Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

 IN THE BEGINNING, there was a desk and an office somewhere in the WaMu building in downtown Seattle, where sat Bruce Chapman, wracking his fertile brain for good ideas for a better world, not the least of which would be an idea for how to finance his newborn think tank.
   Discovery Institute, he called it. But Chapman knew this would matter only if he discovered that elusive source of funding—not easy in an intellectual outpost like Seattle. But one thing begat another. And behold, 15 years later—approximately seven days in think-tank time—Discovery Institute is well-begotten. Chapman and his colleagues have conjured up many good ideas on issues ranging from speedier border crossings and international trade to underground highways with digital tolls.
   But they are best-known as the headquarters of one especially contentious idea called intelligent design, or simply ID, which says that Charles Darwin blew it and that human life is too darned complex to have evolved, so it must have been designed by somebody smarter than we are.
   To Chapman’s delight, that idea has "taken on a life of its own," he says. Somewhat to his chagrin, it has been embraced with particular zeal by religious fundamentalists, so that godfearing creationists ironically find themselves seeking intellectual guidance from godless Seattle, Land of the Liberal Democrats, home of the unchurched.
   In the past year or two, intelligent design has burst into school boardrooms, courtrooms, the halls of Congress and the White House. Most recently, ID was the issue in a major trial that ended with a federal judge scolding its proponents. It has been the topic of cover stories in journals ranging from the Seattle Weekly to The New York Times. Each seems to ask: How in the world did Seattle and the notoriously and unholy Pacific Northwest become the focal point of a great debate over evolution and creationism?
   The answer: Bruce Chapman.
   And, to a lesser extent, a mild-mannered philosophy professor from an obscure Presbyterian college just across the mountains in Spokane.
   But there is much more to this story. I can bear witness to this. My name is Ross, and I am a recovering Discovery fellow. For a few weeks back in 2001, I worked with Chapman and Co.—not on Darwinism, but on transportation. I also am a preacher’s kid who graduated many years ago from that little Presbyterian college.
In Seattle, merely acknowledging my past association with the institute is like confessing to pedophylia or, worse, to failing to recycle my beer bottles. Bring it up in your favorite smoke-free brewpub and your friend is liable to back off for fear of contracting intellectual bird flu.
   But more of that later. Here’s what I’ve learned about Bruce Chapman and the Origins of Species:
   When I first met Chapman, he was not Chapman. He was PC Circleman, the pseudonym under which he wrote an engaging urban affairs column for the staid editorial pages of the Seattle Times. This was the late ’60s, when I was a cub reporter in the Times newsroom, and Chapman was an articulate, slightly geeky Harvard guy with short hair and black-framed glasses who wrote the kinds of things I yearned to write. We were newcomers to Seattle, each in his own way trying to figure out the chemistry of our adopted home town.
   Seattle in the ’60s and early ’70s was a nice, family-friendly city run by a benevolent clique of aging white businessmen who deliberated in the private confines of the Rainier Club, just up the street from City Hall. The city had well-paying Boeing jobs, good schools, a fine university, an outdoorsy ethic and a housing market where a 20-something could buy a three-bedroom fixer-upper for $15,000.
   "Seattle was a real city, but it was not finished," Chapman recalls today. "It didn’t have the ethnic divisions that plagued Eastern cities. It was open and honest and genuinely bipartisan."
   It was also teetering. Boeing lost its supersonic jetliner deal, went into a tailspin and laid off thousands. There were riots around the university and the Central Area over Vietnam and civil rights. And local government was shaken by police payoff scandals that reached into City Hall.
   The climate was ripe for reform. And Chapman, who had moved here in 1966, was eager to help. While at Harvard, the Illinois native had spent summers at the Eastside home of his college roommate. Meanwhile, he had teamed up with fellow Harvardite George Gilder to found a magazine and a progressive Republican club called the Ripon Society. Later they cowrote a book critical of the GOP’s rightwing shift. "We were pro-civil rights and opposed to the John Birch Society and the radical right," Chapman recalls
Eager to put his ideas into action, Chapman became active in CHECC (Choose and Effective City Council), a group of young upstarts, mostly newcomers, bent on reforming city government. In 1971, barely five years after he moved to Seattle, he won a seat on its City Council.
   So we meet again, Chapman as the young whiz kid at City Hall and yours truly as a Times reporter on the city beat. A radical he was not, but he certainly was a radical departure from Seattle’s established order. While his older colleagues focused on budgets and barking dogs, Chapman and fellow reformer (and Yale grad) John Miller pumped out a steady stream of ideas, small and not-so-small, for arts and parks, for open meetings and political term limits, for preserving Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. Some of those ideas raised hackles, particularly the proposal to tear down the ugly but functional Alaska Way Viaduct.
   Chapman was never a populist nor charismatic pol. There was always an unspoken air of I-know-something-you-don’t. He didn’t suffer fools well; and Seattle, in turn, had little use for Ivy League intellectuals.
   But something worked. By the mid-’70s, Seattle was America’s hottest city. The ingredients had been here all along, but the turnaround was based in part on progressive leaders with good ideas and plenty of federal dollars to spend on them.
   When the opportunity arose in 1975, Chapman moved on to become secretary of state in Olympia. Ever the contrarian, he focused on eliminating his own job, one of several state offices he thought should not be elective.
   In 1980, we met again. I was covering elections and Chapman was running for governor, this time on a very different platform. The progressive Republicanism was gone replaced by a Reaganesque agenda: Crack down on crime, beef up the military and pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That campaign never took off, and he lost badly in the primary.
His consolation prize was to move back East, where he joined the new Reagan Administration as director of the $250 million-a-year Census Bureau. "The finest bureaucracy I’ve ever seen," he recalls. "Dedicated, accessible people who are eager to serve."
   The next time we met was in 1983, when I was in D.C., covering Congress, and Chapman had been picked as a domestic policy advisor in the Reagan White House. At a chicken barbeque in his back yard, Chapman allowed that his politics had changed. But so had the nation’s. "I have grown more conservative on social issues," he said then, "as I have become more disillusioned with any aspect of the Great Society, the welfare state, or the endless parade of liberation movements as solutions to any problems."
   The White House provided a heady opportunity to stretch his intellectual muscles. But his ultimate ambition, he said, was to go home, live in the Pike Place Market, and start a think tank.

