❖ A DAY ON A CANNERY TENDER ❖ by Gordon Jones

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. 

A purse seiner on the Salmon Banks, 
San Juan County, 1979.
Photo by Josef Scaylea
Original photo from the archives of the S. P. H. S.©

      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 for The Sea Chest, September 1976
The Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society

❖ Captain E. G. Baughman ❖ of the Gold Ship HUMBOLDT

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 number of the city's fire and police personnel also joined
the gold rush, leaving the 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 the 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 were 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".
Text from: 
The H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest. Gordon Newell, editor; Seattle, WA. Superior Publishing, 1966.

❖ COMMENTS ON TUG KATY's LOG of 5 JULY 2011 ❖

Steam tug KATY on left, 

Undated original photo from the archives of S.P.H.S.©

"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 anyone 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 Seafair 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. " 

The first log entry of the KATY and her owner/skipper
Above comment by L. W."Corkey" North, retired mariner/local historian, Deer Harbor, Orcas Island.

   

❖ Remembering Seattle Sailing Yacht ❖ ALOTOLA

ALOTOLA
226859 
The vessel owner, Charlie Frisbie, is aft.
Dated 1949, 
by mariner/photographer Dolph Zubick, Seattle.
Original from the archives of S.P.H.S©

 "The rest of the gang struggling the new mast onto the deck

for transport to 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 articles stating this was the tallest 

yacht mast in the PNW." Quote from Miles McCoy. 

Original photo by Dolph Zubick, Seattle, 1949, present this day.

From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

1949 at Karl Seastrom's shop.

Original photo by sailor/photographer Dolph Zubick, Seattle. 

See identification in the following text.

From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

ALOTOLA is receiving a new mast as seen in the following photographs by Dolph Zubick.
      "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 at this time, of ALOTOLA, home-port Seattle.
      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 spar-making. 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:
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 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 Frisbie 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."

Mariner memory from 1959:

"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.

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 his book Knee Deep in Shavings, Horsdal & Schubart, Victoria, BC, 1999.

In 1981 ALOTOLA was captured by the Danes from the north.
     

❖ PUGET SOUNDINGS by June Burn ❖

Vintage linen postcard by C.P. Johnston Co., Seattle, WA
From the archives of the S.P.H.S.

Inez "June" Chandler Harris Burn (1893-1969), the 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 the 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 that 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 -- the 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-click" 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 

standing on the caprail.

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.
Photo date circa 1921 from the S.P.H.S. archives.©

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 named in appreciation of their performances? The fine tug IROQUOIS. She burns more than a hundred barrels of oil a day and more when she 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".