to the Navy for service in the Greely Relief Expedition. In 1885 she was transferred to the US Revenue Cutter Service for duty in the Bering Sea and performed this service until her replacement in 1928 by the Diesel-powered cutter NORTHLAND.

The BEAR earned more fame in the Arctic than any other vessel. To the natives she meant law, order, civilization, and justice. The big 'smoke ship' to the Eskimos was a symbol of power of the white man.

Although the BEAR spent her winters at a wharf in Oakland, she was sent to isolated little settlements along the northern coast; she usually began her annual cruises in Seattle.

Cutter BEAR, port of Seattle, WA.
Undated photograph by James A. Turner
Collection of the Saltwater People Historical Society©
Click to enlarge.

The BEAR called in Elliott Bay on her way to the Far North to take aboard stores and embark government employees. Sometimes she carried a famous scientist who was enroute to isolated districts of Alaska to study glacier formations or the origin of the ancient tribes which first settled the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain.
Famed for her cruises in Arctic seas as a mercy ship and to Little America with personnel of the Byrd Polar Expedition, the historic old Coast Guard cutter BEAR, last was reported carrying Jewish immigrants from the Mediterranean to Israel."
From: High Tide
The Big Stories of Seattle's Waterfront
Marine Digest Publishing Co., Inc.
1952

BOATS WE KNEW ✪ ✪ ✪ Bristol Bay Boat WHISKER

2011-10-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

WHISKER
Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, WA.
“John Dickinson’s 29-foot Bristol Bay sailboat started taking on water when he launched it in the spring of 1978, and that meant a big job to be done that summer.
The boat was then at least 50-years old, but it had never leaked before—and wouldn’t have then, he’s certain, except that he had stored it out of the water for three winters running. He won’t do that again, he vows.
The planks of a wooden boat will shrink when they dry out, and thus the seams will open; but if the owner is lucky the planks will swell and the seams will close when the boat is re-launched.
John wasn’t so lucky, and he had to re-caulk (pronounced “re-cork”) the seams—all 430 linear feet of them. He finally hired an expert, Tim Eslick, to help, and got the job done in about two months. First John pulled out the old caulking cotton (think cotton “yarn”) with a hooked tool called a reefer. Then Tim put fresh caulking cotton in with a caulking iron and caulking mallet. And then John put in black seam compound with a putty knife before painting her bottom and putting the boat back in the water.
Bristol Bays are sturdy, seaworthy boats built for fishing under sail in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, starting perhaps around 1880. In 1952 the state allowed power boats in the fishery, and although fish caught from sailboats brought one-cent a pound more than those fish from power boats; that was the beginning of the end for the sailing fleet.
There are still good, solid ‘Bristol Bays’ stored in rotting warehouses in Alaska, John says, and a lot of people would like to have one. But it’s such a problem getting them out, that most people eventually give up.
John and his wife, Edie, bought their boat from Camp Orkila on Orcas in 1963 and sailed it home to San Juan. Their daughter, Elizabeth, then 3-years old, named it WHISKER, because it 'whisks through the water.' (Camp Orkila had been given a number of Bristol Bays by Alaska Packers Assoc. in Blaine.)
There might be a dozen Bristol Bays in the county now [1983], John guesses, some sailboats and some converted to power. They're popular because of their good sea qualities, their lovely lines, and their still reasonable price."
By John and Louise Dustrude
San Juan Almanac 1983
Longhouse Printcrafters,
Friday Harbor, WA.

✪ ✪ ✪ CAPTAIN BARNEY JOHNSON ✪ ✪ ✪ TAKES YACHT TO SEATTLE, WA., 22 June 1937

2011-10-08T13:10:00.001-07:00

WESTWARD HO near the youth camp of the same name, Orcas Island, WA.
Photo image courtesy of Nick Exton, West Sound, WA.
Photographer and date unknown.

At approximately 8:30 this morning, in the swirling narrows and under an overcast sky, Captain Barney Johnston, popular skipper of the WESTWARD HO, dipped his ensign and officially said goodbye for his WESTWARD HO to the Royal Vancouver Yacht club.

Ushered out by Tom Ramsey's ARMITA, carrying Skipper Ramsay, Art Jefferd, and Fred Holland, the WESTWARD HO, under power, circled around in the swirling tide, while the representatives on the ARMITA gave three hasty cheers and blew loudly on a foghorn.

The WESTWARD HO has been sold to a girls' school outside of Seattle. Johnson was delivering her this morning. She was built in Vancouver and has been the property of Barney Johnson for the past eight years during which time she has been the commodore's ship on two occasions.

She has always been regarded as the Royal Vancouver yacht club's number one sailing vessel, sort of one of the pillars of the sailing craft.

'She's a beautiful boat,' sadly murmured Johnston. 'I'll hate to lose her. But I have made up my mind. Come on, boys, have another drink with the sun, you have to have a mizzen now you have your topsail set. Can't sail on one wing, you know.'

Another toast, a few hearty choruses of 'Blow the Man Down,' and the WESTWARD HO was on her way.

Over the weekend she sailed her last race, the Ballenas Islands race for the Beaver Cup, and was an easy win.

'We really sailed her on her last race,' said Barney. 'I'll hate to see her go... but maybe we can get her up here for the ladies' race with some of the girls handling her.'

According to reports Barney Johnson will not be off the sea. The famous old salt plans to get a small boat and do some racing."

Hal Straight
The Vancouver Sun

Tuesday 22 June 1937.

From the archives of the

Saltwater People Historical Society

Below notes from Miles McCoy, West Sound, Orcas Island.
McCoy was the skipper of WESTWARD HO in the summer of 1950 when he was 19-years old. The West Sound sailing scene hooked him on settling in the area.

"The yawl WESTWARD HO was associated with Four Winds-Westward Ho Camps from the late 1930s through the mid 1950s. The camp being named after the vessel; Westward-Ho camp became the boy's camp when Four Winds-Westward Ho became co-ed. The yawl served the camps for many years longer than any other vessel. Hundreds of children sailed and sang camp songs aboard while learning the ropes and the ways of the sea. After WW II ended, Jack and Bill Helsell prepared WESTWARD HO for the 1949 Trans Pacific Yacht Race. The race was a windy one with above average winds over a majority of the course. [Miles McCoy was crewing.]
While in Hawaii WESTWARD HO was met and sailed by a bevy of senior campers from Four Winds. They sailed several day sails in Molokai channel and learned about sailing in brisk conditions.
Later in August after a pleasant voyage from Hawaii to the coast, WESTWARD HO arrived at the Orcas Island camp to a jolly welcome by some of the Hawaii contingent and camp staff. There was much music, singing, and regaling of sea stories.
WESTWARD HO sailed for the camps for several more years before being sold in the early to mid 1950s to sail off to Hawaii and points south. She has not been spotted in the Pacific Northwest since."

SHAW ISLAND CLASSIC SAIL RACE ✪✪✪✪ Clips from the Past 40 years

2011-09-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

1978

Lee Brewer's Schooner RAIN BIRD and KLICKITAT, 1978.

Preparing to start the Shaw Island Classic Sail Race in Friday Harbor.

On the right is the local freight boat NORDLAND, owned by Albert Jones.

Original photo from the files of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

1989

Catboat SHARON L. owned and sailed by
Miles and Louellen McCoy, West Sound, Orcas Island.

"Sail spanned the entrance to Fridy Harbor as 113 sailboats crowded near the starting line of the 1989 Shaw Island Classic.

Heavy morning fogs, and light mid-day winds may have been a factor in keeping the number of participants so low, for the annual event that some years attracts over 150 competitors.

In fact, the wind itself almost didn't show up for the start of the race, with only a few of the boats making it out of the harbor i the opening half house of the race.

"It took us an hour and 20 minutes to cross the starting line,"Louellen McCoy said. "That was when we were thinking about calling it quits."

Eventually, however, Louellen and her husband Miles, sailing their 1933 catboat SHARON L, were glad they stayed in the race, finishing first in their category of classic sailboats.

Stan Miller, also from Orcas, won first place in the classic cruiser/racers.

Of all participants sailing this year, one name stands out: Bentzen. This sailing San Juan Island family dominated the day, with two firsts and two thirds.

In his Hobie 21, VELOCITY, Dan Bentzen was the first boat to cross the finish line this year, in just over 4 hours.

Dan's father, John Bentzen, was the first of the racing class to finish, in his Etchell 22, THOR."

Report by Tom Hook for the Journal.
August 1989

2010

TIR NA NOG

LOCAL BOAT WINS SHAW CLASSIC

Sole finisher and WINNER of the 40th Shaw Island Classic, 7 August 2010.
L-R Back: Kirk Fraser, Marlin Sevy, Steve Hendricks.
L-R Front: Bill Fraser, Joanne Fraser, Liz Sevy
The race was marred by rain, backward winds, and negative currents.
This crew toughed it out!
Photo contributed by Marc Forlenza for the Journal of the San Juans

By FRED HOEPPNER

 Journal of the San Juans
12  August 2010

The 40th Shaw Island Classic hosted by the San Juan Island Yacht Club on Aug. 7 had the potential of being one of the most challenging in the event’s history, with forecasted winds of 17 knots and a nearly 10-foot tidal range creating a flooding current of over 2 knots at Reid Rock.

However, with no wind developing, the fleet was basically hove to. A rumble could be heard as far up town as Vic’s as the skippers alternately cursed Thor or pleaded for wind. Of 68 starters, only one boat technically finished the race. Bill Fraser in TIR NA NOG out of Shaw Island got the checkered flag.

The Shaw Island Classic is unique in that there is no fixed course. The Sailing Instructions are quite simple: Start from Friday Harbor, around Shaw Island either way, and back to Friday Harbor. Shaw Island is the only mark and the Sailing Instructions caution against hitting it. If one does hit the island a 360-penalty turn is not required.

The mass start of 60-70 boats of past years was modified this year by SJIYC Fleet Captain Peg Gerlock to provide a start for slower boats followed 15 minutes later by the faster boats. This lessened the near collisions of former years as the boats merged for the start in usually light wind conditions. The paperwork consisting of the Notice of Race and Entry and the Sailing Instructions were very good with an added touch of humor.

The weather however was a disappointment. Some boats did not get more than a couple of hundred yards from the start. Most with local knowledge chose to go counterclockwise, figuring on riding the counter current on the north side of Turn Island and then catch some breeze coming up San Juan Channel to take them to Upright Channel. Most of those boats hit the flood off Turn Rock — and that was all she wrote.

Bill Fraser, the winner, said, “I could see early on that this would be a mid-course race.” (Race Instructions provided that if no boat completed the course by 1800, finishes would be taken at mid-course, at 1700). He could see the trouble others were having with the light wind going counterclockwise, so he decided to go clockwise with the flood current and take his chances bucking the current in Wasp Passage. Fraser crossed the midpoint line at 1644, just 16 minutes before the time limit.