   It would be nearly a decade before our paths crossed again. I stopped off at the Washington Mutual Building for an interview, and ran into Chapman in the hallway. He was back, realizing his old ambition—sort of. He had become a one-man outpost of the conservative Hudson Institute, a one-man think tank housed in an office on loan from a downtown law firm.
   And there he sat, exploring new ideas and searching for deep pockets to make them pay. In 1991, he landed a few small, private grants that allowed him to split off from Hudson, and reorganize as Discovery—named for the ship George Vancouver sailed into Puget Sound 200 years earlier in 1792.
   It was never easy, Chapman says. Running a think tank is "a hardscrabble existence, even for a liberal, and harder still for conservatives. It seems that people in Washington state imagine that they are not meant to play in the big leagues of public policy development."
   Grant by grant, fellow by fellow, Discovery grew. Former Times writer John Hamer came on board to work on International Seattle, which asked why Seattle hadn’t taken a more global approach to economics. Military expert Philip Gold arrived to write about defense and international terrorism. Paul Schell, a longtime Chapman friend, pushed the Cascadia concept, which promoted regional, cross-boundary solutions to problems.
   The Cascadia idea, in turn, attracted Bruce Agnew, another progressive Republican who contributed his extraordinary ability to assemble diverse groups and consensus solutions—not to mention the occasional federal grant. It was a good partnership, Agnew recalls, but hardly lucrative. "We were dirt poor. I was drawing a salary of $12,000, and taking consulting jobs on the side."
But it was real think tank. Discovery hosted lunchtime debates over topics such as charter schools and international trade—"conservative ideas with a progressive bent," Agnew calls them.
   But Chapman was still looking for that breakout issue. In 1993, he read an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by a young Whitworth College professor named Stephen Meyer. Meyer was defending a California biology professor whose job was threatened because he had questioned evolution theory.
   "I saw the issue at first as an example of political correctness run amok," Chapman recalls. "Only later did I see it as an issue in science, and sense the implications."
   Once again, Chapman teamed up with his Harvard soulmate, George Gilder, who had become a neo-conservative superstar. They sat down with Meyer and decided that "Discovery should become the home to the scientific critique of Darwinism, and home as well to intelligent design as an alternative theory."
   Thus was born what they now call the Center for Science and Culture. In the years to come, that work attracted millions of dollars in support from conservative foundations, starting with the Ahmanson family in Southern California.
   Critics argue that intelligent design was a a crass marketing strategy to get the money Chapman needed to support his other habits. But those closest to Chapman credit him with far more integrity.
   "I don’t agree with him on ID," says Bill Ruckelshaus, the widely respected former Reagan Cabinet member who previously served on Discovery’s board. "But Bruce feels very strongly about it, and it didn’t make sense to try to talk him out of it."
   Chapman embraced the meat along with its rich sauce, the idea and the dollars that followed. In addition to helping pay the rent and light bills, ID helped explain his deep disillusionment with the entitlement programs and liberation movements which had divided and "demoralized" American politics—all in the name of social sciences that are rooted in evolution theory, he says.
   "Darwinism is crucial not only to materialism in science, but in our culture, which is why all this is so incendiary," he says. "People care about their world-view. For most real Darwinists, evolution is their religion."
   Whatever the motives, Chapman and Co. were off and running with the idea. They hired staff, bought computers, and rented bigger offices to accommodate them. Intelligent design was on its way to becoming an intellectual jihad in the nation’s culture war. Armed with a growing array of new books, issue papers, videos and DVDs, the Science and Culture campaign openly aspired to drive a "wedge" into the heart of Darwinism, to "defeat materialism" and replace it with intelligent design.
   Seattle barely noticed. To this day, neither daily newspaper has attempted a thorough look at Chapman and his crusade against evolution.
   Neither had I.
   It was the summer of 2001 before I again encountered Chapman. This time he offered me a job. The Cascadia Project had a Gates Foundation grant to come up with ideas for unraveling Seattle’s transportation gridlock. After 30-plus years of newspapers, I was ready to move on.
   Some of my friends were appalled. Hadn’t I heard about, as one put it, the "Flat Earth Society?" Even Chapman felt he should warn me that his Science and Culture efforts might run against Seattle’s sensibilities.
   I wasn’t disturbed. Journalists, like think tanks, should be willing to rethink conventional wisdoms. I’d ruffled feathers with articles that questioned the economics of recycling, the mortgage tax deduction, or of making our kids pay for our Social Security. My work had been attacked by ideologues ranging from Lyndon LaRouche to Rush Limbaugh. Discovery should take on big and unpopular issues, and they don’t get much bigger than the fundamental questions of human origins.
   So, in the summer of 2001, I became a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which worked out of an odd, corridor-shaped office on the third floor of an older office building overlooking the main post office. Chapman had a private office at one end, Agnew at the other. The rest of us peons sat between them, at metal desks cluttered with paper and PCs. Mine was a few feet from the copy machine, which seemed to run ’round the clock spewing out paper dealing with technology or transportation or, yes, evolution.
  At the other end of the hall were the Science and Culture folks—about six enthusiastic 20-somethings, some of them recent graduates of Whitworth College. They appeared to be very busy at whatever they were doing, and I didn’t ask.
   I did, however, enjoy chatting with Philip Gold, the curmudgeonly and dry-witted military writer who sat nearby. We were entertained by the ID kids’ grumblings toward the dreaded "Darwinists" – a term that seemed to have replace "reds" in the conservative lexicon. Gold offered an ID motto: "God does not play dice with the Universe; He plays Scrabble."
   My amusement was arrested one day in September, when Discovery launched its attack on public television. My first clue was a new banner headline on the website home page: "PBS Evolution: Last Gasp of a Dying Theory."
   Public TV, I learned, was about to air a seven-part documentary series on Darwin and evolution theory, and Discovery didn’t like it. The series failed to report the gaps in Darwin’s theory. Worse still, it failed to mention intelligent design. The Science and Culture folks had counterattacked with a book-length response, educational curricula, canned op-eds and press releases that helped explain why that office copier had been running nonstop. The kids down the hall were most pleased with themselves at having one-upped the misguided Darwinists.
   I probably over-reacted. Go ahead and take on PBS, I argued. Take it on for the interminable fundraising or for those mindless folk music retrospectives. But for a program about evolution?
   And if evolution is a "dying theory," how come it got a seven-part series on TV and intelligent design didn’t? The reality: like it or not, evolution is alive and well, accepted by virtually every legitimate scientist on Earth.
   As it happens, nobody noticed the TV series, let alone Discovery’s critique, because that very week jetliners were crashing into tall buildings and changing everything. A few weeks later, I resigned. If the world is going to hell, I would go out as a journalist, not a think tank fellow.
   Discovery has done just fine without me. Agnew and the Cascadia Project attracted a $9 million Gates grant, so that regionalism is no longer the poor stepsister to anti-Darwinism. Agnew and Chapman are providing a much-needed, independent forum where regional solutions can be promoted without political consequences. There have been conferences on freight rail and how to separate it from passenger rail, on how to use electronic tolls to pay for new highways. And Cascadia gets credit for pushing a variation on Chapman’s 30-year-old idea to tear down the Alaska Way viaduct.
   ID, however, gets most of the attention. The last time I saw Chapman was in December, when he was anxiously awaiting word from Pennsylvania. In the previous few weeks, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones had presided over a lawsuit challenging a small-town school board that had decided to include intelligent design in its science curriculum. The board members were old-school creationists, guided not by Discovery but by the Book of Genesis, he said. Chapman and others had pleaded with the school board to back off.
   However, during the two-week trial, two Discovery fellows testified on behalf of intelligent design.
   On December 20, the churchgoing judge, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a scalding decision, declaring that ID "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory." So the school board’s edict violated the required separation of church and state.
   Discovery has responded with a lengthy critique of the ruling.
But Judge Jones reflected the opinion of most scientists, says Dr. Keith Benson, who taught history of science at the University of Washington for some 20 years. Chapman’s critique of materialism—the view that every phenomenon in the natural world can be explained by natural forces— is fair grounds for a philosophical discussion, Benson says,. "But it was not Darwin who started the movement toward materialism." he says. "That began with Isaac Newton. It happened first in astronomy and physics, and Darwin applied it to biology."
   Yes, there are gaps in evolution theory, he adds. In Origin of Species, Darwin wrote about the problems with his own theory. "There are gaps in every scientific theory. Physicists can’t fully explain gravity, and they aren’t sitting around smoking cigars because it’s all wrapped up."
   As a PhD science historian, Benson is persuasive. He learned his science well as an undergraduate biology student at Whitworth, the same little college that sprung Stephen Meyer and much of the ID staff. And Benson’s biology professors taught evolution.
Four decades later, it still does.
   "We teach the best biology we know," says Dr. Lee Anne Chaney, a PhD biologist who has taught there for 25 years. "And that is why intelligent design is not in our curriculum. That’s not because we don’t think God created the universe. My personal belief is that God is wise enough to make a world that changes over time, and that is infinitely more complex than we can ever grasp completely. But we don’t teach Creation as science, and ID is not science because it does not lend itself to rigid experimentation."

