SOME CANADIAN CHARACTERS I HAVE KNOWN with Boatbuilder N. C. Blanchard

 

Harold A. Jones
Royal Vancouver Yacht Club
Commodore 1939, 1944-1947.
He was elected to an honorary
life membership in 1953.
Photo courtesy of the RVYC

"Harold A. Jones was a Canadian who lived in Vancouver, B.C., where he was in the towboat business. As I recall he had between seven and twelve tugs in his fleet, all with their uniformly painted stacks, and he was pretty much the Foss of Vancouver. You'd see his tugs pulling logs, helping ships get away from the pier, those sorts of things. He was a damned good fleet operator, and everybody knew his boats.
        One of my early trips to Vancouver to visit Harold must have been around 1936. Harold had a daughter--his only child--who was around 16 at the time but thought she was 25, and of course, she could do no wrong. Harold was likable and always very popular on both sides of the line.
        Harold Jones was a preeminent member of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, and for a long time, he owned a boat that my father built, the Gwendolyn II, which was previously owned by Fritz Hellenthal. Although I never had an opportunity to sail with him, Harold was a very good competitor until WW II came along, and all racing stopped. Well, shortly after the cessation of hostilities Harold phoned me and said he needed to meet with me––something about Princess Louisa Inlet. I said that that would be OK, so we arranged a date, and I drove up to Vancouver.
        When I got to Harold's house he was down in his playroom, I was highly surprised to find that in the space of the octagonal foundation in his basement, he had built, with his own hands, a light diorama of Vancouver from the water, and he had his Lionel model railway running through it.
        Harold continued with the Gwen for quite a few years, and then around 1946, he got Ed Monk to design him a new boat, a big sloop, about 65 feet with a nice teak house. He told Ed he wanted to build her skookum, and Ed designed it plenty skookum, and then Harold went and doubled all the dimensions. The frames were steam-bent oak and four inches square --really crazy. The result was that she floated about eight or ten inches below her designed waterline, but that didn't cut down on Harold's pride. He was very decent about how it came out, and always said, 'It was my own damned fault.'
        On his cruise down to Seattle Harold never came alone. He would always come through the locks with a helper. Of course, he could always pull a deckhand off his list to go along with him. The most memorable thing about his coming through the Lake Washington Ship Canal was that he would stand on the foredeck of his boat and play his trumpet. He always had his trumpet with him, and you could hear him coming. If we were planning to have lunch at the Seattle Yacht Club I'd leave the shop as soon as I heard his trumpet. I'd walk out on the dock at the club and here he'd come, with somebody else steering the boat, and Harold still on the foredeck playing his trumpet. You know, in those days very few adult men could play an instrument of any kind unless they were professionals.
        Harold Jones was a character, and that reminds me of the five old Canadian gentlemen who owned the Minerva. She was still gaff-rigged, but she was a big, powerful yawl, about 50 feet long. She belonged to these five old gentlemen, and they always kept a hired 'boy' on her––he was only 65!
        When the old boys finished their race they would sail right up to their mooring––they'd come in under full sail and pick up their buoy––and there was no sign of a breakwater near the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club like there is now. They always kept their dinghy on the mooring buoy. It was a pretty good dinghy, too, about 11 or 12 feet, because their hired boy would use it to row all of them together into the club float.

Yacht MINERVA
"Jones was also an exacting and
dominant skipper of Spirit II. His
pride and joy was Spirit which he built 
from an Ed Monk design in 1946."
Courtesy of the Royal Vancouver YC.

        

These gentlemen always imported their Scotch in the barrel from Scotland, and the barrel sat with a spigot in it between the berths in the after-stateroom. As soon as the first one came into the cockpit in his white flannels after a race, the 65-year-old boat boy would show up with a water server, but it was full of Scotch whisky. One by one each of them would show up in the cockpit in his white flannels, and then everybody knew it was an open house on the Minerva. If you were aboard you were immediately offered a drink, and one of them would start pouring, and if you didn't stop him he'd fill that tumbler right up to the top with Scotch whisky.

Everybody always liked to talk about these guys, and they were a popular topic of conversation. They had an agreement among them that as they died off, the last survivor would own the Minerva outright. Of course, once they began to die there were only a couple of years before all five of them were gone."

Words by: Norman C. Blanchard (1911-2009) with Stephen Wilen. Knee-Deep in Shavings, Memories of Early Yachting and Boatbuilding on the West Coast. Victoria, B.C., Canada. Horsdal & Schubart Publishers Ltd. 1999. 

From the library of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

☛ BOOK REVIEW ☛ "BUILDING BOATS WAS ALL HE EVER WANTED TO DO"

From the library of the S.P.H.S.