Friday Harbor Cannery was Swift SUCCESS

2011-09-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

Recollections by Captain William P. Thornton to the Friday Harbor Journal, June 1958.

KATY THOMAS built on Waldron Island in 1894.
From the Anacortes Museum collection. Date of photo unknown.

"I'm taking you back 60 years when I was a boy in Friday Harbor.
My brother-in-law, Ashton Thomas, was the Sheriff of San Juan County, at that time. He was also owner of the Bay View Hotel, as it was called then, and I was helping him. Sheriff Thomas and his two brothers had a little tract of land on Waldron Island and they were building a boat. I'll say at that time that San Juan County and the entire US was in the grip of a great depression. There was no employment for anybody. The wages for young men were about $20 a month; a girl could get $2 a week if she could find a job. However, San Juan County was rich with fertile lands and large herds of stock, but there was no call to raise much of anything, for there was no sale.
Around the first part of April 1894, one beautiful afternoon a new sailing boat came sailing around Carter Point with brand new sails and fresh paint. This was the little vessel the Thomas boys were building. It wasn't long until she sailed up close to the dock, then it was necessary to get their oars to assist them in getting to the position they desired. There were no gas or steam engines in those days for smaller boats.
She landed at Sweeney's dock and it wasn't long before Thomas was aboard and talking to his two brothers regarding their trip down. For the next two days Sheriff Thomas was very busy in taking his friends aboard the new sloop named after my sister, KATY THOMAS. After taking some of his friends for a number of short sailing trips out into San Juan Channel and then on a Sunday afternoon Sheriff Thomas, his two brothers, and three other men with him left Friday Harbor for a trip to Port Townsend to get her measured for register. They went on down through San Juan Channel and through San Juan Pass and then off into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and across, arriving in Pt. T. about 5:30 on a Monday morning.

Steamer LYDIA THOMPSON, b. 1893 by Enos Raymond, Pt. Angeles for Thompson Steamboat Co. She ran Seattle/Bellingham via the San Juan Islands 3 times/week. Captain W. B. Thompson was the master when she went on the rocks near Orcas Island in 1898. No loss of life; the crew camped on shore before the LYDIA was floated free and towed to Seattle for repairs. She went back in service for many years of uneventful sailing on local runs.

About that time the steamer LYDIA THOMPSON was just arriving from a trip through the San Juan Islands at six o'clock. The LYDIA landed a little ahead of the new little sailing vessel, and as Thomas' boat was coming alongside, three men came running over and were not long in getting into conversation with the Sheriff. Those three men were looking for a fishing place to start a cannery. In mentioning that to Thomas they couldn't have found a better known man to talk to, and after only a few words Thomas decided to leave his boat and return with those three men who were from Astoria, OR. These men were Johnny Devlin, Fred Keen, and Phillip Cook.
At Argyle they were fortunate enough to find Alfred Douglas there with a new buggy and a team of horses who volunteered to drive the three men and Thomas to Friday Harbor, which is about one and one-quarter miles. A hurry up meeting of the merchants and business men of the Harbor was called while Thomas stated the conditions that the men were looking for. The meeting was called in the shortest space of time and everybody came to terms almost immediately.
The men at that meeting were: the banker J.A. Gould, Joe Sweeney, merchant; Churchill & Nofsgar, of the San Juan Trading Co.; L.B. Carter, merchant; C.L.Carter, former county commissioner; S.E. Hackett, county attorney; C.M. Tucker, county treasurer, Wm. Shultz, superintendent of the Roche Harbor Lime Co; E.H. Nash, county clerk; L.D. Hix and his son-in-law, Dell E. Hoffman from Shaw Island; the latter two being very important men because they owned the only pile-driver in SJ County at that time, and they knew where piling could be obtained.
The meeting was such a success that those three men from Astoria decided right then and there they would build a cannery in Friday Hbr, provided Devlin could get the Chinamen to do that kind of work. It was late in the year for this is what they had to do; they had to build a cannery, get the material to make the cans, install machinery, and have this work done before 25 July because that is the time the fish commence to run. The little steamer SUCCESS was chartered to take Mr. Devlin and Mr. Keen to Anacortes where Mr. Devlin would go to Astoria and Mr. Keen would stop at Seattle to arrange conditions there, while Phillip Cook was left in the Harbor to open an office to handle the business of the new cannery.
Four days later the little steamer MICHIGAN came steaming into Friday Harbor with Captain Howard Buline as master, and Mr. Keen on board as well.
Mr. Devlin has succeeded in getting the Chinese; he stayed in Portland and Astoria to take care of the business-end. Two weeks later the steam schooner SIGNAL came steaming into Friday Harbor with lumber, tin plate, and all kinds of cannery machinery which was required to start the cannery; word went out to all parts of the county for men to go to work who didn't have a job, and it was all speed to get the China-house built so the Chinese could land and start work.
It was like a bolt of thunder into a silent little community and before twenty days has passed there wasn't a man, woman, or child who wanted to work that didn't have a job.
The San Juan Trading Company volunteered to let the newly formed company use their dock at no cost in order to get everything going. Mr. Gould also gave a 30-year lease for enough property on which to build the plant and China-house. From that time on men would arrive from the canning industry in Oregon, such as Harry Cribbs, who was foreman of building; Jimmy Burke had charge of placing the machinery in the completed cannery. It was built and when the fish started to run on 1 August of that year, they were all ready for work; at the close of the season they had canned 18,000 cases of salmon. In those days all they canned were sockeyes. The humpbacks, silvers, and others were thrown back into the sea.
This was the start of the bust of the depression, and after the fish business got going in 1895, there were two more canneries started in Anacortes, two more in Blaine, and one in Bellingham."
By Captain William P. Thornton
Fish and Ships; Andrews, Ralph W.
& A.K. Larssen, Bonanza Books.

Classic Boats Visiting Deer Harbor ~~~~~ Summer 2010

2011-09-10T22:30:00.001-07:00

John Gorton, Deer Harbor sailor, historian, and master photographer, has shared some fine shots of the classic woodies passing through his territory on Orcas Island.
The photos are from September 2010, for your viewing pleasure, and not for commercial use.

Deer Harbor, September 2010.
Photograph courtesy of John Gorton©

Schooner MARTHA
Deer Harbor, September 2010
Photograph courtesy of John Gorton©

Deer Harbor, September 2010.
Photograph courtesy of John Gorton©

JOSHUA, Deer Harbor, September 2010
Photograph courtesy of John Gorton©

Petrified RomanceJune Burn Puget Soundings 1929

2011-09-08T13:55:00.001-07:00

One islander's collection of "as-found" beach agates gathered
while enjoying sixty years of beachcombing in the San Juan archipelago.
On loan for this photograph September 2011.

"What curious and fascinating things can be found on the beaches! Shinglebolts and great logs which have got loose from the booms. A cedar block with a smooth rope-worn hole in it--once a float for somebody's launch. Stumps with bleached roots, interlocked and tangled. Little Japanese kegs with bark hoops. Old mattresses, sea-cleaned, washed overboard from a wreck, maybe...oh, there goes a long black freighter kicking up the sea-dust over yonder towards Canada! big drifts of wood and planks and sticks.
And agates! What incomparable delight to creep along these white, or gray, or jade-green beaches, running the gravel through the fingers and at last to spy an agate shining, translucent, waxy, beautifully marked or maybe pure black or red or topaz or milky or rose or waterclear. Petrified romance, I call them. There is nothing to compare with the thrill of finding agates on a graveled beach. I wouldn't give a nickel for a sandy beach. It is warm and sometimes clean. But it is not interesting. I missed the gravel beaches of our islands on the shores of California and Florida, while people from down there miss the warm sand of their home beaches."

A DAY ON A CANNERY TENDER ....... by Gordon Jones

2011-08-13T00:14:00.000-07:00

Tender PETREL, 76-ft, built in 1918. Photo by author.

"My story deals with only one small facet of reaping the silver horde of sockeye salmon, that of accompanying a cannery tender to the fishing grounds on two different occasions to buy freshly-caught salmon from the fishing seiners during the later summer months. The tender was the PETREL, Captain Ellsworth Trafton, fish-buying for the A. & P. Cannery in Anacortes, WA. Ellsworth known as "Taffy" to his friends, had been associated with fishing much of his working life. He, his brother Ted, and their father, Jack Trafton had operated the schooners ALICE, AZALEA, and WAWONA under the Robinson Fisheries Company banner. A friend of theirs, E. Harry Anderson, a first-tripper in WAWONA in 1940, had been invited to join the PETREL and to ask a friend; that's how I found myself aboard during the '65 and '66 seasons.
Purchasing the fish directly from the boats on the grounds obviated trips to-market by the fishermen. Boats fishing for A. & P. stationed themselves in the path of the Sockeye returning from their sojourn at sea to spawn in the freshwater streams of their birth. The "grounds" were along the west side of San Juan Island where the runs turned northward from the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward the mouth of the Fraser River and other streams.
After taking on supplies from the cannery just west of Anacortes, Taffy headed the PETREL toward the grounds about eight A.M. each day. During the run a good breakfast was served up by Cliff, the cook, in the ample galley of the 76-footer, a wooden vessel of eighty-gross tons built in 1918 and still going strong. Norman Hansen, deckhand and engineer, spelled Ellsworth at the wheel while he ate and discussed prospects for a good season. Fishing had become so "spotty" in recent years that predictions were difficult, guesses at best.

Seiners north of Cattle Pass c. 1980.
Photo from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

Proceeding northerly from Cattle Point, the first boats we spotted were off Limekiln Light. Three or four seiners had already made their sets but none was hauling a net. No action yet. As we proceeded farther north, however, a couple had hauled their nets and showed promise of some fish. Our ice was down and Taffy decided to go after some more should the fleet have a good day. This required a run over to Bellingham, about forty miles away. After taking-on ice, we returned in the afternoon and a check into Mitchell Bay showed half-a-dozen seiners anchored and ready to sell. We were soon at anchor and receiving fish from the GLADIATOR. The catch had been poor and the seiner had decided to quit for the day. Soon the PETREL was flanked by two more boats wanting to discharge and it was getting dark by the time the GEORGIA entered the bay about seven-thirty P.M.
The procedure was to lower one of PETREL'S baskets into the fish hold of the vessel, standby while the fishermen pewed it full of salmon, hoist it out, and discharge the fish into a hopper which rested upon a weighing scale. Each load was weighed and tallied; when the fishboat had discharged, her skipper came aboard to receive a receipt for the catch. Each catch was put on ice in the tender's hold for delivery to the cannery the next morning. These Sockeye at spawning season run about twenty-four inches in length and weigh about seven pounds.