   I am not a scientist, nor a philosopher; I’m not particularly religious, nor am I hostile to religion. For these and other reasons, nobody has asked my advice on all this. But here it is anyhow:
   To Chapman and friends: Go for it. Question authority, including scientists. Keep looking for flaws in evolution theory. That’s what think tanks are supposed to do.
   But dump the wedge strategy, and spare the public schools. They have plenty to worry about without outsiders telling them how to teach biology. Besides, the Dover trial proves that it’s dubious strategy to generate an important discussion and hand it over to small-town school boards and lawyers.
   And give up the argument that ID is not a religious undertaking. That argument may pass the smirk test, because Chapman and friends can say it without smirking. But it flunks the duck test: Intelligent design walks and quacks like religion. And every ID adherent I’ve encountered turns out to be a sincere, thoughtful Christian, which requires no apology—even in Seattle.
   To the rest of the world: Cool it. Wedge strategy or no, intelligent design is not a threat to science as we know it. The movement consists of a small cadre of smart, sincere people like Chapman; and a few nice, dedicated kids armed with a website, some slick videos and a very busy photocopy machine. This also might describe Greenpeace, except Greenpeace it has more members and more money.
   ID should not be foisted on our schools. But, if my kids’ biology teacher had decided to take a few minutes to teach the controversy, I would hope they would have stayed awake, taken notes, and brought it home to the dinner table: Why is it that scientists subscribe to Darwin, but the majority of Americans don’t? Discuss.
   We live in a big, open country accustomed to grappling with big, open questions. There is plenty of room for Darwin and Creationism and intelligent design. Most of us are too busy living our lives to spend much time and energy on it. And, when we do, it all swirls into an intellectual mud....
   Which, according to Christianity and most religions in the world, is what we were made of in the beginning.

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JAWS, PUGET SOUND STYLE. SIXGILL SHARK
 
 
   Light and color wane rapidly in the depths of Puget Sound. At 30 feet beneath the surface, the reds and yellows disappear, followed by the greens and blues. At 90 feet, roughly the width of Water Street, the world dims to murky shades of gray and black.
   This is where one enters the realm of the sixgill shark.
   Don Zahn, a nuclear operator from Richland, has been diving for many years, so he knew what to expect last fall when he and a friend stepped off a charter dive boat in Hood Canal, near Brinnon, and descended slowly down a steep, submarine ridge. They planned a deep, "technical dive," using a special mix of compressed air, waterproof cameras and lights.
   At 70 feet, they were looking for octopus, wolf eel and giant lingcod that prefer those depths. At 90 feet, they spotted a dark figure moving slowly through the murk. An enormous lingcod?
   The fish turned, and Zahn switched on his camera lights, transforming the grayness into a mini football stadium. And he nearly swallowed his regulator. He was face-to-face, or jaw-to-Jaws, with a seven-foot shark.
    He acknowledges he was shocked. But he had the presence of mind to keep his camera running -- even when the creature swam between the two divers.
  "He never did anything threatening," Zahn says. "He was moving pretty slowly, almost casual. I think he was oblivious to us."
    "I’d heard they were around," he adds. "But I never expected to see one."
   Nobody does. The waters around here are notoriously cold, but they’re supposed to be home to familiar, even romantic critters -- silvery salmon and crowd-pleasing orcas. The only sharks we see are those pesky dogfish, the miniature great whites that show up on hooks intended for prized kings and cohos.
   But in recent years, divers and scientists have been probing deeper into the sound. And they’re learning that Puget Sound is also home to hundreds and probably thousands of sixgill sharks, a 200-million-year-old species that resembles its more notorious cousins.
   Based on the experience of Zahn and other divers, sixgills have no appetite for people. But they certainly have the equipment to do some damage -- big spooky eyes, gaping jaws with jagged teeth and a streamlined torso reputed to reach the lengths of automobiles.
   Don Coleman, who runs a dive charter boat out of Pleasant Harbor, near Brinnon, counted at least eight different sixgill sightings by divers from his boat last year. Local dive shop operator Mark Peil and a buddy encountered one on a night dive in Discovery Bay. Yet another seven-footer washed up on a Port Townsend beach and was turned over to the Seattle Aquarium, which still keeps the carcass in its freezer.
   Sixgills are rarely seen because they are deepwater sharks accustomed to darkness. Divers find them -- or are found -- in deep water such as Hood Canal and Discovery Bay, or in shallower depths on night dives, when the sharks come up to feed.
F   or years, sixgill sharks were the stuff of local legends -- Puget Sound’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster. A generation ago, an eccentric Seattle reporter named John O’Ryan talked the Post-Intelligencer into sending him out to catch one. For days, he floated around the sound in a small boat equipped with fishing gear, sending back reports on his quest. But nary a nibble.
   In the summer of 2000, however, an amateur fisherman hooked a big sixgill while night-fishing from a West Seattle pier. A few days later, he caught another one.
   Biologists were alarmed. Shark populations around the world have been depleted by over-fishing, and nobody wanted to see it happen here. So the state acted quickly to prohibit fishing for them. And that ban continues.
   But some biologists reasoned that, if two sixgills were hooked in the same place within a week, there could be a heck of a lot of them out there.
   So the Seattle Aquarium teamed up with state and federal agencies to find out. Using rebar and cable, scientists assembled a crude, four-by- two-foot shark-feeding station on the seabottom beneath the aquarium, and hooked up a time-lapse video system.   For bait, they used frozen clumps of fresh and decayed salmon, dogfish and bits of octopus. Then they waited.
   But not for long. The station was an immediate success, with nightly visits from sixgill sharks. They kept coming even when researchers went down to greet them.
   "Mostly we see six and seven-footers," says aquarium biologist Jeff Christiansen. "But we see the occasional big guy -- 10 to 12 feet."
   Meanwhile, researchers chartered a fishing boat and began catching sharks on longline gear -- miles of line with baited hooks strewn along the bottom of the sound. One by one, they caught more than 200 sixgills, keeping a few for analysis, while the others were measured, equipped with numbered tags attached to their dorsal fins, and released back to the sea.
   Gradually, the research is adding to our limited knowledge of an amazingly resilient creature which has been swimming the world’s oceans for some 200 million years.
   Shawn Larson, a curator at the Seattle aquarium, describes the bluntnose sixgill shark, Hexanchus griseus, as a slow-growing, long-lived species which is found in both warm and temperate oceans around the globe. They’re big -- up to 16 feet, with undocumented reports of specimens well over 20 feet. Males mature at about nine feet and females at about 13 feet.
   But most of the sharks encountered here are somewhat smaller, about seven to 11 feet, and there are few mature males. This, Larson says, suggests that Puget Sound may be a nursery area for young sixgills, which migrate out to the ocean as they mature.
So it’s safe to assume that we have some mighty big critters swimming past Port Townsend beaches on their way to who-knows-where.
   While they seem to be more docile than great whites, they actually have bigger jaws, Larson reports. Appetite-wise, they appear to be "opportunists," eating fish, octopus, dead or injured seals, whatever is available. "Just about everything has been found in their stomachs," she adds.
  Except people, that is. "They certainly could attack a human, but we’re probably outside their prey range," Larson says.
   They also have a different feeding strategy. While great whites "strike fast," sixgills use more stealth, biting and sawing their prey with serrated teeth.
   Based on analysis of tissue samples, scientists believe the sharks in Puget Sound are related -- an extended family estimated at about 8,000 adult sharks. That could be the adult population for Puget Sound, or for a larger area. It is also a very tentative estimate, and probably a conservative one, she adds.
   So the research continues. But we can be assured of one thing: Every time we leave the docks of our fair port, we are passing within a few feet of some king-sized toothy critters who are far less impressed with us than we are with them.