Knee Deep in Shavings: Memories of Early Yachting and Boatbuilding on the West Coast.
Blanchard, Norman C., with Stephen Wilen. Victoria, BC; Horsdal & Schubart Publishers. Ltd. 

      "In 1778, the sailors' sailor Capt. Cook blithely sailed past the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the 15-mile-wide entrance to Puget Sound. He didn't have a clue there was anything down there. In the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of yachting, publications featured who was who in New York, Newport, and Boston. They also didn't have a clue there was anything out there in Puget Sound.
      This book is the opening of a long-lost treasure trove of information about some of yachting's finest designers, builders, and sailors, whom virtually no one knew about. Although the book's title refers to the West Coast, it is focused on Puget Sound not only because the chronicler, Norm Blanchard, built boats in Seattle, but also because that's where most of the action was. Puget Sound and its adjoining passages are blessed with islands, fjords, bays, and coves unnumbered. Its forests provided unending supplies of high quality, long-length native woods. 
      This environment spawned numerous boat yards and attracted great craftsmen. In fact, they were so busy that in 1936 the Board of Education of Seattle, the funky little town in the center of all this activity, hired one of the builders, Jim Chambers, to establish a boatbuilding school, Edison Tech Boatbuilding, in order to keep up with the growing demand for the wooden boats. That school, now Seattle Community College School of Marine Carpentry, is still in operation because yacht clients with high standards of excellence find the best quality craftsmanship there in Puget Sound.
      The special wonder revealed by this book is that the West Coast boats were designed mainly by homegrown folks, including Ted Geary, Ben Seaborn, Ed Monk, and Bill Garden. Geary and Seaborn designed most of the boats Norm mentions, and thus he talks most about their personalities, as well as the outstanding vessels they drafted. Norm does a good job of bringing these two geniuses to life. West Coast designers had little coverage during the high times of wooden yachts. But look at the photos, read of the vessels' performances, and believe that some of the Puget Sound naval architects should arguably be in the designers' Hall of Fame.
      The first quarter of this book begins with a history of the Blanchard Boat Co and Norm Blanchard's family. So many exquisite yachts were launched there, mainly for the middle-class backbone of the West Coast. From 1905 to 1941 the yard's production was a long line of top design and fine craftsmanship. The work of the Blanchard Co was recognized and praised by the designers and the clients; thus orders kept coming for more boats. However, typical of so many renowned yards, Norm states, 'Except for the SILVER KING, and maybe one or two other contracts, the company had been so unprofitable in the prewar years that we could barely justify our existence. If Dad had any business sense at all he would have given up years earlier, but building boats was all he ever wanted to do.' One may well assume that great boatbuilders are born that way, and the profit-and-loss departments of their brains are only vestigial.
      The book is a series of memories narrated by Norm Blanchard and recorded and edited by Stephen Wilen. Norm couldn't be a more ideal chronicler of the happenings in Puget Sound. He has an encyclopedic memory, a great photo collection, and he treats the cast of characters involved with the yachting scene in a straight-arrow manner, compassionate and nonjudgmental. However, he hands out a few sharp rebukes to a couple of customers for their lack of courtesy, and to William Atkin, the naval architect, for sloppy tables of offsets.
      Norm is a kind and patient soul but he suffers no fools. However, Norm doesn't knock people for trying. I enjoyed this story about the man who in 1932 commissioned the beautiful 58-ft sloop CIRCE, designed by Ben Seaborn when Seaborn was in high school. 

CIRCE
Ben Seaborn designer
Ray Cooke, owner. 
Seattle, WA. 1934
Original photo from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

CIRCE had the fine lines of a fast vessel, but the owner insisted on buying cheap sails that would become baggy in a short time. The sloop never did particularly well at races. Norm kindly concludes this story with: 'Anyway, the CIRCE was a wonderful design, especially for a kid who was still in high school when he designed her, and we have Ray Cooke to thank for her existence. Ray Cooke was never the yachtsman that he aspired to be, but he was a man who played a big role in my early years of sailing.'
      Norm also shares other perceptive observations about the flashy guys and the spear carriers he feels played significant roles in the West Coast yachting scene. He is a good journalist and senses interplay of attitudes. 'My acquaintance with Roy was made when he was having his first ever sail with Geary on SIR TOM. I think he thought that Ted [Geary] was going to buy a Cadillac from him, and I'm just as certain that Ted had thought that Roy [Corbett] was going to have himself a yacht.'
      The work of Ted Geary especially shines through in this book. His sailing vessels were virtually unbeatable. SIR TOM, an R-class sloop, lost only one race and that was to PIRATE, another Geary-designed "R" boat. His motor yachts, including MALIBU, PRINCIPIA, CANIM, AND BLUE PETER, are still going strong and still calendar art specimens of beautiful vessels.
      Knee Deep in Shavings is a valuable part of our maritime heritage. It tells us in fresh words and many never-before-published photos how a small population, still carving its existence out of the wilderness, ensnared yachting as part of its life and created some of the most fabulous vessels imaginable."