Cliff had dinner on the table by the time we had washed down the decks and were headed through Mosquito Pass on our way back to the cannery at Anacortes. Taffy knew the islands as well as his own name and he put the PETREL through her paces. But our scheduled return was interrupted by orders via the radiotelephone from the cannery: pick up a load from another tender anchored off Green Point. So it was haul-out-the-gear once again, moor alongside, receive several tons of fish with illumination provided by the masthead lights and .... finally, run the last leg of our course.
It was after one-clock in the morning before we were again moored at the A. & P. dock. Ellsworth was dog-tired, but sent both Harry and me home with a nice salmon for breakfast."
Gordon Jones
The Sea Chest
The Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society
September 1976

Remembering Captain E. G. Baughman ☆ ☆ ☆ of the Gold Ship HUMBOLDT

2011-08-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

The HUMBOLDT
In 1897, Seattle mayor, W.D.Wood and associates, chartered the new wooden steamer HUMBOLDT, laid down at Eureka, CA, as a lumber-carrying steam schooner, but completed as a passenger and freight steamer. The mayor deserted city hall to enter the Alaska steamship and mining business, departing for St. Michael aboard the HUMBOLDT. A large percentage of the city's fire and police departments' personnel also joined the gold rush, leaving municipal government in a somewhat more chaotic state than usual.

"The death of Capt. Elijah G. Baughman in 1935 was accompanied by a most remarkable (and well documented) happening. He was never master of any ship except the HUMBOLDT. He was her pilot at the time of her first voyage to Alaska in 1897 and was appointed master in 1900, remaining in charge throughout his entire career. By 1915 he and the HUMBOLDT had already completed 500 voyages to south-eastern Alaska. In 1919 the steamer was withdrawn from Alaska service and operated on California coastal routes. When she was laid up at San Diego Capt. Baughman retired. The HUMBOLDT lay quietly rotting away in the boneyard for more than two years... until the night of 8 August. That was the night Capt. Baughman died--slipped his cable, as the old sailors used to say--and it was the night the HUMBOLDT slipped her cable, too, and sailed again for the last time. Toward night a Coast Guard cutter hailed an unlighted ship moving silently through the harbor toward the open sea. The Coast Guardsmen boarded her and found her warped decks and dusty cabins deserted; no living hand on her wheel. She was towed back to her boneyard mooring and in 1936 was reported still there, her house and smokestack gone and her hull rotting away. Her eerie sailing on the night of her old master's death was no doubt a mere coincidence, but on the other hand, the bond between a man and ship can grow very strong in thirty years. The reader is left to draw his own conclusions".
Gordon Newell, Editor
The H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest
Superior Publishing, Seattle, WA, 1966.

COMMENTS ON TUG KATY's LOG of 5 JULY 2011

2011-07-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

"Reading your log about the KATY was special. She was in Deer Harbor about 1949 raising the old BELLINGHAM that sank alongside the cannery. The cannery crew brought the boat in alongside the dock to work on, bow to the north. The tide took a deep breath and the bow stuck in the mud, so the stern went down a bit lower to where the dried-out seams let water visit inside. The owner said that any one who removed her could have her----Damn, I wanted that boat, but the Navy wanted me and I really didn't have oars long enough to row a 120-foot boat, or smarts enough to know how to raise it. The KATY showed up and the diver wrapped the stern in canvas, pumped out some water at low tide and up she came on the incoming tide. Simple!! Sadly, she was burned in Elliot Bay for Sea Fair a couple years later.
I was impressed at the time when the KATY skipper/diver told me his boat was in her eighties. So, you shook my memory tree again. "
Follow-up by L.W."Corkey" North, retired mariner/local historian, Deer Harbor, Orcas Island.

Remembering Seattle Sailing Yacht ☆☆ ALOTOLA ☆☆

2011-07-16T14:15:00.001-07:00

Original photo by sailor/photographer Dolph Zubick, Seattle.
1949 at Karl Seastrom's shop.
See identification in following text.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

"This smiling bunch are the ones that got the job done. The man on the left is Anton Peier. Anton, for many years was the head machinist for the Seattle Fire Department. He had wonderful experience and skill with metal work, casting, and machining. Most of the halyard and sheet winches and sailing hardware in the Seattle area, at the time, were made by Anton Peier.
   Second from left is Charlie Frisbie, the proud and friendly, owner of ALOTOLA (O.N. 226859), home-port Seattle, at this time.
   I believe the tall man in the felt fedora is Karl Seastrom. Karl was a woodworker of the first order--the shop was a long, narrow, old building, ideal for sparmaking. Karl was noted for making helms and steering wheels for all types of craft.
   The nice man in the plaid jacket is Rudy Peier, brother to Anton. The Peier brothers were icons on the Seattle sailing scene and boat building world. Rudy Peier was the head accountant for the Fischer Flour Mill family and went on to be chief accountant/purchasing agent for Vic Franck's Boat Company. Rudy was the designer and had much to do with building the new mast in the photo as well as many other spars in the Seattle area.
   I was a crew member on ALOTOLA several times with the new rig. I do not recall any big wins during my time on board, but everyone always had jolly good times and came away with fond memories sailing with Charlie and Betsie Frisbie."
Above text submitted by Miles McCoy, who has been forever sailing the breezes of West Sound, WA. He found himself in the islands to skipper WESTWARD-HO in the summer of 1950 for the beautiful Four Winds-Westward Ho children's camp on Orcas.

Below text:

The Adaptable Stephens Brothers,

Wooden Boat Issue #175 page 32.

Written by Barry Ward.

"The 57-ft ALOTOLA was built side-by-side with her full sister TAMALMAR for a San Francisco businessman in 1927. She went through a succession of owners before coming into the capable hands of a Seattle yachtsman [Charlie Frisbie] who bought her in 1947, recognizing the pedigree of Stephens Bros., and designer George Wayland.

In 1949, he converted her into the largest active racing sloop in the Northwest, giving her a new 86-ft mast and a sail area of 1,552-sq. ft. She responded by winning or placing high in many of the Puget Sound racing events of the 1950s, and was named boat of the year in 1950. But distant shores were to beckon, and in 1958 she departed the Northwest on a 15,000-mile world cruise down the West Coast to Panama, through the canal to Colombia, and through the Windward Passage to Jamaica. From there, her owner sailed her to Nassau, then Bermuda, and on to Nice, France, where he was born and lived until age 16. The cruise continued to Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. There a Greek yachtsman made an irresistible offer, thus ending ALOTOLA's American registry in 1960."

In 1981 she was captured by the Danes from up north.

ALOTOLA receiving her new 86-ft mast at Karl Seastrom's shop just west of the Fremont bridge.
Owner Charles Frisbie on the aft deck. Original photo 1949 by Dolph Zubick, Seattle.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

"This the rest of the gang struggling the new mast onto the deck of ALOTOLA
for transport to a location with a crane for stepping. This was early in my sailing days,
I was not acquainted with many of the adult waterfront gang.
I recall some newspaper articles & photos stating that this was the tallest yacht mast in the PNW."
Quote from Miles McCoy; original photo by Dolph Zubick, Seattle. 1949.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

"Charlie Frisbie almost postponed our wedding. We went to opening day of boating season at the Seattle Yacht Club the May before we were planning to marry (in June 1959). Charlie approached Robin and asked if he would help sail ALOTOLA from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean Sea. Robin turned him down because he was getting married the next month. I thought my future husband was crazy. You don't get that chance often in my world, and a wedding could be postponed. But Robin didn't go."
Kae Paterson, Maritime Historian, happily married to her sailor guy for 52 years.
Gig Harbor, WA.
Mr. Norm Blanchard devoted a chapter to his close friends and mentors, Rudy & Anton Peier as well as a chapter highlighting his "silverware collector", life-long friend, Charlie Frisbie, in the book Knee Deep in Shavings published in 1999 by Horsdal & Schubart of Victoria, BC.
For anyone connected to Pacific Northwest boating this is a highly interesting flash back. Mr. Blanchard's chapter relating to his friend Jack Tussler of Coon Island is included on this log in January 2011.

PUGET SOUNDINGS by June Burn

2011-07-12T13:49:00.000-07:00

Vintage linen postcard published by C.P. Johnston Co., Seattle, WA
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

Inez "June" Chandler Harris Burn (1893-1969), author of Puget Soundings, first came to Puget Sound with her husband in 1919 from Washington, DC. They homesteaded a tiny island, the 15 acre Sentinel (48-38'22"N, 123-09'03"W), in the San Juan group and lived there a year. This was the last of the San Juan Islands to be homesteaded; it is now owned by the Nature Conservancy. After a second year in Alaska they returned to the East, but the call of the West was too much for them and they came to the Pacific coast again, this time to California, summering in Puget Sound and wishing they might make their permanent home there.
   In 1928 they decided to pull stakes and come to Puget Sound with their family for good, but first they would make a vagabond trip around the US "hugging America", June Burn called the trip. They arrived in Bellingham, the one city in the US they wanted to call "home". In Puget Soundings June Burn will reveal some of the reasons why she thinks Puget Sound has been rightly called the charmed land.
   June became nationally known for the classic, her "unconventional autobiography" Living High, which she published in 1941 and then in 1946 for her series of articles which ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer "100 Days in the San Juans", mailed in from her adventures through the San Juan Archipelago in a surplus USCG lifeboat. In 1983 Longhouse Printcrafters & Publishers, Friday Harbor, WA., republished the columns in book form with the same title used for the original columns.
   There are no titles to the essays so we will list some chosen examples by the date written.

12 October 1929

"The waterfront of the little cities -- what delightful places they are! How friendly and informal and jolly are the men who work down there. Why is it that you never expect to get a story from a dressed-up man but are sure of getting one from that same man when he is wearing overalls? Especially if the overalls are torn and very dirty.
   Go down to the waterfront and listen to the stories of the fishermen and boatmen and workmen down there if you want to know something of the romance of Puget Sound.
   The smells of the docks -- smell of tarred logs, of seaweed, of humans, of oil, gas, old sacks, food, fish. They are the smells of adventure. When I went down to the docks the first time after getting back to Puget Sound I stopped a block or so from the waterfront to savor the smells.
   It was early afternoon. The dock was nearly deserted. I heard the putt-putt of a gas launch below getting ready to pull out. Her master was untying ropes. He did not see me watching him, homesick to be a-going with him wherever he was going.
   The ALVERENE lay against the piling of the dock. It gave me a curious shock to see her, as if she were a friend I had been homesick for. Filled me with nostalgia to be aboard, bound for island harbors.
   But when I discovered the CALCITE from Roche Harbor and fat, old Peter Larsen, her captain, talking down on a float I felt as if I had got home in truth, for Roche Harbor lies nearest to Sentinel, our homestead island, and a boat from that lovely bay is a boat from home. Peter remembered me and I sent messages to old neighbors.
   The SAN JUAN SECOND! There she sits. Waiting for a new engine, they tell me. How proud she will be to go "clickety-clik" like a big boat instead of "putt-putt-putt" like a little one!