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Archibald Menzies: The Northwest's First Master Gardener

         At the top of our garden in Cape George stands a young Douglas fir which carries some rare and well-traveled genes. It’s only about 18 inches tall, but this tree is world class, a direct descendant of one of the tallest trees in Britain. Its grandparents, which I believe grew here on the shores of Discovery Bay, must have been giants.

          The story of our tree goes back some 215 years, when a mild-mannered Scottish botanist and naval surgeon named Archibald Menzies climbed out of a longboat and onto the shore of Discovery Bay.

          Menzies, who pronounced his name “MIN-gez,” was the official naturalist to the expedition of Capt. George Vancouver, the stuffy Englishman who first explored and mapped these Northwest waters. By the spring of 1792, when they dropped anchor in what Vancouver decided to call Port Discovery, they had already sailed halfway around the world, and they’d hardly begun.

          For some two weeks, while most of the crew worked on ship repairs and provisions, Menzies set out on his own mission, becoming the first scientist to study the shores of Port Townsend and Puget Sound.

          Judging by his journal, Menzies was overwhelmed by what he found. “The shores here are sandy and pebbly,” he wrote. “The point we came to (Port Townsend) was low and flat with some marshy ground behind it, and a pond of water surrounded with willows and tall bulrushes. Behind this a green bank stretched to the southward a little distance from the shore, which was marked with the beaten paths of deer and other animals... I ascended this bank and strolled over an extensive lawn, where solitude, rich pasture and rural prospects prevailed.”

          Obviously, while he sailed for the British Navy, Menzies had the soul of a master gardener.   Born and raised in the shadow of the Menzies family castle in Perthshire, at the edge of the Scottish Highlands, he grew up tending to the gardens of the estate. Later he studied botany and medicine at Edinburgh University. In 1786, at the age of 32, he sailed with Capt. James Colnett to the Northwest Coast, collecting a few specimens around Nootka, on Vancouver Island.

          In 1791, he made his return trip, this time with Vancouver. When they returned to England four years later, he brought home his vast collection of seeds and specimens.

          Nobody knows precisely what became of those specimens. We do know that, by the late 1700s, Great Britain was using wood for everything – fuel, construction and spars for the Navy, and that the native forests had been logged out. The British were replanting their forests, but were looking for trees that grew faster than the native evergreens.

          Three decades later, in 1825, another Scottish naturalist, David Douglas, sailed to the Pacific Northwest and brought back more specimens. Somehow, the common name of our regional fir became Douglas, but the scientific name remained Menzies – pseudotsuga menziesii. And over time, most of Scotland and much of England was planted in Pacific Northwest trees – generally Sitka spruce on the damper west side of the island, douglas fir on the east side. 

          Mary and I learned about this a few years ago, when we were staying in the Scottish village of Dunkeld, with its medieval cathedral, and took a day hike up the River Tay. Passing through a grove of big evergreens, we followed a sign up a side trail to what was billed as the “Tallest Tree in Great Britain.”

          It was a douglas fir, more than 200 feet tall, standing in a grove of douglas firs. Olde Dunkeld, whose human history dates back well over 1,000 years, sits in a Pacific Northwest forest.           Mary scooped up a few cones at the foot of the giant and stuffed them in her purse. Later, she planted them in our Seattle garden. And last year, the young sapling moved with us – back to shores of Discovery Bay.

          We call it the Menzies Tree.   The Menzies castle is only five miles from Dunkeld, near the town of Aberfeldy, Scotland.   We know that the naturalist had ties to the local of Duke of Atholl, and that the duke directed the replanting of his forests two centuries ago. Those trees must have come from Menzies’ seeds.

          And since he spent more time around the Quimper Peninsula than just about anywhere else, it seems likely that Menzies collected many of his specimens right here.

          Besides, the pioneer naturalist deserves credit for something. The fellow braved ocean voyages lasting up to four years, identified scores of previously-unknown species, carefully recorded his observations, brought back specimens and almost certainly contributed to the reforestation of Scotland and much of England.

          Yet most folks hereabouts, and back thereabouts, have never heard of him. There is no published biography, and his journals have been out of print since the 1920s. Even his skipper managed to dis him; Vancouver grumbled about the potted plants on the decks of his ships and, while he named our landmarks after his crew and other obscure British naval officers, he never found so much as a rock to name for his trusty botanist.

          But gradually, a few latterday Menzies fans are trying to rekindle some respect for the old Scot. A few years ago, the historical society published his journal entries from local waters. Jim Norris, Port Townsend’s fisherman-biologist, attached Menzies’ name to his boat and to his research organization – the Menzies Project.   And my little Monk cruiser, which lives a mile or two up the bay from Vancouver’s 1792 anchorage, has been rechristened the good ship Archie Menzies.

          And some day, long after I and my boat have puttered off to our proper punishment, I hope that little doug fir on Quinault Loop grows into a suitable memorial to Port Townsend’s original Master Gardener.

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Those funky ferries: Run ‘em til they sink!

          Eighty years ago, when my dad was a teenager in California, he routinely crisscrossed San Francisco Bay, frequently riding the ferries Stockton and Redwood Empire – two of the snazzy new boats called “Steel Electrics.”

          The year was 1927, the same year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 homers.   Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, Henry Ford was rolling the first Model A’s off his Detroit assembly line, and an obscure Austrian corporal named Hitler organized the first Nazi meeting in Berlin. 

          How time flies. All those guys have been dead for decades. My dad outlasted them all; he died four years ago at the tender age of 92.

          But those boats kept right on steaming.  They plied the bay for 10 years, until the completion of a couple of big bridges which rendered them obsolete. So the Steel Electrics moved north to Puget Sound, where the Stockton became the Klickitat the Redwood Empire became the Quinault. And they kept on working like Energizer octogenarians, 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, on Puget Sound routes – including our hometown route across Admiralty Inlet to Whidbey Island...

          Until this month, when state Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond put her foot down.   Enough, she said, is enough. And, oh yeh, have a nice Thanksgiving.

          Hey! How can she do that? The Quinault and Klickitat are as much part of the Port Townsend landscape as the Point Wilson Lighthouse, or the courthouse tower. We love the oak and brass trim, the ever-so-nautical portholes, the long, steep staircases. A lot of us even liked the Celtic harp player who entertained upstairs.

          The PT-to-Whidbey route is the most scenic on the sound. And, at $2.60 a pop for passengers, it has to be one of the one of the world’s best buys in boat rides.

          Or so it was, until Nervous Nellie shut ‘er down. 

