❖ CASTING OFF 2013 ❖

Ready or not, we must cast off year two thousand and thirteen, while packing a seabag of maritime memories. The past year included 73 posts and 10 pages, each with vintage, original photographs from the archives developing in this salty county of San Juan. Below are some sad goodbyes, along with a few celebrations to log online and into our memory bank, before the tide washes in with a brand new year. 

22 August 2013
Ron Meng (1954-2013)

Ron and Jennifer Meng, 1970s
I.M.C., Lopez Island, WA.
Original photo from the archives of the S. P. H. S.©

The founder and owner of Islands Marine Center, Lopez Island, was a self-made man. Ron started Islands Marine Center c. 40 years ago, literally from the trunk of his car, servicing what was then a sizable fishing fleet on Lopez.
      Gradually, he and his wife Jennifer purchased waterfront property, developed a full-service marina and shifted their emphasis to recreational boaters as the commercial fishing industry waned. Ron designed and marketed his own brand of northwest-style boat, the Ocean Sport Roamer. Coming up on hull No. 100, this unique brand was a source of great pride for Ron, as he engaged his favorite pastime, fishing trips to Barkley Sound. 
Above text from The Journal of the San Juans

September 2013
GEMINI (ex-WESTERN FLYER)

GEMINI (ex-WESTERN FLYER)
Famous as the vessel used on 
Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez expedition.
Photo location, Port Townsend, WA., 
donated by Skip Bold, 9/2013.

Up from the bottom of Swinomish Slough and hauled out on the hard at Port Townsend is the vessel known widely as the transport for John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and crew, to the Sea of Cortez in 1940. 
      A review of Steinbeck's book, The Log from the Sea of Cortez can be viewed here.
      A Spring 2015 update of the vessel plans can be viewed here.

13 September 2013
Ferry HYAK collision in Harney Channel, ca. one mile north of Lopez Island ferry landing, San Juan County, WA.

The 28' sailboat was hit by the WSF HYAK
on 13 Sept. 2013.
The lone sailor was rescued before the loss of his vessel,
reported in the Journal of the San Juans,
as NORMA RAE.
An eyewitness said it was a clear day.
Two months later, a 21-page report was released
that listed the ferry crew at fault.

27 October 2013
      Seattle sailor Bill Buchan was honored on this day with his induction into the National Sailing Hall of Fame, which took place this year, in the historic waterfront district of Annapolis. 
      Bill won first place in the 3 Star Class World Championships in 1961, 1970, and 1985. 
      The Star-type boats are one of the world's oldest organized classes. Each boat was built to rigid specifications to make winning a factor more of skippering rather than hull design. The Star is a keel-type boat about 23-ft long, 5-ft beam, and weighing a little less than 1,500-lbs. 

 

Bill Buchan, 1970
With World Star Championship silverware.
Original photo from the archives of the S. P. H. S.©


In 1984 Buchan won a gold medal in the Olympic Games. While Bill was winning his Olympic gold, son Carl won an Olympic gold medal in the Flying Dutchman class. Congratulations on your awards, Mr. Buchan.

Bill Buchan, up, and Steve Ericsson,
crossing the finish line
for an Olympic gold medal, Star class,
10 August 1984.
Original photo from the archives of the S. P. H. S.©

6 December 2013
Anacortes, Fidalgo Island, WA.

America's Cup, in 1934.
Crafted in sterling silver
in 1848 by Garrard & Co.
It has been modified twice by adding
matching bases to allow for more engraving,
as viewed in the photo below.
Original photo from the archives of the S. P. H. S.©

      Into little Anacortes, on this date, and with "security escorts," came the oldest trophy in international sport, affectionately known as the "Auld Mug". 
      The sterling silver America's Cup was originally awarded in 1851 for a race around the Isle of Wight in England, won by the yacht AMERICA. 
      For the celebration at the Watermark Bookstore and the Anacortes Yacht Club, came the Commodore of the Golden Gate Yacht Club, Norbert Bajurin, and Mark Turner, the Anacortes-based builder of the ORACLE boats.
      Turner and Cafe Adrift helped with hosting and celebrating the public event. 
 

THE AMERICA'S CUP 
Watermark Bookstore, Anacortes, Dec. 2013.