SAN JUAN II on her mail route in the San Juan Islands
before heading to homeport of Bellingham, WA.
Relief Captain George Stillman leaning forward from the pilot house.
Photo © circa 1921 from the Saltwater People Hist. Society archives.
Two months after this column was written, the vessel was wrecked in
foul weather off the southern coast of Orcas Island. No hands lost.
Her gas engine was salvaged for her replacement, the OSAGE,
built on Decatur Island, WA., in 1930.

The owners of the SAN JUAN II were among the first people in this land to welcome us ten years ago when we were here to homestead Sentinel. They used to run the boat themselves and many are the pleasant hours I've spent in her pilothouse talking to old Captain Maxwell. They used to stop at Sentinel to load or unload passengers for us. And once or twice we've hailed them from mid-channel to give them a fine cod we had caught that morning.
   The little tug TOREDO. Now why celebrate the pest of the Sound by calling your boat after it? A man in overalls, tells me that the TOREDO tows piling. The toredo worm destroys piling, thus giving the boat TOREDO more to do. Hence the name. He is joking, of course.
   The boat BALKO. Why that name? Won't she go? The big tugs DIVIDEND and PROSPER. Were they named in high hopes before the dividends and prosperity or have they been namead in appreciation of their performances? The fine tug IROQUOIS. She burns more than a hundred barrels of oil a day and more when sse works very hard.
   Tugs going out and tugs coming in. Heavy, squat, powerful, bull-doggy looking fellows and long slender, swifter ones each out after his own peculiar type of load. I watch them walking the waters of the harbor off down towards the islands and I decide that, 'When I'm a man I'll be a boat captain!' See you tomorrow, June".

OTIS L. SHIVELY AND THE GRANDMOTHER OF ALL TUGBOATS

2011-07-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

Early tug KATY, undated, unsigned original photograph©
Tug AUGUSTA on right.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

In this maritime log we have saved historical stories of rowboats, fishboats, sailing schooners, diesel ferries, and the one and only behemoth battleship built in Seattle. Today we remember a Ballard mariner Otis L. Shively and his favorite towboat....
   "In telling about 'Shive' and KATY it seems we were writing about towboating in general as it was on the Sound fifty to sixty years ago when towboating was fun. There were a bunch of rugged individualists around in those days who made do with what they had. Most tugboat companies were family affairs. This is an abridged story of one of them"...
Compiled by Ken Ayers.
Courtesy of the PSMHS Journal
The Sea Chest, June 1975
OLDEST SHIP REACHES LAST PORT
By the late, great, James A. Gibbs, Jr., c. 1952
Otis Shively, a stocky, graying, towboater, ran his calloused hand over his sweating brow as he squinted into the blazing inferno that engulfed his tug KATY on the mudflats near Marysville.
   'I hate to see her go', he murmured. 'Guess she's outlived her usefulness, though, and there's no use havin' her layin' around and rottin' away'.
   He turned away toward the wooded hills above the water as though trying to dismiss the fact that he had set the fire to recover her metal. 'There ain't much money in it, either' he added as an afterthought.
   The cremation of the KATY marked the end of a chapter that started shortly after the Civil War and lasted until Seattle's Centennial--the saga of the KATY. Be it known to all that she was the 'grandmother' of all tugboats on the Pacific Coast. She probably was the oldest active tug in the entire USA. She was launched at San Francisco in the spring of 1868 and joined the service of the US Coast & Geodetic Survey fleet upon completion. On her initial survey trip she charted PNW waters. Less than a thousand people lived in Seattle then and Indian canoes were still the principal mode of transportation. So far back does the KATY's government service go that the archives at WA, DC, bear no record of her.
   As a commercial steamboat, the KATY came to Puget Sound about 1885 to stay, long having had her honorable discharge from Uncle Sam. She wasn't far from Elliott Bay when the terrible Seattle fire of 1889 demolished our city. The KATY virtually grew up with the Pacific Northwest through times of inflation and depression, through the days of the fabulous gold rush and the war booms. Time after time she towed tall windjammers and square riggers to and from Cape Flattery. In between, she was towing logs from Port Madison, Port Blakely, Utsalady, Port Gamble, and Port Townsend. She left hundreds of thousands of miles of foamy wake trailing behind, a pace she maintained for 84 years.
   When the 20s rolled in, the old steam plant was removed from the KATY and replaced by a Diesel engine by Otis Shively, who had purchased her a few years earlier. The KATY and Shively seemed to go together. She was a remarkable tug and he was a remarkable operator.
   During the prosperous '20s Shively owned a large fleet of tugs but after the depression he parted with much of his floating stock as did men in all professions in those hectic years. But 'Shive' kept the KATY. She was his favorite. He soon became known as the Rube Goldberg of the towboat world, for he could do things with KATY that nobody else could do. He rigged up his own pilot house controls in a most unorthodox manner even to the place where clothespins sometimes acted as levers. He took pieces of junk and made them into first-class engine parts and the strange thing about it, his contrivances always worked. He could do anything with the KATY but make her fly. Some even accused him of lying in his bunk and operating the tug with his toes.
   Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery gazed upon the KATY many times when they were in Seattle years ago to film the immortal 'Tugboat Annie'. The KATY did much stand-in work in that film.
   The passing of the oak-hulled KATY went without fanfare; her engine and machinery were removed at the Northwest Rolling Mills on the Lake Washington Ship Canal. In fact, only a few witnessed her burning on the beach at Arvid Franzen's between Edmonds and Mukilteo. If ships could only talk, what a story she could have told when she reached the port of no return.
   "And Jim was so right. If KATY could have talked these are some of the stories she would have told us.
   Shive came to Seattle in the early 1920s where towboating became his way of life and his way of towboating was sometimes something else. Cylde Holcomb says Shive also lived for a while in a float house under the south end of the University bridge.
   Shive bought KATY in 1926 or '27 from the Chesley Towing Co. She was steam, of course, and according to Jim Cary, sported a 10 x 24 x 20 fore and aft compound. The source of steam was a pipe boiler carrying 250 pounds. Not a bad power plant. KATY was launched as the USS KATY in San Francisco in 1868. She was turned over to the US Coast & Geodetic Survey as Gibbs mentioned. Her registered number was 14405, her dimensions were 76 x 18.4 x 8.5 with a gross tonnage of 93. Two of KATY's last skippers when she was sailing for Chesley were Bill Stark and our friend and benefactor of 50 years ago, Captain Lindley Davis.
   Now, as all of you know who were familiar with Shive's style of towboating, he was not widely known for having a surplus of crew members aboard at any time. In fact I was told he used to run KATY by himself when she was steam! That's almost like flying a 747 solo but not quite. Also, it would (to be legal) require that Shive have both a Master's license for steam vessels as well as a Chief Engineer's license. I'm not sure he had them or would have considered it a matter of importance if he didn't.
   It wasn't too long before Shive decided he should modernize KATY's main propulsion by removing the steam plant and replacing it with an internal combustion engine. Somewhere he latched onto a six-cylinder, four-cycle Union gasoline engine. Now this was quite a pile of iron for 300 HP. Someplace along the line Shive decided gasoline was too dangerous or too expensive so he called in a well known Marine Engineer named Stroud who specialized in converting gasoline engines to semi-Diesels or semi's to full Diesels. Now there was a real pair because Shive himself was a very innovative mechanic of considerable talent and imagination. Would you believe it, when these two gentlemen were finished with that four-cycle gas rig, it turned out to be a two-cycle semi-Diesel? This is about the equivalent of tossing a can of beans and wieners into a frying pan and coming up with a three-egg, cheese omelette. It just isn't done in the best of circles, but they did!
   As has been mentioned, Otis Shively was quite a mechanic. If he had had any formal or technical education he could have gone a long way in the marine engineering field. As a matter of fact, he did pretty well as it was. Les Reynolds tells me that when Shive dropped the Union into KATY he decided to make it a one-man boat as much as possible with wheelhouse control, etc. This he proceeded to do. I don't know all the technical ramifications of what he did but Les says, and is backed up by others, that Shive had a couple of automotive electric starters mounted up over the reverse gear and connected to it with suitable shafts and right angle gearing. Then, all over the boat, wheelhouse, foredeck, afterdeck, etc., he had mounted switches like dimmer switches on a car. In this manner, no matter where he was on the boat, he could put her in the go-ahead, backup, or kick her out of gear.
   Now we beat our brains out trying to get to run a small tug with two or three men. In those days Shive had it licked. He used to run two or three boats with one man--himself. This is one reason it has been so difficult to learn about Shive as very few people worked for him. I have been told, he used to lash the ALITAK alongside KATY and run them both himself while on a log tow and that once in a while when he needed some extra power he would make the TRIO fast on the opposite side of KATY. I don't have any pictures of such goings on but believe me there are a lot of old timers who will swear to it.
   Church Griffiths recalled the time someone asked Shive how he got any sleep while on a log tow by himself. Shive replied, 'No problem. I have a fourth mate who stands the opposite watch'. Well, a smart man would have dropped the subject right there but instead he came back, 'Fourth mate, how come you carry four mates'. ' Well, it's like this', said Shive. You see I have a tall fourlegged stool in the wheelhouse. To one I bend on the lead line, run it out the door and over the side with the lead in about 20 or 30 feet of water. I have four old coffee cans which I place on top of the stool and turn in. When the lead hits bottom it turns the stool over, the rattle of the cans turns me out, I look around, come one or tow spokes left or right as the case may be, replace the becket, stool and cans, thus turning the watch back to the fourth mate and turn in again'.
   In those days there was a very astute gentleman named Captain John M. Fox who covered the waterfront as President of the Ferryboatmen's Union; Master, Mates and Pilots; Inlandboatmen's Union, etc. It was part of his responsibility to see that proper manning (number of crew members, etc.) was maintained on the various vessels. One day he met Shive on the street. After proper salutations the conversation went something like this:
Captain Fox: "Shive, I hear you are having some manning problems".
Shive: "Well, not really, Captain. The mate's not bad, he's a little new to these parts but he's learning fast. The Chief Engineer is a little hard to get along with but he knows the engine well and keeps it banging away. The A B is a good man, should be sitting for his Mate's license one of these days. The Ordinary is trying hard and will make a good seaman with a little experience. The cook, now there's a place we could be improved! He's not so good. Other than that we don't have any manning problems".
   Captain Fox, being a very intelligent man, knew when he'd been had and that Shive was and would continue to run KATY by himself. He did the only thing possible. Put his hands in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders, turned around, and walked off.
   Otis died 24 June 1954 of a heart attack. His ashes were consigned to Davy Jones locker but you can bet that wherever Shive is he is sitting around figuring out some way to run the place all by himself and he just might do it.
   What a wonderful Northwest maritime legend--"Shive" and KATY--the names go together like anchor 'n chain. Now many old mariners, some with Captain before their names, meet and laugh at stories of their youthful experiences and hardships aboard the KATY and wonder how everyone survived encounters that would now overheat the OSHA Bureau."
   For stories on Shive and KATY not recorded here, please see WATERWORKS by Captain W. Leiter Hockett; Trafford Publishing, Victoria, BC., 2005. Leiter wrote six fascinating pages about his Ballard friend.