          We’ve all heard the explanations. Inspections reveal “cracks” and “leaks” in those 80-year-old steel plates. A consultant reported 184 fractures in the four vessels, including the Klickitat and Quinault.

          It’s enough to make state and Coast Guard officials very, very nervous. Who wants to be in charge when one of those boats breaks up in 60-knot winds and eight-foot waves, and goes to the bottom?   Imagine the finger-pointing.

          But are those funky old boats at risk of sinking?  Not to worry, says Port Townsend’s Carl Allen. And he ought to know. He’s a retired engineer who spent 30 years working the bowels of Washington ferries, the last three of them as chief engineer aboard the 80-year-old Quinault.          “Listen,” he says. “The crews know those boats. And trust me, if it’s even close to being unsafe, they’re not going to be out there working.”

          Allen made thousands of crossings, and never worried about going down with his ship.

          But what about all those cracks and leaks?  Allen sighs. It’s a bit misleading, he says, to say the Steel Electrics are 80 years old. They have been rebuilt, repowered, refitted and renewed. The power systems, he says are essentially the same as the modern Mark II jumbo ferries, which have been amazingly reliable, he says.

          “They’ve been inspected and updated repeatedly. The power systems are solid. The controls are solid. The steering is solid. The upper cabins are solid....”

          And the hulls?

          “Yes, there are pinhole leaks scattered through the older parts of the hull,” he says. “It’s not age so much as defects in the steel. Steel boats corrode from the inside out, and it shows up as these pinholes. They’re structurally sound, but mention those pinholes and everybody freaks out.”

          But Allen acknowledges that boats have lifetimes, and that the Steel Electrics are reaching the end of theirs. Each trip, each landing, each winter storm adds new stresses to an aging hull.

          The Port Townsend-Whidbey crossing is the roughest in the state ferry system. It traverses fierce tidal currents that frequently run against equally fierce winds and seas. The ferries constantly find themselves crossing paths with enormous tankers and freighters.   Just docking the boats, especially at the Keystone terminal, requires a skilled boat handler.

          What worries him most is the risk of a collision – a freighter or tanker that swerves off course or loses power in Admiralty Inlet. “All the technology can work against you,” he says. “You make things work too smooth and comfortable, and people can get complacent.”

          He’s suspicious of last week’s timing. State officials want to replace the boats, and a holiday shutdown could help get the attention of lawmakers.

          Ferry officials are stuck. When they proposed to replace the Steel Electrics with larger boats, and to build new terminals to accommodate them, Port Townsend threw something of a civic fit. We like those old boats just the way they are.

          “There’s no reason you can’t build new ferries just like the Steel Electrics,” Allen says. “But they want the big boats, interchangeable with the rest of the fleet.”

          Allen, for one, predicts the shutdown won’t last very long. The state will inspect those old Steel Electrics, patch the wholes and mend the cracks, and return them to service once they’re sure that lawmakers got the message, he says.

          Meanwhile, we need somebody to blame for cutting our floating lifeline to the rest of the world. We can blame state officials for taking the old boats out of service before they had built new boats that meet our civic and aesthetic standards. We can blame the Coast Guard for being overly cautious.

          We can blame Tim Eyman and the Tax Revolt for all those state initiatives that cut the taxes that were designated to buy new boats. And we can blame a few million of our neighbors who voted those initiatives into law.

          Or we can just stay on our side of the pond, sit back and enjoy it. Does anybody have a good reason to venture over there?  

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30 years celebrating the craft and culture of wooden boats 

My first view of the Port Townsend waterfront came in 1977, when I sailed my 21-foot double-ender up from Seattle for the first Wooden Boat Festival. That’s when I knew I wanted to live here.

Thirty years later, the festival has become an institution, an annual celebration of the arts and crafts of wooden boats, and an exchange of information and good will among the people who continue to keep it alive. This event is the equivalent of an annual convention for people in the maritime trades who are such a vibrant part of the regional culture and economy.
Sustaining an institution for 30 years requires the passions and hard work of countless individuals. There had to be people with a vision and the will to see it through, people to recruit volunteers and take tickets and clean up afterwards, people to volunteer their boats and skills and advice, people to take over the festival helm when others became exhausted, people to refine and update the original vision to keep it all going...
This summer, we talked to a just a few of those people. Here, edited and somewhat distilled for space, is what they had to say:

Carol Hasse

For more than three decades, Carol has advocated Port Townsend as a regional center for traditional maritime trades, and she was an early organizer of the festival. From her sail loft at Port Hudson, she and her friends have created one of the nation’s pre-eminent sailmaking shops. 

 
It’s been a wonderful 30-year run. There’s something truly amazing about this festival. The Port Townsend population doubles or triples, the hotels and restaurants fill up, and it’s all about these beautiful old wooden boats!
Every year we open the doors to the sail loft and people wander through to see how we do what we do. And we’ve never had a bad experience, never had anything stolen. It’s like a dream.
I grew up in Camas, on the Columbia River, and learned to sail with the family doctor and his wife and eight kids. I started college, but then spent a year cruising in the Pacific, and I realized that’s what want to do – sail, hike, play my guitar. So I came back and joined friends in a communal building of a 47-foot ketch. And that’s how I got my job at Schattauer Sails in Seattle and started to learn sailmaking.
In 1975, we were working on that boat, and Sam Connor called to say there was work in Port Townsend. We hoped to make some money to do a circumnavigation. We all were blown away by the beauty of this town, and started dreaming of Port Townsend as a place where people could learn traditional maritime skills from each other, a west coast center for stewardship of the crafts – rigging, boatbuilding, sailmaking. And we started thinking about turning this old, rundown harbor into a campus for some kind of festival..
Sam was living in the pilot house and Tim Snider was working with him. We were all working for the same things, looking for credibility. I was working in this same loft with Ron Harrow. That went on for two years. In ‘78, Ron left and went to the Carribean. And Nora Petrich and I started this business right here. We realized that sailmaking is both a link to the past and something of relevance today. Sailing is as magical as ever, still beautiful and functional.
It’s the same with wooden boats. Those of us afflicted with this dementia believe that wooden boats have souls. They deliver a sheer joy that is not the same with glass or steel boats. There is this whole set of crafts that go into building and maintaining them. And I knew a long time ago that I wanted to be part of that.
Of course, the festival has changed over the years, just as the town has changed. But the essence is still there. I’m drawn to this town as portrayed in the marine trades. It’s a set of values that we share, the desire for beauty and functionality and simplicity. We are an island of people who want to grow our own food, mend our own sails and build our own boats. And that has not changed.
But the town is changing in other ways. Every year, somebody comes along who wants to
put condos and yuppie restaurants on this little harbor. Each time, people here rally to the cause of these beautiful old buildings and this historic little harbor.
I know the town and the festival will continue to grow. I hope to see the Wooden Boat
Foundation and the Maritime Center grow together, using their sailing programs to connect people with the sea. That’s what we all have been working for these 30 years.