This review was written by the late, great Dick Wagner for The Sea Chest, June 2001. The journal of Puget Sound Maritime, Seattle, WA.
Here is a  link to a post on one chapter  about sailor Roy Corbett, from Knee Deep in Shavings by Blanchard on S.P.H.S. and 
another link here on a chapter about sailing in the San Juans, also by Blanchard.

❖ Flattie to SIR TOM ❖ ❖ ❖ ROY W. CORBETT ❖

From 1905 to 1969, the Blanchard Boat Co of Seattle was renowned and respected for its well-built vessels, large and small, sail and power. Today hundreds of graceful Blanchard boats still ply the sounds and inlets of Washington, Alaska, and B.C.
      Norman C. Blanchard is the son of Norman J. Blanchard, founder of the firm; here follows one of his abridged stories he wrote for Knee Deep in Savings with Stephen Wilen. (Search link below.)

R boat SIR TOM 
L-R: Andy Joy, Roy Corbett, J. Swift Baker, and
SYC Commodore Ted Geary, helmsman.
The 1930 crew after winning back the Lipton Trophy
at the P.I.Y.A. race at Cadboro Bay, Victoria, B.C.
These original photos from the archives of S.P.H.S.©

"Roy W. Corbett arrived in Seattle about 1920. I don't have any idea what brought him here. I don't think Roy even had a job when he got to Seattle, but within a short time, he did find work selling Cadillacs. Just how he got hooked up with L. E. 'Ted' Geary and the SIR TOM gang is a mystery, because when he first arrived in Seattle Roy Corbett didn't know sickum about sailing or sailboats. Over time, though, he managed to become a pretty good sailor.
      My acquaintance with Roy was made when he was having his first sail with Geary on the SIR TOM. I think he thought Ted was going to buy a Cadillac from him, and I'm just as certain that Ted thought that Roy was going to have himself a yacht. They remained good friends for life. It was probably around 1921 or 1922 when this occurred, and I think that Capt. Griffiths' two sons, who had been part of SIR TOM 's crew, decided they were getting a little too old for the game. So in the summer of 1922 Roy Corbett crewed on SIR TOM, with Geary at the helm, and my dad, who was the foredeck man, Colin Radford, and one or two others.
      Now, this was the time when the SIR TOM was being campaigned heavily. She always finished first, and her crew practiced very seriously right off our company dock. In time Roy became a very adept sailor and was the main sheet man on the SIR TOM under Geary, and later with Jack Graham at the helm.

Roy Corbett
Sailing a one-design Flattie, 1931,
designed by L. E. 'Ted' Geary.

Later called a Geary 18.

Photo from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

      Roy, to my knowledge, never sailed in any catboats, but, when Ted introduced the design for the Flattie, Roy was one of the first to put up the $150 and order one from my dad. I think that Roy mainly wanted the boat for their daughter, Mary Helen, to race. She became a pretty good sailor herself and was the 1929 Seattle Yacht Club Flattie champion.

      Finally, Roy bought a real boat from Geary, a Marconi-rigged ketch, c. 50-ft, built on speculation in CA. After C. W. Wiley died, Roy bought ALICE, renamed her MAHERO and won the SYC Opening Day Class A Race in 1932 and in 1937. Roy was commodore of the SYC in 1933, and active in the Barnacle Bill cruises that had been started by Bill Hedley. Roy kept the MAHERO until early in WW II when she was taken over by the Coast Guard."

DEBUTANTE,
Roy Corbett, 1937, Seattle.

Above text; Knee-Deep in Shavings by Norman C. Blanchard.

Book search here.

❖ CRUISING IN THE SAN JUANS ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON ❖ WITH A SHELL OIL CO. ROAD MAP.

Coon and McConnell Islands, San Juan County, WA.