SCHOONER WAWONA'S BONES

2011-06-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

Schooner WAWONA
Courtesy of the author

"February 26 2011, was a special morning for Roy and Annie because we were out of bed by 4:00 AM to meet Les Bolton, Executive Director of the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport Authority, and a crew of other volunteers in Montesano, WA at 6:00 AM. We were off to rescue WAWONA's bones off Sandpoint Way in Seattle.

The weather was not especially cooperative, with a temperature of 14.8℉, and a recent snowfall lingering in the shadows, but the roads seemed clear so we were off on our adventure. The Black Hills section of Hwy 8 was coated with compact snow and ice near McLeary, but we slowed down with a 2-axle equipment trailer behind, and carried on without a slip.

   WAWONA's bones were the salvaged portions of the stately old lumber schooner, WAWONA, that was built in Eureka, CA in 1897. She had served well as a lumber schooner, moving redwood and fir lumber to ports up and down the west coast until 1914 when she was converted to a cod fisher. One of her captains was Ralph E. Peasley who became famous as the model for Capt. Matt Peasley, the "fictional" hero in Peter B. Kyne's adventure novel Cappy Ricks, or the Subjugation of Matt Peasley, published in 1916.

   In 1914 WAWONA was purchased by the Robinson Fisheries Company in Anacortes, WA and loaded with tons of salt for preserving cod, and with provisions to last 38 fishermen for six months, and sailed to the Bering Sea. At the fishing grounds 24 dories would fan out in all directions, each with a fisherman and his hand lines. They fished all day long to fill each dory with cod fish before returning to the mother ship at nightfall. When the fog closed in, the fisherman and his dory were isolated and alone except for the periodic sound of the WAWONA's horn which provided the location of home.
   Those days are long past and today WAWONA would be making one last trip. After riding at anchor in Lake Union for many years, she had finally been scrapped and her knees, rigging screws, blocks, bowsprit, capstan, keel, and other bones were waiting for us in the corner of a parking lot near the NOAA facility on Sandpoint Way. The day was mostly clear but a biting wind blew in off the lake as we went about our business. With the help of a cranky old fork-lift the trailers and pickups were loaded with pallets and boxes and lashed down for their ignominious last voyage through Seattle rush hour traffic to the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport in Aberdeen, WA."
Written by Roy Pearmain
For Saltwater People Historical Society
June 2011.

WAWONA at winter moorage, Clam Harbor, West Sound, Orcas Island, 1951.
Courtesy of Mary Schoen, on shore at this location.

According to Eric Lacitis, Seattle Times staff reporter, the WAWONA, in 1970, was the first vessel to be placed on the National Historical Register of Historic Places.

All of Seattle's other sailing ships either have been broken up for scrap or sold to other ports for maritime museums.

In 1963 funds were raised in Honolulu to purchase the 4-masted bark FALLS OF CLYDE for a maritime attraction.

The Schooner C. A. THAYER was rescued from her "pirate" role on the beach at Lilliwaup, Hood Canal, WA, to undergo major reconstruction before Capt. Adrian F. Raynard and salty crew her sailed down the coast to San Francisco Maritime. This passage is well documented in The Schooner That Came Home by Harlan Trott, Cornell Maritime Press, 1958.

According to Joe Follansbee, the Anacortes History Museum, the Northwest Center for Wooden Boatbuilding and the San Francisco Maritime Museum all received pieces from the deconstructed WAWONA.

Anchor winch from the deconstructed Schooner WAWONA,
c. 10,000 pounds.

Schooner WAWONA, keel section.
February 2011

Salvaged bowsprit of the Schooner WAWONA
Southbound Seattle to Aberdeen, February 2011.

Salvaged Blocks from the WAWONA.

WAWONA's rigging gets loaded too.
All salvage photos courtesy of Roy Pearmain, 2011.

The Extraordinary Maritime Collection of Bill Somers

2011-06-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

★ Wheels, Whistles, and Wonders ★
Grand Opening of a New Exhibit
11 June 2011
Foss Waterway Seaport

The sounds, sights and classic beauty of Puget Sound's historic "Mosquito Fleet" and steamboat era of the 1850s — 1930s will be richly represented in the new exhibit, which showcases about a quarter of the nearly 1,500 exquisite pieces acquired last fall from the largest known private collection of artifacts related to the maritime history of Puget Sound.
   One–of–a–kind collection kept intact!  The generous support of area business leaders Jim Milgard and George Russell enabled the Seaport to obtain the entire collection. "This comprehensive collection is a must–see for all who are interested in maritime artifacts and the rich heritage of Puget Sound's steam era," says regional maritime artifacts expert, Roger Ottenbach. "The Somers Collection is Puget Sound's most important maritime artifacts collection in existence. Bill was very deliberate in what he gathered. It is outstanding that the Seaport was able to acquire these items."
   The Grand Opening activities will feature live music reminiscent of the steamboat era, food, docents presenting "then and now" interpretations of maritime artifact usage, storytellers reenacting characters from the era and interacting with visitors, and children's hands–on activities. Attendees will see the Seaport's active wooden boat shop staffed by expert boat builders, and heritage vessels such as the unique M/V Westward, S/V Odyssey, and S/V Red Jacket at the Seaport's docks.
   Extend your fun and go next door to Foss Harbor Marina's "Salty Dock Day" in honor of National Marina Day on June 11th. Take part in boater education classes, a "Salty Dog" Contest for canine "First Mates," games, safety demonstrations, a Saturday Night outdoor movie (weather permitting), and other fun activities to help celebrate all of the recreational opportunities marinas provide on our community's waterways. Amazing artifacts — and then some!
   The history of Puget Sound's Mosquito Fleet steamboats is strongly represented in the immense collection of artifacts, including vessel name boards, life rings, models, ships' wheels, photographs, and paintings from the famed era when privately owned steamships and sternwheelers plied the waters of Puget Sound. Visitors will hear authentic steam whistles and experience the wonder and diversity of hundreds of finely preserved ships' artifacts including funnels, binnacles, anchors, fog horns, brass propellers, life rings, and ship models.
   Also included are many objects from navy vessels, merchant vessels, and ships that sailed the Yukon River during the Gold Rush, including an 8–foot diameter ship's wheel. Visitors will see a ship's bell from the USS Chauncey, one of seven Navy destroyers that ran aground on the California coast in 1923 in an event that became known as the Honda Point Disaster. There are also several artifacts from the SS Mayaguez, the merchant vessel at the center of what is considered the last battle of the Vietnam War.
Please see FossWaterwaySeaport.org for hours and directions.

The Skipper's Little Secret ........ from HOME COUNTRY by Ernie Pyle

2011-06-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

On April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle met an untimely death by Japanese machine -gun fire on the island of Ie, near Okinawa. He was then by all odds the most popular and best-known correspondent of WWII. But many readers who treasured his war dispatches were unaware of the fact that, in a less spectacular setting, Ernie had been doing the same sort of homely, endearingly human reporting for years. The posthumously published book, Home Country, collects the finest of these early columns, which Ernie himself believed to contain the best writing he ever did.
Courtesy of The Sea Chest, the Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, March 1972.

"The prairies are all right. The mountains are all right. The forests and the deserts and the clear, clean air of the heights, they're all right. But what a bewitching thing is a city of the sea. It was good to be in Seattle --- to hear the foghorns on the Sound, and the deep bellow of the departing steamers; to feel the creeping fog all around you, the fog that softens things and makes a velvet trance out of nighttime. And it was good to hear the tall and slyly outlandish tales that float up and down Puget Sound.

   Once upon a time there was a tugboat of Puget Sound dragging behind it a long tow of logs. There was no special hurry, so the tugboat was hardly moving at all. Furthermore, it was using its leisure time to run some oil tests on its new Diesel engines. The engineer and several five-gallon cans of different brands of oil. He would let the engine run until it exhausted one can, then cut in a different brand, start the engine, and plow ahead again.
   All of this left the captain bored, and with nothing at all to do. Furthermore, his feet hurt. He stood sadly on the deck, watching the shore which hardly moved at all, and now and then taking a look at the water around him. It looked so cool. Finally he took off his shoes and socks, sat down on the low rail and hung his feet over the side. Lordy, it felt good!
   The water kept on feeling good, and the old captain was enjoying it immensely, until a seal popped up and swam past. The captain thought it was a dog. He leaned far out for a better look and fell overboard. By the time he had come up and had rid himself of that portion of Puget Sound which he had imbibed, his favorite tugboat had drawn away from him. But all was not lost, for the tow of logs was still coming along. So the old man drifted back and h'isted himself up.
   A bunch of logs on the end of a towline is no place for a dignified shipmaster to be, so our captain kept running up and down, yelling to the engineer on the tugboat. But the engineer couldn't hear him for the engine noise, and wouldn't have heard him anyway, for he was asleep.
   At this interval we must leave the captain a moment and switch to the shore. Somewhere along the Sound lived one of those delightful people whose sole profession is watching the boats go by. He stood on the shore, pulled up his telescope, leveled it first on the tug, and then on the tow, and finally on the captain. Aha! thought the watcher. Poor Captain Blank has gone off his nut. So he phoned the tug company's office that the captain had gone crazy, that he was back on the tow of logs, barefoot, running up and down and screaming like a wild man.
   Now we shift back to the tugboat. One of those five-gallon cans of oil ran out. The engine stopped. The engineer woke up and went about his business of cutting in a new can and getting the engines started again. This gave the captain his chance. He jumped into the water, half swam and half pulled himself along the towline up to the tug, climbed aboard, sneaked into his cabin without anybody's seeing him, changed his clothes and was out on deck by the time they got going.
   That evening they pulled into Port Angeles. The company officials were all down at the dock. So were an ambulance and the sheriff and a couple of policemen, just in case the old man should be violent.
   The captain stepped out on deck and greeted them. The company president began to fade slightly beneath his skin. 'Why, Captain, I understood you were ... ah ... sick.'
   'Fit as a fiddle', boomed the captain. 'Never been sick a day in my life.'
   I don't know how the company president explained to the sheriff. Anyway, he never said another word to the captain about the matter."
Reprinted in The Sea Chest from Home Country, published in 1947 by William Sloane Associates, N.Y., N.Y.