Tim Snider
Tim was coordinator of the festival, founding director of the WBF, and an early writer and editor at Wooden Boat Magazine. I found him in overalls and a baseball cap, perched on the porch of his small, energy-efficient home in Port Townsend.
The positive response to Wooden Boat Magazine nurtured the idea of a festival. We felt there was a need for a forum where amateur and professional boatbuilders could come together. And that’s what we wanted to do.
I grew up in Connecticut, where my father and I built a boat when I was a kid. He was a cabinetmaker, and I became a teacher, developing woodworking curriculums and how-to books. Everybody’s boats were wood, unless they were rich. About 1974, I ran into my boating friend Jon Wilson on the docks in Stony Creek (CT). He had a box full of photos and manuscripts, the raw material for this new magazine – Wooden Boat. We put the magazine together and started taking it to boat shows, soliciting subscriptions. We found an incredible thirst for knowledge, and our mission was to find the best answers to people’s questions.
So, in 1976, I came out here to the Pacific Northwest, and I was impressed by the intensity of the wooden boat culture here. I came back in the spring of 1977, driving a van full of magazines, looking for boatbuilders and bookstores to help sell our magazine. And I decided we needed the festival here. I was looking seriously at Anacortes, but I met Sam Connor who invited me to come over and look at Port Townsend. He had a shop at Port Hudson, and the harbor was perfect.
There had been groups of boatbuilders gathering all over the nation, but they tended to have a few beers and then go back to work, making a living. After being a part of other events I knew we could do better. Sam and I opened an office with a phone and a typewriter next to the sail loft at Port Hudson and worked all summer. We put together a program of seminars and how-to sessions with professional faculty from around the nation that encompassed the scope of the wooden boat culture and profession. It was a coming-together of people who had years of experience – Spike Africa and Lance Lee and Earl Wakefield . The trick was to get the older people to talk to the younger people, and it worked.
And people came. We expected 800, maybe 1,000. We got 3,000 people from all over the nation. It became the Woodstock of Wooden Boats.
So we needed to do it again. And we needed an organization. So we came up with the Wooden Boat Foundation, and that winter we started having boatbuilding classes. The next year
we brought in Nat Wilson from the tall ship Eagle, and the next year we got John Gardner from Mystic Seaport.
Initially, the city fathers didn’t know if they supported our Hippie event -- until the first festival sold out the hotels and restaurants. Then they realized that we were a serious organization running a serious festival.
Wooden boats have made a comeback because wood is still the natural material for building boats. A properly-constructed wooden boat can take enormous punishment. And, if something fails, it an be repaired anywhere. That’s why people come here – this tremendous interest in handmade vessels and the persistence and skills that go into building them.

Alex Spear
Alex is a professional woodworker who showed up for the 1979 Wooden Boat Festival – two weeks late. Since then he has made his home here, serving on the WBF Board and opening his 1933 wooden double-ender to visitors each September since 1980.

For me, wooden boats are primarily about beauty. We live in a world where aesthetics get discounted. Most people want bigger and bigger boats with maximum power and maximum living space and maximum speed. There’s an inherent beauty to wooden boats. They represent something older and more important about the human endeavor.
I sailed into Port Townsend from Sitka and Hawaii in the fall of 1979, and missed the festival. I spent the winter on my boat at Port Hudson, met my wife here, and stayed. It was wonderful to come to a place that appreciates wooden boats as I do. And working with the festival, the foundation, and now the Maritime Center was all a natural progression for me.
To me, there is something very special about seeing all the fiberglass boats leave and replaced by these beautiful, amazing wooden boats. It’s a precious few days, an amazing gathering of people who value the same things I value, and people who are willing to share their ideas and skills and experiences. We don’t get many opportunities to do that, and it’s been really important to me.
And there’s always a bit of a letdown when the festival ends, and the wooden boats leave, and the other boats come back. But that’s life.

Mary Dietz McCurdy
Mary served as festival director in the mid-1980s. She now lives on Bainbridge Island, returning frequently to Port Townsend.
The festival attracts people for different reasons. There are people who come to look at the boats, people who come to learn how to build and maintain boats, and people who just come to have fun on a nice day.
But whatever the reasons, somebody still has to pay the bills. When I took over in 1984, the festival was in poor financial shape and some people thought it had strayed from its original purpose. Tim Snider was gone, and some of the city fathers thought we were a bunch of ne’r-do-well hippies – even though we filled the motels and restaurants. The city still doesn’t appreciate the benefits that festival brings to Port Townsend.
There were also lots of people who wanted to help, but they were trying to keep their businesses going, and there was no capacity for philanthropy.
Some new people stepped forward. We sat down and asked ourselves: What’s our vision? How do we rejuvenate this event? We had our dreams, but we had to raise enough money to start actually paying some people rather than relying completely on volunteers. I worked for three or four months without pay, just hoping the festival would raise enough to eventually pay myself.
And we did. I had worked at South Street Seaport in New York, and I’d learned that non-profits have to learn to do retail. So we designed and ordered up T-shirts, and we sold $50,000 worth. We looked for corporate sponsors, and got LaBatts to sponsor the first beer garden. The poster became a best seller. And all that helped bring in the revenue we needed.
Some of the purists don’t like the T-shirts and the beer garden. But we learned that marketing is important. There is a magic to wooden boats. They make people feel good. And that’s what the festival is about. But it’s also about raising some money to keep things going.
.
Anne Greer
Anne Greer, who divides her life between homes in Port Townsend and Newport Beach, CA, directed the festival from 1996 to 2000. She spoke by telephone from her southern port.
I believe wooden boats are about much more than history. They are about a wonderful set of skills and crafts that were in danger of being lost, and the Wooden Boat Foundation and Festival are helping to keep those skills alive.
I come from generations of sailors and wooden boats. My parents sailed, my husband sails and builds boats, and our home is filled with boats and spars and sails. We came to Port Townsend first in the late ‘70s, when I was a teacher and a writer working for a boating magazine and my editor suggested I do something with this wild wooden boat festival. I was hooked.
In 1986, we came up for the tenth festival and stayed in our VW camper at Port Hudson. It was a gorgeous three days, and the next year we came back – except this time we bought a nice old Victorian and built a boat shop alongside.
Ten years later, the festival was well-established and the foundation was looking for a festival coordinator. My family also had many years of marketing experience, and I was working in advertising. So I combined by experience in teaching and sailing and promotion. I had learned so much from so many people, and this was my way of trying to give something back.
Some people wanted to keep the festival very local, and others wanted to take it to another level without destroying what we had – to make Port Townsend the “wooden boat mecca” of the nation. I was sympathetic to both arguments. So we took what was already here and tried to tell the rest of world about it. We didn’t have a big budget, but we had a great event to market, and we were able to do that.
Our other charge was to make a clear distinction between the Wooden Boat Foundation and the Festival. The Foundation stages the festival, but it also has an even more important mission to introduce people to the sea and to traditional boats.
I think the merger of the WBF and the Maritime Center is a very positive move. Together, I think they will develop Port Hudson into an even more important center for the maritime trades. I know it hasn’t been easy, but I think it will be a very good thing.

Ernie Baird
Ernie is a Port Townsend shipwright who has served on the boards of the Wooden Boat Foundation and the Northwest Maritime Center.
I arrived here in March of 1977 for reasons that had nothing to do with boats. I attended the Wooden Boat Festival in September, and I was profoundly impressed, and I think disturbed by what I saw. The boats were so compellingly beautiful. It’s hard to articulate, because it’s so much a matter of the heart. But I wanted so much to be part of it.
That thought festered until I was hired by Mark Burn at Port Townsend Boatworks, which spawned so many of the boatyard enterprises of that day. A number of young people had gone fishing in Alaska, made some money, came back and spent that money on repairing and maintaining their boats, which sparked the renaissance of wooden boats in this town. I don’t know that people here appreciate how important that was.
In 1980, I decided I had to build my own boat – a 26-footer. I was one of the shed boys, who lived in an 8-by-12-foot plywood shed while working on boats. When I finished it, a friend asked me to put it in the festival. I did, and it’s been back every year since. In 1999, that boat was the model for the festival poster.
The festival has always been a wonderful visual event, but it’s easy to overlook the education that goes on here. When I was on the WBF Board, we decided to move toward an expanded educational mission – especially on behalf of young people. And that has continued.
I’m optimistic about the future of the festival and of wooden boats. People my age are slowing down and looking for new passions. And that’s what wooden boats do for some of us. As an investment, they stink. But as a work of art, they are of immense value. There are few things in the world quite so beautiful as a wooden boat on the water.