Original Photo  from the archives of S.P.H.S.©

Jack Tusler was a character Eunice and I got acquainted with sometime after WW II; Eunice had known his wife because she was a teacher at the U of Washington when Eunice was there. Jack was originally from somewhere farther south, and they owned Coon Island. Coon Island is so small that some people don't even know it is there. There were no raccoons on it when Jack had it, but that's how it got its name. There was nothing at all on the island when Jack arrived, and he was kind of an opportunist so I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he bought it at a tax auction. [The Tuslers of Carmel, CA. bought Coon Is. from Gene Gould of Seattle in the peak of summer in 1940.] He built a nice cabin, just a log cabin with a gravel floor, and an outhouse, nothing more, and the Tusslers used it strictly as their summer home.
        Jack had a little daysailer, not very big, but it was a keelboat. The boat had a tent that they slipped over the boom, and as such, it was their cruiser, but mostly their cruising was rather short range.
        Well, one of their best stories was about the time a boat that was built at Grandy's went by Coon Island. The Tusler's beach was on the east side of the island, and Jack was there getting their boat provisioned for a cruise when he saw this nice 48-footer; it later belonged to Mrs. Eddie Hubbard, the widow of that great aviator who flew the first airmail contract between Seattle and Victoria. The boat went by well off the island, but awfully close to the reef on the east side of Coon, and is covered at high tide. Jack stood there on the beach fully expecting the boat to strike the reef, but they missed it by inches or a few feet, and so he continued stowing the equipment and food aboard his sailboat, using his two-man life raft for a dinghy.
        Pretty soon Jack's wife was ready, so they got on the boat and started sailing north. They wanted to go to Sucia Island, and of course, this was long before Sucia became a State Park. But they ran out of wind as soon as they got up a little past Jones Island, so they decided to go into the bight on the north side of Jones and drop the hook for the night.
        Jack was still standing on the foredeck after dropping the hook and double-checking that he had it in the ground properly when he noticed the 48-footer anchored nearby. A man called over to him from the aft cockpit, "Hi neighbor, wouldn't you like to come over and have a drink?"
        Jack said, "That sounds very nice," and Mrs. Tussler approved of accepting the invitation, but she did start her Primus stove and set the pressure cooker on it so supper would be ready in about an hour.
        They rowed over to the power cruiser and had a very pleasant hour. When it was time to row back to their boat, the man said, "Oh, just a minute, please. Tomorrow we want to go to Bellingham, to do some shopping. Do we go this way or that way?" pointing each way around Orcas Island.
        And Jack said, "Well, as a matter of fact, you can go either way. We're awfully close to the halfway mark right here, but I wouldn't know for sure without measuring it. Let me show you on a chart."
        So the man reached up to the chart table and got out a Shell Oil Co highway map of WA State. Jack said to him, "Gee, this is awfully small to measure accurately. Don't you have hydrographic charts?"
        The guy shook his head; apparently, he had never heard of hydrographic charts. Jack was looking around, and he saw the chart drawers down under the counter to the left of the wheel and he pulled a drawer open and said, "This is what we need. These are hydrographic charts.
        "Oh, the guy said. "I can't do anything with those things. All those little numbers, they just confuse me."
        Well, the next morning the couple went on their way, and Jack never heard from them again, nor read of any boating disaster in the newspaper, so he assumed they got to Bellingham all right. That was probably in the early 1950s, and the boat is still around, to the best of my knowledge.
        

L-R: Orcas Island mariners
Jack Tusler and R. B. Brown
Image courtesy of photographer Barbara Brown, Orcas Island, WA.
A rare image of these two well known Orcas Islanders.
If anyone has another, would you share for maritime history archives?

Another story about Jack Tusler--that guy was really a character-- he liked to create tableaux for passing boats, on the reef mentioned earlier. One time he got Dr. George Horton's 16-year-old daughter dressed up like a mermaid, sitting on the reef when it was a little out of the water. She had a mirror with her, and when the ferry from Anacortes came through Wasp Passage she flashed it and gave the passengers quite a show. Another time, he set up on the reef, a real old-fashioned barber chair that he had salvaged off the beach; he and a friend stood out there just like a barber giving a customer a shave. He always wanted to get a horse out there with a guy in a red coat sitting astride it, but he could never convince anyone to go along with putting their horse on that reef.
        Jack Tusler was a yachtsman himself but in a small way. The yachting people who knew him liked him, and I never heard a disparaging remark of any kind about Jack Tusler or his wife. And after she lost Jack, Mrs. Tusler married Jack's only brother.
Above text by:
Blanchard, Norman C. with Stephen Wilen. Knee Deep in Shavings, Memories of Early Yachting & Boatbuilding on the West Coast. 0-920663-63-X
Seattle, WA., Horsdal & Schubart; 1999.

     









The Museum of History and Industry, The Sophie Frye Bass Library, is the repository for photographs, boat plans, and brochures of the Blanchard Boat Co. (1900-1963).
http://www.mohai.org/