Five days later this story comes across my desk...
Captain Davis, of the CALCITE [built on Lopez Island] had a most unpleasant experience on Wednesday. On a trip over from Waldron, Capt. Davis was alone on board, and while endeavoring to regulate the tow line of the scow he was bringing in, lost his balance and fell into the Sound. Fortunately he was able to catch the line, and drew himself onto the scow, but could not board the boat, and he was forced to remain in his uncomfortable position until the CALCITE was aground.
San Juan Islander
Front Page 7 May 1909

SEATTLE BATTLESHIP ................ by Robert Moran

2011-06-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

Original photo by Otto T. Frasch (1882-1958) of Lilliwaup, WA.

The ship's keel was laid 4 July 1902;
USS NEBRASKA was launched on 7 October, 1904.

Considered the flagship of the US Navy, she was commissioned on 1 July 1907,

one year before she sailed the world as part of Roosevelt's Great White Fleet.

"When the writer appeared at the Navy Department in Washington with a proposal to build in 'that sawmill town of Seattle' what was in those days a first class battleship, some of the Department organization probably had no knowledge of such a place as Seattle, so it appeared quite a joke to some of the Navy organization that a firm that had never built a battleship should presume to enter competition against the older established naval builders.
   The facts were that the so-called old naval constructors were no better informed on naval construction than was Moran Bros. Company. At any rate, the law required that contracts be awarded to the lowest bidders, and as my company was prepared to furnish the bond, we were on an equal footing with the so-called older shipyards.
   Congress had authorized the construction of four of the 'NEBRASKA' class ships and made a definite cost appropriation for the completion of the vessels. This bound the Navy constructors to design ships the total cost of which would not exceed the sum authorized by Congress. The Navy Department, in its desire to get the most ship for the money available, expanded its plans to a point where, when the bids were opened in Washington, all were found to be approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars in excess of the sum appropriated by Congress. The bidders were then told by the Secretary of the Navy that all bids would be rejected unless they were scaled down to the amount of money cost available.
   In the case of my company's bid, it was required to be reduced about three-hundred fifty-thousand dollars. Of the above sum, the Navy organization cut about fifty-thousand dollars cost from the specifications, which in my company's case left about three-hundred thousand dollars to be cut from our bid. The writer was in Washington at the time. I fully realized how important it was that Seattle secure a contract for one of these ships, so concluded to advise the Seattle Chamber of Commerce of the facts by wire. In this, I advised that if the Chamber would undertake to secure subscriptions from Seattle business men and citizens for the sum of one-hundred thousand dollars, my company would contribute two-hundred thousand, making the three-hundred thousands reduction on our bid, which would secure the award of the contract. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce acted promptly on this, secured the full hundred thousand pledge to be paid only when the ship was launched in Seattle.
   This is a brief history of how the first and only battleship was built in Seattle, by the Moran Brothers Company. Navy Department records show that no finer ship was ever delivered to the department by a contractor, a fact attested to by Admiral Kountz, and Admiral Gregory when he told 1,600 people gathered at Rosario that the NEBRASKA was the finest ship ever built for the Navy."
From: An Address
by Robert Moran
At the Fiftieth Jubilee Meeting of
The Pioneers Association of the
State of Washington,
Presented 6 June 1939, in Seattle, WA.

According to historian/newspaper journalist Lucile McDonald, the building of the 435-foot NEBRASKA put Seattle on the map as a major shipbuilding center. Following the launching of the flagship of the United States Navy, Robert Moran (1857-1943) retired from the shipyard, to build his family estate, Rosario, on Orcas Island, WA.
For more in-depth history see "Moran Brothers Shipyard" in The Sea Chest, March 1971, the quarterly journal published by Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, Seattle, WA. written by the long-time, supportive member, Lucile McDonald.

Also, The Sea Chest, June 1979 includes an extensive article "Seattle Builds a Battleship" by Daniel M. Caine and James J. J. Corbin.

Photo postcard of Rosario, the estate of the Robert Moran family,
Cascade Bay, Orcas Island, Washington.The family moved into the new home in 1909.
From the Saltwater People Historical Society archives.

Captain J. E. Shields and His One-Man War ☆ ☆ ☆ A Memorial Day Tribute from "High Tide"

2011-05-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

Captain J. E. Shields a'board SOPHIE CHRISTENSON.

Photograph kindly shared by his grandson Jim Shields, 2011.

"Among my most interesting friends on Seattle's waterfront was Capt. J. E. Shields, shipowner and master mariner extraordinary, who became an international figure a few years before Pearl Harbor by saving from foreign invasion the rich Bristol Bay fishing grounds. This area is famous as the world's greatest district.
   With nets across the lanes followed by migrating salmon, Japanese fishermen were a threat to the huge Bristol Bay salmon packing industry and were hampering the operations of the Puget Sound codfishing fleet.
   Protests were of no avail and Captain Shields sent his famous wireless message asking that a dozen rifles each and plenty of ammunition be sent to the schooners SOPHIE CHRISTENSON and CHARLES R. WILSON, fishing in the Bering Sea. Captain Shields commanded the SOPHIE, while Capt. Knute Pearson was master of the WILSON.
   The dispatch attracted attention all over the country and was cabled to Japan by news agencies. It was followed a few days later by this message from the SOPHIE:

'Hurrah! Hurrah! All Japanese boats out of the Bering Sea. Rifles no longer needed’.

   Captain Shields, single-handed, had been successful in what repeated protests and international negotiations had failed to accomplish. The Japanese left the Bering before the run of red salmon began and consequently there was a big pack that year. The sturdy skipper had won a one-man war without firing a shot.
   The famous dispatch of Captain Shields requesting rifles and ammunition for the SOPHIE CHRISTENSON and the CHARLES R. WILSON, was followed by an announcement by a high Coast Guard officer that "if there is going to be any shooting in the Bering Sea, the Coast Guard will do it," but leaders in the fishing industry only smiled.
   I remember a typical story of a codfishing cruise told to me in 1938 by Captain Shields after his famous "one-man war" with the Japanese. The SOPHIE CHRISTENSON, commanded by the colorful sailing ship skipper, had just towed into Poulsbo, a codfish center for more than 40 years, after a five-month cruise. In the hold of the picturesque vessel were 385,000--not pounds--but codfish, caught on the Bering Sea fishing grounds. In the log of the four-masted sailing schooner were entries that read like pages of a movie thriller.
   Captain Shields told of chasing the invading Japanese out of the Bering Sea.
   'We had 150 fathoms of chain out and it was blowing great guns,' read one of the entries in the log of the SOPHIE.
   There were days when it was impossible to get a dory over the side and not a fish was caught. Then there would be smiling skies and smooth seas and the fishermen were in their dories by 4 o'clock in the morning, harvesting the gray cod from the sea. The fishermen did not expect calm weather all the time and often sent their blunt-nosed dories into heaving swells, leaving behind them the whine of outboard motors and the odor of burned gasoline.
   "One night," a hardy, bearded, fisherman told me, "we were lost on the banks in a great fog far from the ship, but Captain Shields was equal to the situation. With a mechanical fog horn going full blast, he went aloft to the crosstrees and there, 85-feet above the heaving deck, rigged an automobile spotlight hooked up to a six-volt battery. The skipper spent three hours there alone, flashing the brilliant light into the cold, murky night until he saw a faint blur through the ghostly fog. The "lost" fishermen boarded the ship at 3 o'clock in the morning. They were glad to get back to the SOPHIE and thanked the skipper for what he had done for them.
   High-line man for the voyage was Ray Press with 21,155 fish. With a five-pound sinker and two hooks, Press landed as many as a thousand fish a day.
   Cod are caught in deep water with halibut for bait. The fisherman gradually brings the school closer to the surface, where he works with two lines, one on each side of his anchored dory. With the precision of a machine, he pulls up one line, takes the fish off, baits the hooks, drops the line with its five-pound sinker, and hauls away on the other line. The fish sometimes come into the boat at the rate of 100 an hour, often being caught two at a time.
   A typical day's work begins with breakfast at 4 o'clock in the morning and by 4:30, the dories go over the side and fan out from the mother ship.
   Arriving in the Bering Sea, the ship anchors about 10 miles offshore and the fishermen, in their dories, go as far as five miles from the vessel. By 9 o'clock in the forenoon, the dories, laden with codfish, begin coming in. The fishermen eat dinner before returning to the fishing grounds. This is the heaviest meal of the day. By 5 o'clock in the afternoon, they return for supper and conclude the day's work.
   During the morning, the dressing crew begins work as soon as the first dories arrive. If fishing is good, the crew works from that time until the day's catch is in the hold. Sometimes, these men work well into the night putting the catch in cure, since each day's take must be processed in order to be ready for the following day's catch.
   Capt. Ed Shields, son of Capt. J. E. Shields, is plant manager at Poulsbo and skipper of the schooner C. A. THAYER. He says his plant, originally started in 1911, is the only one of the Pacific Coast that produces and markets codfish.
   Capt. Ed Shields made his first trip to the Bering in 1934. Between cruises, he attended the UW where he studied engineering. He graduated in 1939 and then took a year of advanced engineering at Harvard. He put his engineering knowledge to practical use at the Puget Sound Naval Station during WWII.

Photo postcard of the Pacific Coast Codfish Co. crew unloading their schooner, Poulsbo, WA.
Photo by B. Torvanger, Pt. Madison, 1914.
From the Saltwater People Historical Society archives.

When the schooner returns to Poulsbo with her catch, the cured fish have lost 75 per cent of their weight. One pound of dried fish equals four pounds of fresh fish. More weight is lost in later processing, by the removal of the skin and bones, so a one-pound package of codfish is equivalent to six pounds of fresh codfish.
As skipper and owner of the SOPHIE CHRISTENSON, Capt. J. E. Shields was the most versatile of master mariners. He was navigator, ship's doctor, pharmacist, a judge of all disputes involving the crew, chief fish-tallier and dentist."
This story, Captain J. E. Shields and His One-Man War, is written by the Seattle waterfront reporter R. H. Calkins who published his colorful collection of c. 50 essays under the title High Tide, The Stories of Seattle's Waterfront in 1952. Expect to see more of them posted on this site.

An exhibit celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the Pacific Coast Codfish Company of Poulsbo, Washington is now featured at the Poulsbo Historical Society Heritage Museum.

For hours and directions: poulsbohistory.org.

King Crab ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ The Delicious Monsters!

2011-05-20T00:38:00.000-07:00

Fisherman aboard the beam trawler the DEEP SEA.
Photo Life, Photographer unknown.