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Happy 100th, Martha! (And sorry ‘bout the rent)

Rhodyfest is grand. But, for this old salt, Port Townsend’s finest hour occurs in September, during the Wooden Boat Festival, when those magnificent schooners Martha and Adventuress and their handsome cousins hoist sails and parade along the waterfront.
For a few spectacular minutes, the seascape is dominated by some of the most elegant vessels ever to grace any sea, sleek low-slung hulls powered by acres of trapezoidal sails assembled into bulging swept wings soaring silently past the docks.
It’s an annual reminder that our little corner of the nation has turned itself into a world class tall-ship seaport. Like the courthouse tower or the Point Wilson Lighthouse, those grand old schooners have sailed into the heart of our civic identity.
And while they may look like fat cats’ toys, Martha and Adventuress are both serious-minded non-profits that each year put hundreds of kids through hands-on training in maritime skills and environmental science.
So why can’t we return the favor and give them a break? But we’ll get back to that.
Schooners will be back at center stage this weekend, when devotees gather down at the Northwest Maritime Center dock to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Schooner Martha. Birthdays, even centennials, come and go. But, for a wood-hulled, wood-sparred schooner with a rare pedigree, a century is a very big deal.
And Martha, with her 84-foot silhouette, sweeping sheer line and brilliant brightwork, is truly the fairest of them all. Step below into the main salon, with its sedate, mahogany cabinetry, and you are transported into another world.
There are reasons that schooners are so easy on the eyes. The twin masts and gaff rigging allow six or seven sails of various sizes and shapes to merge into one spectacular wing.
But schooners were invented for more practical reasons. The Age of Exploration sailed on square-rigged ships, with sails hung from horizontal spars. They were big and carried lots of freight. But they had two major handicaps: they needed dozens of crew to handle those sails, and they couldn’t sail into the wind.
Smaller sloops, with “Marconi” sails attached directly to the masts, sailed far better to windward, but they were too small for ocean voyages.
Schooners were the compromise. With two (or more) sloop-like masts, usually the same height, they could carry enough sail to cross oceans. They pointed well into the wind, and the sails could be handled from the decks by a small crew.
“The Americans employed schooners handsomely against the British in the Revolutionary War,” says Capt. Robert d’Arcy, skipper of the Martha. “They were smaller, but they could sail to weather where the British couldn’t.”
For the same reasons, New England fishermen rode schooners to and from the Grand Banks, and Puget Sound merchants favored them for shipping lumber to California.
By 1900, steamships ruled the oceans, and schooners became pleasure craft. Martha and Adventuress were both built early in the century as yachts for rich businessmen.
Martha was launched in San Francisco in 1907 as the city began to dig out from the 1906 quake. Over the years, she had a series of owners, ranging from actor James Cagney to the Four Winds Camp on Orcas Island.
Ten years ago, d’Arcy took over. He’s a master mariner and a second generation shipwright who sharpened his skills at Mystic Seaport. Since then, I’ve looked in periodically, and watched how a grand old sailing ship is kept alive.
The interior, wheel and virtually everything below the waterline – the planking, frames, even the fastenings – are all original, d’Arcy says. But much of what you see above the waterline is the work of the skipper.
For years, he wintered at South Lake Union, tying up next to the decrepit lumber schooner Wawona. The contrast between the two projects was a lesson in the nature of maritime heritage. Year after year, taxpayers and well-meaning donors have poured money down the hatches of the Wawona, and the ship is in worse shape than ever. D’Arcy, meanwhile, had no money, so he rolled his sleeves and did it himself. He has rebuilt the transom, replaced decks, beams, ribs and much of the planking. There are new rails, new framing, new gunnels, new engine...
“I did 90 percent of the work,” he says. “But there’s always more to be done. She needs new bottom planking and fastenings. That work begins this fall.”
It’s another reminder that, contrary to popular wisdom, ships do not have souls. They are mere constructions that, left alone, will quickly rot. Boats merely reflect the soul and passions of the people that build, maintain and sail them.
That is what should be celebrated on the waterfront this week.
And wouldn’t it be great if the fellas down at the Port of Port Townsend joined in that celebration, rather than sending another stiff moorage bill.
Last year, Martha and Adventuress coughed up more than $20,000 in moorage fees to the Port. That’s a huge bite out of their tight, nonprofit budgets -- enough to take more boatloads of kids out on the sound for an unforgettable week.
Neither d’Arcy nor Catherine Collins, director of Sound Experience, which runs Adventuress, wants to whine about their moorage fees. So I’ll whine for them: Why are we taxpayers making these extraordinary ships pay full freight?
It’s a matter of fairness, says Deputy Port Director Jim Pivarnik. “I’m a huge fan of those schooners, and they’re great people. But we have to be even-handed. It all comes down to supply and demand. There are other vessels out there, 127 boats on the waiting list for moorage.”
Understood. The port is not a charitable institution. It’s a publicly-run business, and it must be run as a business.
So forget aesthetics. Let’s take a hard, business-minded look at Martha and Adventuress. How are they different from dozens of other boats down there? Let me count the ways:
1. They are fulltime educational institutions that work with local schools, the Sea Scouts and others. On those rare occasions they charter themselves out, it’s to raise a few bucks to get a few more kids on the water.
2. They are major tourist attractions – every bit as much as Fort Worden or the Rose Theater. Make no mistake, people visit Port Townsend in part because they crave a closer look at those magnificent schooners. This may explain why the Port of Port Townsend uses a photo of the Adventuress as the backdrop to its Internet home page.
3. They employ real people in real jobs. The pay isn’t great, but there are a dozen or more salty souls who are able to live and work here because of those grand schooners.
4. They support the maritime trades, including the port itself.
5. There is competition out there. All those years that Martha moored at South Lake Union, the city of Seattle never charged a dime for moorage. And Seattle would take him back in a minute.. Tacoma would love to lure one or both schooners to its docks, and already provides space for the Sea Scouts and their smaller schooner for a dollar a year. “Don’t get me wrong,” d’Arcy says, “Martha is a Port Townsend vessel. We’re not going anywhere. But the port isn’t making it easy.”
6. Unlike the private yachts, those schooners are out sailing most of the summer, when competition for moorage is greatest.
7. They are legitimate nonprofits serving a very public purpose. Neither has ever made money.
8. They are historic landmarks. Adventuress has the official designation, and Martha should have.
9. As sailing ships, they don’t guzzle gas or change anyone’s climate.
Finally, Martha and Adventuress are unique. No other vessel will ever meet those standards.
Stan Cummings, the new director of the Northwest Maritime Center at Hudson Point, had years of experience running a nonprofit seaport in Orange County, California, and admits he is baffled by the port’s hardline stance.
“Icons like Martha and Adventuress are critical marketing tools for economic development of the marine trades and the rest of the PT community,” he says. “They are marketing assets beyond price.”
And what do they get for all this? The port generously does not charge for the space occupied by their bowsprits. Other than that, those grand old schooners pay full moorage, the same rate some Microsoft millionaire pays to park his rocketship yacht with the tinted windows and the “no trespassing” signs.
Which apparently is Port Townsend’s special way of twirling its moustache and saying: “Happy hundredth, Martha!”