    

✪ BOOK REVIEW: The Log from the Sea of Cortez ✪

The Log from the Sea of Cortez
John Steinbeck
(New York: Viking, 1951)

We have a book to write about the Gulf of California. We could do one of several things about its design. But we have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea; its duration a six weeks’ charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits—our own without reservation.
We made a trip into the Gulf; sometimes we dignified it by calling it an expedition. Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and more exciting name....
      We said, “Let’s go wide open. Let’s see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures.” (The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Introduction, pp. 1-2).
      And in this way and in this frame of mind did John Steinbeck and his good friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, set out on an off-season fishing boat for a 4,000-mile voyage from Monterey around the Baja peninsula to see what they could see and write about it in the spring of 1940.
It was an uneasy time in the United States for anyone aware of the gathering storm already underway in Europe and Asia. The violence and pointless destruction of war are ever-present in the back of Steinbeck’s mind even as he is escaping from the reach of newspapers and newsreels. “Hitler was invading Denmark and moving up towards Norway; there was no telling when the invasion of England might begin; our radio was full of static and the world was going to hell.” (Steinbeck, p. 7)
Steinbeck’s mind roamed the world and the history of humankind, even as his eyes and hands were occupied with the business of collecting samples. Plenty of marine biology took place on the trip. Thousands of specimens were dipped up in nets, pried off rocks, and harpooned after the boat turned left at the corner of the tip of Baja and made its way slowly north. The log offers full details of the common and Latin names of the specimens, their customary habitats, and their taxonomy (the contribution, no doubt, of  Ricketts, who was listed as co-author on the earlier, unabridged version of the story, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking, 1941). But both as individuals and as members of functional ecosystems, the marine organisms inspired Steinbeck to poetic description, forays into word origins and mythology, analysis of their design and purpose, and philosophical reflection comparing their lives and communities to human ones.
      Aquariums, tanks, and trays filled the hold of the 76-foot WESTERN FLYER. Neither Steinbeck nor Ricketts had ever attempted this sort of prolonged scientific expedition before, and much of the trip was a series of experiments, missteps, and disappointments in trying variously to keep the specimens alive (for observation) or to kill and preserve them without destroying their distinctive forms and brilliant colors. There were problems with equipment—notably, the outboard motor for the small shore boat that refused to work except when removed for inspection and installed in a bucket—and both the still and film cameras produced poor images in the rare instances when there was anyone with dry hands free to use them.
      There were the usual sorts of squabbles you’d expect among a group of men (which included Steinbeck, Ricketts, the boat owner and captain, an engineer, and two Italian fishermen hired in Monterey), sharing a small, hot, and fishy space together for weeks. Tensions grew when the store of liquor ran out and when fresh food or delicacies found their way aboard; crew members were occasionally mutinous about doing dishes, frustrated by faulty equipment and the efforts to collect, or testy from lack of sleep. At one point, Steinbeck dryly admits that, “all collecting trips to unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.” (Steinbeck, p.10)

      The WESTERN FLYER encountered many Mexicans in its travels. At each port of call or small anchorage, once the locals figured out what the boat was up to, small boys and men alike tied up alongside to sell specimens they’d found or to offer their services as scouts and collectors. Steinbeck is generous in his description of these mostly poor, local inhabitants, noting their common humanity and describing their living arrangements without condescension.
In fact, the main subject of Steinbeck’s account is not the marine organisms they were collecting, but philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, human character, and the characteristics and course of civilizations—including the human tendency to make war and commit murder. He compares the study of tide pool animals to the study of homo sapiens, “We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, ‘This species typically does thus and so,’ but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species....When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species.” (Steinbeck, p. 15)
The voyage offered a respite from the reality of all that. “...the great world dropped away very quickly. We lost the fear and fierceness and contagion of war and economic uncertainty. The matters of great importance we had left were not important.” (Steinbeck, p. 173) At some point, after the boat had gone as far north in the Sea of Cortez as it could go, had filled all its tanks and trays and turned for home, they would have to rejoin that world again. But for now, there was a pause and a chance to concentrate on the matter at hand—the boat, the sea, the creatures swimming and crawling within it. “France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost—we didn’t know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles. It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much.” (Steinbeck, p. 7)
Near the end of the expedition, Steinbeck observes that, “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.” (Steinbeck, p. 179) In this way, a person comes to see that “all things are one thing and that one thing is all things...all bound together by the elastic string of time.” But lest the book end on a note too high-toned and philosophical, Steinbeck sums up what the expedition meant to him in the most basic terms. “Here was no service to science, no naming of unknown animals, but rather—we simply liked it. We liked it very much. The brown Indians and the gardens of the sea, and the beer and the work, they were all one thing and we were that one thing too.”

2015, Spring Update. The WESTERN FLYER has been salvaged from the mud of Swinomish Slough and lives on the hard in Pt. Townsend, WA. For an update of the future plans for her please see here.

This is the third in a series of book reviews kindly contributed by mariner, Allison Hart Lengyel of San Juan County, WA.

Her first review was posted 13 Nov. 2011: Leviathan or the Whale by Philip Hoare; Harper Collins, 2008.

The second from her pen, posted January 2012 please see N by E by Rockwell Kent; Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1930.