The year 1941 will always live in the memory of a man named Lowell Wakefield, son of an Alaskan family long engaged in the business of herring fishing. That was the year he first saw "haystacks" in the sea, off the storm buffeted island of Kodiak. There appeared at lowtide a phenomenon seldom witnessed except on rare occasions by fishermen off the lonely coasts around Alaska and the Bering Sea--hundreds of giant King crabs, piled one on top of another in a huge pyramid--why, even the most eggheaded students of creatures of the deep have never been able to explain.

The Kodiak islanders gathered the beached giants and had a memorable crabfest. The meat of the claws and legs proved to be more delicate than lobster and astonishing flavorsome. Wakefield's imagination was fired by the incident. These scores of fabulous crabs were a type seldom seen in the area, vicious-clawed monsters, some of them measuring six feet from tip to tip. As it turned out, he was destined to pioneer from these ugly eight-legged creatures, a $6 million industry never before essayed by an American.

Wakefield sent some specimens to the Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle. "These are delicious," he said, "but what kind of crabs are they?" Veterans of the Wildlife Service identified them as Paralithodes camtschatics, specimens of the King Crab, a giant crustacean peculiar to the North Pacific. When WWll ended, Captain Wakefield decided to go a-crabing. The Japanese with their floating canneries had been crab fishing commercially for years. Wakefield had a better idea--not canning, but freezing the delicious meat of the crabs taken fresh from the sea.

As the crabs were hauled aboard, they were dumped into "live" tanks of circulating sea water where, removed from the mighty pressure of the sea, they became sluggish and manageable. They were then washed, placed into wire baskets and plunged immediately into boiling water and cooked. The meat was removed, frozen in blocks and, as an extra insurance to perfection, covered with a freezing glaze of fresh, clear water. The DEEP SEA could freeze and store 170 tons of crab meat.

The first three years were rough ones, during which Wakefield struggled to create a market. By 1950, the battle began to pay off. Fine restaurants were buying Wakefield's new frozen crab heavily, and it had made its first appearance in grocery stores. Two years later, Captain Wakefield was face-to-face with a brand new problem--demand threatened to exceed the supply.

He made a quick decision that seemed foolhardy to old hands along the Seattle waterfront. He decided to risk a winter voyage to the Bering. The DEEP SEA was the only fishing vessel underwriters ever insured for winter voyages, but even she had always kept to port in January and February.

The trip across the North Pacific was rough but uneventful. They stopped for fuel and water at False Pass, Alaska, on 31 January and two days later they took on three more crew members at the village of Akutan to make up a full twenty-two man complement. Early in the morning 4 February, they reached their destination and began fishing operations.

It was clear, calm, and cold. They made two prospecting hauls without success, but the third trawl showed promise.

Then it began to blow, and for 5 full days all hands fought the fury of the Arctic. It was a norther, 80-miles-an-hour fresh from the Polar ice cap, and the temperature was minus 14. Each sea crashing over the ship added to the tons of ice forming on decks, superstructure and rigging, and the men chopped and beat at it with axes, crowbars and clubs day and night to prevent capsizing.

On the tenth, the wind swung to the southwest and moderated to a gentle breeze. Air temp climbed to 22 degrees. A net was dug out from under two feet of solid ice, and went over the side for a one-hour tow. As it was lifted alongside the ship, jammed to the wings with 8 or 10 thousand crabs, it was carried away from the sheer weight of the enormous creatures, and net and haul were lost.

A new net was bent on, and trawling operations continued. They ended up packing to maximum capacity--15,000 pounds of King Crab legs and claws a day. Captain Wakefield had accomplished his purpose. His hard-earned market had an unfailing, year-round supply of King Crab, as promised.

This story on small, yellowing, pages was published in Photo Life,
date and author unknown. The image above accompanied the article &
illustrates the action on board the DEEP SEA.

The Wakefield family lived for a short time at Griswold, Shaw Island, and West Sound, Orcas Island in the late 1800s.

Lee Wakefield owned Apex Cannery on Fidalgo Island.

SALMON BANKS ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ With CAPTAIN PEACOCK

2011-05-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

Photo by J.W. Sandison, Bellingham, c. 1924.
The 53.5-ft. Tug FAMOUS can be seen in the background, on right.
Courtesy of Whatcom Museum of History©, Bellingham, WA.
All Rights Reserved. This image is intended for personal or research use only.

"Pioneers of Puget Sound, especially loggers, beachcombers, navigators, and fishermen, who seined salmon out at the Salmon Banks, or other seining haunts of the San Juan archipelago, may well remember the old wood-burning tug the FAMOUS, and Captain Billy Peacock, her owner.
   How-some-ever, what I attempt to narrate here, dates back to c. 1912. More modern tugs took towing jobs away from Captain Peacock until he was not making expenses. As purse-seining was the all important topic of the men with whom he associated, Captain Peacock decided to install a seine table in the stern of the 'Old FAMOUS' and equip her with a purse-seine, organize a crew, and join the fleet of purse-seine launches and motor boats that swarmed about the channels and bays surrounding the San Juan Islands.
   Captain Billy had a son whom he had tutored as a 'steamboat' engineer. He collected others of his crew from those of a more or less adventurous trend of mind, and a small amount of experience in the vocation of purse-seining for salmon in the waters of Puget Sound.
   For some unaccountable reason, Captain Billy Peacock and his crew aboard the 'Old FAMOUS' made some good hauls. But the FAMOUS was too long and too clumsy to steer around a school of fish and manipulate among a fleet of hundreds of purse-seine launches that could skulk right up alongside and throw out the 'lead' and surround a school of fish before Billy could get his crew and equipment into action.
   The FAMOUS being a steamship, that burned wood or coal, it had to be 'fed-up' on beach-wood. This required the time and labor of all hands to comb the beach for fuel 2, 3, or 4 hours of every 24. This process caused comments from the crew, and Captain Billy especially, which I will not repeat here because of their inflammability.
   The following spring Captain Billy Peacock traded the 'old FAMOUS' for an old gas launch named the CARLYLE which had been used as a purse-seiner here and there, up and down the inland coastal waters. There was a crack in one of the cylinder heads of the engine of the CARLYLE which Billy did not discover until he reached the Salmon Banks. It was discovered by an engineer from one of the other seine boats that came along side to give assistance.
   The engineer relieved the situation for the time being by driving the blade of a case knife into the crack. Billy and his son together, got the engine started after priming the plug-sparks and turning the bullwheel several times back and forth.
   The first week out, all of Captain Peacock's crew quit, but one Austrian and his son. So he hove into Friday Harbor in search of a crew on Sunday morning. Brother Frank and I acted favorably and so did Charley I. Gant, who was out for a 'lark' and some spending money. He went aboard to act in the capacity of cook. Seven in all were aboard the CARLYLE in the cruise to the salmon banks that hazy Sunday morning. We ran into a school of mostly Sockeye salmon first, off Cattle Point, and made a haul. We surrounded a good school, but before we got them pursed into the 'bunt', the seine parted in several places and we lost lots of fish. But, as fate favors her own freaks, we landed enough salmon that first haul, to net each man of the crew a twenty dollar share in a period of two hours.
   The seine had to be resewed in many places where the folds had been exposed to the air and sun and where slime and jelly fish had not been washed out the last time the net was used.
   In the meantime, we lost the balance of that school of fish because we were mending net and disposing of the salmon we had in the hold from our first haul.
   I could forsee our impending doom from thence forward, and begged Billy to put me ashore. (As I had a family of 5 children and a wife to support.) But he begged and pleaded with me to stay the week out, because I was the only experienced purse-seine man of his crew. On behalf of Charley Gant and brother Frank, I promised to try for another haul.

Netting needles and seine fishing photograph from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society.

   On Tuesday morning we cruised up along the west side of San Juan Island, past Mitchell Bay, and the mouth of Open Bay, west of Henry Island, when up popped a school of salmon just outside of the CARLYLE, 30 or 40-feet away. I was standing by the pilot house at the time, and I pointed them out to Captain Billy. They were finning leisurely along, with a good, fair-tide, which would carry them to Boundary Bay. From there they would next wend their way into the Fraser River to spawn another generation of sockeye salmon.
   Billy signaled to cut loose, and seine rolled off over the turntable, and the fish began to 'sound' out of sight. Billy turned out and made a 50-yard circle, and hurried back to the lead end of the seine. The way bubbles came up we all knew we had fish by the thousands. We all felt highly elated. Even our cook took a plunger and scared them away from the open ends of the seine.
   At last we had them collected into the heavy bunt. We had not got all the weak part of the seine up on the table when we noticed the tide was taking us into a fish-trap lead.
   'Throw out the anchor,' yelled the Austrian.
   Before I could stop Billy and his son, they ran forward and threw both anchors overboard. Brother Frank and I were left to hang onto the part of the seine that was last on the table. When the CARLYLE came to the end of the anchor line, she hove to with a jerk, and the weak old seine parted from the new, strong bunt, and that bag of 15,000 or 20,000 salmon swam on, except for 12 that got gilled in some broken meshes. I jumped into the skiff, freed them from the meshes, and tossed them into the skiff.
   We estimated that loss at at least $100 per share. Our cook, Charley Gant took the loss more seriously than the rest of us, as he thought he had made a summer's wages when he saw that bag full of fish almost ready to haul in.
   Again, I asked Billy to put me ashore. Again, he begged me to go with all hands to Stewart Island to help them sew up the torn net. I went; we spent 2 more days mending rotten places in that seine. Friday noon we came out into Speiden Channel and made a set for another school.
   I am here to tell you, they all got away that time. Billy laid it to a rip in the tide, but all hands agreed we had had fishing enough aboard the CARLYLE that year."

Jim Baker
Orcas Island, WA.
The Orcas Islander, 6 July 1944

SOUTH FROM ALASKA ☆ ☆ ☆ The Great Canoe Race by Captain Doug Logan

2011-05-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

Harbor view of Petersburg, AK. Photo by Chuck Diven.
Undated postcard published by C.P. Johnston Company, Seattle, WA.
C. Christensen collection ©.

"So, you want to hear about the canoe race? Let's start off with a little Petersburg history. In 1940, the population was 1,641. There was a one-man bank with a total of two-and-a-half million bucks in it. A sleepy, little halibut town. A few purse seiners, but not too many. A couple of canneries for salmon and one big cold storage for halibut. Of that 1,600 population, I'd say 90 to 95 percent were Norwegian, mostly second generation. One Filipino family. Maybe half a dozen Indian families. And one white man. Me.
   The reason I was in Petersburg was because I always got a good job on the halibut boats because I'd overhaul the engines in the wintertime and get 'em ready to go for spring. I used to fish with the Otness group--I was buddies with Johnny Otness. We sailed together in WW II. Toward spring, I'd work for Bob Thorstensen's father-in-law hauling trap logs and hanging web. I had a little bitty tugboat, a 36-footer, and a rigging scow that I'd yard out the trap logs with.
   One winter I worked for Puget Sound Bridge and Dredge Company. They were dredging the Wrangell Narrows with the old dipper dredge AJAX. Bob Morton was dipper man and George Youth was running the tug TOM for 12 hours a day. I'd run it the other 12 hours, hauling dump scows out to Mountain Point and dumping them in deep water and then bringing them back and tying them alongside the dredge.
   The other thing I'd do in the winter is drink. Because that's about all there was to do in Petersburg. Everybody drank Everclear. We'd make punch out of it, and every night there was a house party somewhere. And of course everyone was invited. They'd take a washtub and, oh, six or eight quarts of orange juice, canned orange juice, some grape juice to make the punch purple, throw a few lemons and a couple of quarts of Everclear and a little bit of water. So you were drinking that stuff, which was disguised by grapefruit juice and orange juice. The next thing you know, you couldn't grab your ass with both hands.
   Communication with the outside world was one plane a day from Ketchikan. For freight and passenger service, every two weeks we had Alaska Steam--the BARANOFF one time, the ALEUTIAN the next. The ALEUTIAN was about 260-feet, not a very big ship, and she made about 15 knots, which is pretty fast.
   Anyway, the chief mate and one of the third mates were having a drink with me at the Harbor Bar, and we got into an argument. The chief was an old friend of mine. We'd sailed together in the Merchant Marines--sailing S.U.P. [Sailors' Union of the Pacific]. The argument was over the seaworthiness of my canoe.
   It was an Indian dugout canoe, a whaling canoe--a pretty good-size one. I'd bought it in La Push on the Washington coast in 1944 for $20 cash, and a shot-out .22 special and a couple dozen #4 Victors. I'd restored the canoe pretty good, putting in some new seats and built a little transom on the stern just big enough to take an outboard.
   What a lot of people don't know is the bottom of these ocean-going canoes is about four inches thick, tapering from the bottom, which is flat, on up to the sides to about one inch at the gunnel. Then they'd always put a wear strip across the top of the gunnel which was four inches high. So there was quite a bit of freeboard with just me in the canoe.
   Anyway, I threw it on the back of a boat and took it up to Petersburg as my hunting canoe. I had a brand new 20-horse Merc on it that had just come out in 1948. It was a gorgeous rig, and I wasn't about to take any guff about her seaworthiness.
   So I made a bet: that I could beat the ALEUTIAN to Seattle. For a case of MacNaughton's.
   We sailed at the same time, and I took off down the channel going like hell. The way I had the canoe rigged is I had a couple of 50-gallon drums with pre-mixed gas and side bungs in 'em, old lube-oil drums. This way I could run on a 50-gallon drum rather than a little six-gallon tank that came with the Mercury. I had a little Coleman gas stove, a couple flash-lights, and a box of grub and a handful of spare parts--spark plugs, etc.
   Of course, the ALEUTIAN had to stop for 4-hours in Wrangell and another 4-hours in Ketchikan on the southbound trip. She could make a red hot 15-knots, but the canoe, planing, could do about 25-knots. So if I could stay awake, I figured I could beat her hands down.
   I'd forgotten how that canoe could beat a person to death in a light chop. I had a long handle on that Mercury and I'd stand up and grunt 'til I had to sit down, first on one cheek, then the other. I'd get my sleeping bag and lean back with the tiller under my arm. Of course, I had my rain gear. It was a little damp out there.
   I stopped at Klemtu behind Cone Island there by Boat Bluff, where I slept at that little cannery for 4-hours, and had the watchman wake me up. Ran into a little chop crossing the Queen Charlottes, forcing me to slow down, but I made it to the locks in 40 hours and 8 minutes, which is an average speed of a little more than 18.5-knots.
   When I got there, I couldn't even get out of that canoe, I was so stiff. But I won my case of whiskey. In those days there was a locks slip that you got with a time and date stamped on it, so I had proof. That canoe is now on display at the Burke Museum in Seattle--up there in the middle of the University of Washington. I always thought I'd repeat the trip back up, but it's a little slower up hill. I'm clear."

Steam Launch OCTOO ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ From the Quarterdeck

2011-05-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

"World War l was just barely over-- it was 1919 and as usual I was busy at my favorite occupation which was bumming around the waterfront in Olympia. One of my waterfront idols was a young chap who had just returned from Naval duty as an Ensign. My respect for him, however, was greatly enhanced by the simple fact that he owned and skippered a steam tugboat. The boat was named OCTOO. He was Delta V. Smyth and a more considerate man never walked a deck.
Being short-handed one day Del asked me if I would like to go along to pick up a tow. Right there he acquired a deckhand, age twelve.
The engineer was Jonas Wheeler who wore his hat pointed at the top like 'Smokey the Bear'. One eye was more than slightly off course but it came in handy as he could watch the gauge glass and steam pressure at the same time. He smoked a little pipe which was apparently synchronized with the main engine. Del swore he could get the correct RPMs by counting Jonas' puffs.
Del was the cook as well as the skipper so at noon I finally got my itchy fingers on that steering wheel. Right then I was in love for the first time -- steamboating on Puget Sound!
I spent all my waking hours for years on any steamboat I could get on whether it was underway or not. Due to the days I had to waste in school it was sometime before I began to 'deck' for Hill Davis on the LUMBERMAN.
Hill taught me how to splice lines, lay a course, to read a Mercator's chart, variation and deviation, that there were three norths and why some markers were red and others black, and why they were shaped differently. Also, he taught me how to handle a boat. The best days were when I got to blow that big, beautiful steam whistle! Man, that was living!"

By Ken Ayers, President
Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society
Quarterly Journal The Sea Chest

The 38-ft vessel OCTOO was launched at Reed's, Decatur Is.,
for the Seattle Oyster and Fish Company in the fall of 1908.
Miss Irene Van Moorhem broke the customary bottle of wine over the bow.
In the beginning of OCTOO's career, she worked as a shrimper both "down sound" and up in the San Juan Islands
as reported in the early San Juan Islander newspaper
Photo courtesy of Robin Paterson.

Shrimper ORLOU (right), sister ship to OCTOO,
also built at the Reed Shipyard,
on Decatur Island in 1909.
Photo courtesy of Robin Paterson.

The Old Cannery Dock (Friday Harbor, Washington )

2011-04-16T23:47:00.000-07:00

Fish Tender NEREID, built 1911 by Albert Jensen, Friday Harbor, WA.
Original Photo from the Saltwater People Historical Society Collection©
Site: Home port of Friday Harbor, WA.

"If only docks could talk, oh what stories they could tell! For many years my Uncle Art was the engineer on the Friday Harbor Canning Co.'s fish carrier NEREID. Of course, when they came in with a load of salmon they needed to tie up at the cannery dock to unload, but other times they just needed a place to park the boat for awhile. In such a case, if all of the spaces were full, they often tied up to another boat that was already at the dock. (This practice is called rafting.)

Way back in the thirties or forties, Uncle Art was a good friend of George Willey who was the manager of the Friday Harbor Canning Co. It seems that one summer, someone with a log patrol license had tied a cedar log alongside the cannery dock. It was a big one, probably in access of six-feet in diameter and about forty-feet long. They left it there for a long time; so long in fact that Mr. Willey was getting worried that a big winter northeaster would drive it right through the cannery dock. He told Uncle Art about his concerns and asked 'Unk' if he could do anything about the situation.

Well, one very foggy day someone untied the big log and gave it a mighty push out into that dense fog. Dad 'just happened' to be out in that fog with his boat, and slowly the huge shape of that log came into sight. Dad said that in that thick fog it looked like it was as big as an aircraft carrier. He towed it home and cut it into shake bolts. Quickly he moved those bolts to a nice secluded clearing in the trees where he split them into shakes. There were enough to shake the entire house with a lot left over. As a teenager, I planed some of those leftover shakes to about an eighth of an inch thickness and made them into a guitar. Some sixty years later I still have that guitar. The cedar wood was beautiful in the guitar; the shakes were beautiful on the house too. They're still on the old house today."

By Henry Hoffman, San Juan County, Oct. 2006

Author of Henry's Stories: Kitchen Garden Press, Shaw Island, 2008.

"Capt." Willey, as he was affectionately known to his many friends, was born in 1869, and came to Puget Sound as a boy and has been actively engaged in the lumber, shipping, and salmon business almost continuously.
   Soon after the turn of the century, together with the late Wm. Schultz and Wm. Persell, he formed the Friday Harbor Packing Co. and purchased the present Friday Harbor Canning Co. property, and operated one of the most successful ventures on Puget Sound.
   In 1925, on the death of Wm. Schultz, he took over the cannery and continued as principal owner and manager until 1935, when he retired.
   Courtesy of the Friday Harbor Journal, n.d.

SAGA OF THE SEA IN THE GULF ISLANDS

2011-04-15T01:23:00.000-07:00

Salt Spring Island, Gulf Island Group, B.C, undated.
Photo Postcard from the Saltwater People Historical Society Collection.
Copyright by Western Canada Airlines©

"It was on 13 July 1960, just outside Bedwell Harbour, when disaster struck and a 25-day drama began to run its course. There was no inkling of the coming events when H.A. "Buster" Horel loaded his bulldozer on Asa Douglas' barge for a routine towing job from Pender Island to Salt Spring Island. It happened quickly and no one really knows how, but it is theorized that the barge struck a deadhead, filled with water, tilted, and dumped the "cat" into 200-feet of water.
   Everyone but Buster thought the 'cat' was gone for good. Everyone including the insurance company. The insurance company paid off and with almost a snicker gave Buster the salvage rights for $50. He and Asa began dragging operations. He hired the services of two scuba-divers from Chemainus.
   It was 16 days later before they hooked the 'cat' for the first time. The divers went down 204-feet, and working in the dark, attached a line. A storm came up and the rope slipped off.
   It was another five days before they hooked it again. This time they were successful and the line stayed on. The dredge, that is currently widening the canal between North and South Pender, was brought into the fray. The dredge, with its boom and a tug worked for five hours before swinging the 'cat' upon the beach. It was the 6 August. It was not the end of the saga.
   The action of the sea water had turned the pot metal parts of the 'cat' into the consistency of cookies. The metal crumbled at the touch. Buster, who had stripped his old 'cat' of parts, began to work on the water-soaked machine. He changed the parts and pumped diesel fuel through the system. Two hours after beaching, the bulldozer was running again!
   Divers working in complete darkness at 204-feet is a rarity and indeed, this salvage operation may well be a record. Buster Horel is to be commended for tackling this almost hopeless job, and succeeding.
   Maybe a 'cat' has nine lives after all."
Mrs. Etta Egeland of Friday Harbor had a relative living on Salt Spring Island who mailed her the above column. The story had been written up in the weekly paper, Driftwood.  The Friday Harbor Journal received permission from the editor, Mr. W. Fisher, of Salt Spring, to reprint it in the Journal in 1960.