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April Weather: All of the Above

These days, your typical five-day weather forecast is about as much help as consulting your daily horoscope, which is to say none whatsoever.
Take this week: Rain. Partly cloudy. Chance rain. Mostly cloudy. Rain likely. Sun breaks. Showers.... Each daily forecast has that little picture of a shower and a cloud with the sun peaking out from behind. Translation: Expect any or all the above. Each should be followed by a question mark.
For serious sailors, this works fine. Go ahead and raise sails; if you don’t have some wind and sun, just wait a few minutes.
But the rest of us are left to wonder why we pay all those smart people down in Seattle to offer the same forecast, day after variable day.
Mike McFarland understands. He’s one of those smart people who works at the National Weather Service in the city. He lives in the infamous Snohomish County “convergence zone,” and frequently spends time at his parents’ home in Cape George, gazing across Discovery Bay and trying to unravel the meteorological mysteries in this fickle corner of the atmosphere.
And these days, he confesses it’s mostly guesswork. December forecasts are pretty reliable – think wind and rain, he says. Summer forecasting is even easier.
But April? “Not so good,” he says, a little apologetically. “”We do pretty well forecasting major floods, and a fair job of gale warnings. But everything else is, well, not very skillful.”
McFarland was the guest speaker recently at the Port Townsend Yacht Club, where more than 100 of us mariner types showed up for an inside look at how the weather guys do what they do.
The challenge around here, he explains, is too much geography – mountains and bays and a very large ocean, he says. If he were doing the weather in, say, Kansas City, life would be much simpler.
Look for yourself. Go to www.weather.gov, the National Weather Service site; or www.atmos.washington.edu, the University of Washington’s. You’ll find data from weather satellites, from weather balloons and ocean buoys, computer models and radar data. Some of it is useful, some isn’t. Radar, for example, is almost useless, McFarland says – too many mountains in the way.
“Everything we use is now on the Internet,” he says. The TV guys use the same data as he does, except it’s prepackaged with those whizbang graphics.
In the Northwest, the most useful tool is that familiar weather map, with its contoured lines, or “gradients,” showing relative changes in atmospheric pressure. When those gradients are widely separated across the map, things stay stable; when they’re close together, watch out. And in April, they’re usually bunched up “like spagetti,” he says.
Then there’s the jet stream across the Pacific. “What matters is the strength of jet stream, where it curves and how sharply,” he says. “A slight change may divert a storm we thought was headed for Forks, and push it up to the Queen Charlottes.”
Those are the times that NOAA predicts 10-knot northerlies in Admiralty Inlet, and they turn out to be 15-knot southerlies, or vice versa.
It’s all so variable and inconclusive that, “after any official forecast, you can look out your window and improve on it,” McFarland says.
Take fog, for example, which can’t be predicted or even detected by technology. “Our fog forecasts are terrible.”
That’s why the weather guys supplement all their data with live information from volunteer spotters, amateurs who read their own gauges, then look out their windows and call the Weather Service to report what they’re seeing – like fog.
The service also makes good use of the state ferries, each of which carries automated weather equipment. “At first, the Port Townsend-Keystone run was giving us terrible data,” he says. “Turns out the equipment wasn’t allowing for the speed of the boat.”
So it all comes down to data, computer models and experience, he says. Human beings can improve somewhat on the computer models – but not much.
Here in Port Townsend, there is some consolation in the famous rain shadow, he says. Less rain, more sun. “You picked the right place to live.”

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The Pigeon (Guillemot) Lady of Discovery Bay

OK, pigeon guillemots ain’t sexy. No elegant plumage, no exotic mating ritual, no operatic song. They’re middling-sized and unobtrusive, dressed in basic black, except for a patch of white on the wings and bright red feet that they rarely show off.
But what they lack in charisma, guillemots make up for in hometown loyalty and character. In the winter, while many of their feathered cousins wing off to greener pastures, our trusty guillemots stay right here, returning faithfully year after year to the same mates and the same nests, making their livings in local waters.
We see them patrolling in small groups near the shore, especially in Discovery Bay, around Admiralty Inlet or out along the strait. They’ll drift with seeming nonchalance until, as if alerted by sonar, each bird tips backward, lifts its wings slightly, then darts beneath the surface, leaving barely a ripple behind.
I’ve watched them for years, but most of what I know I learned just last month from Lee Robinson, who was featured speaker at a meeting of the local Admiralty Audubon Society. A trained wildlife biologist who now lives on Bainbridge Island, Robinson has been studying guillemots since her childhood on the beach at Diamond Point.
“They’re abundant and easy to study,” she explained. “And once you start working with them, you learn they have personality – those doe-brown eyes and marvelous red feet.”
Robinson grew up gazing across Discovery Bay at the seabirds and the hazy, dream-like profile of Protection Island, the federal wildlife refuge which is a strictly-protected nesting site for exotic puffins and rhinoceros auklets, as well as the more prosaic gulls and guillemots. Later, she adopted the Discovery Bay guillemots as a subject for her masters thesis, then worked as a federal biologist for some years before coming home to build her own nest.
Finally, in the early 1990s, Robinson gained access to Protection Island to begin her volunteer mission, gathering data from the region’s largest guillemot population for the state’s Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program.
Each summer, she resumes her work, driving up most weekends to her parents’ home at Diamond Point, launching a tiny fiberglass fishing boat from the beach for the quick run out to the island. Sometimes, she’s accompanied by her daughters, both of whom have “caught the birding bug,” she says. But often it’s just Robinson and her guillemots.
Over 13 summers of work, Robinson says she has captured, banded and released some 560 birds and recaptured about 25 percent of them – a very successful rate of recovery, she says. Along the way, she’s become, well, the pigeon guillemot lady of Discovery Bay.
Guillemots live and nest all around the sound and straits, but they’re especially abundant along the steep shores and driftwood beaches of Jefferson County. Usually, they nest in bluffs, but out at Protection Island they lay their eggs amid the driftwood on the long sand spit that extends eastward from the island cliffs.
That’s where Robinson works. Some time in April, she distributes 40 wooden boxes, custom-made for guillemots. In June, the birds take up residence and lay their eggs – usually two of the black-on-white speckled eggs slightly larger than chicken eggs.
Mostly, the birds nest directly on the ground, just above the high tideline, she says. But they’re very happy to get the boxes, which are built to discourage otters and other predators.
“One year, all but one of the boxes was occupied,” Robinson says. “A few years ago, I showed up late and the birds were waddling around, waiting for me.”
Males and females share egg-care duties, which provides Robinson opportunities to capture and mark birds – two bands per leg – for later data gathering.
The adults don’t like all that handling, she says. They use their long, narrow beaks to peck at her hands. She’s tried work gloves and bicycle gloves, but what works best is her grandmother’s old, white cotton “church gloves,” which hold up well to the pecking and pooping alike.
Most of her work goes on in daylight. But once in a while, Robinson comes out for an overnight, checking the boxes in darkness, sleeping in the crude research cabin at the foot of the bluff.
The first chicks hatch around July 1, hacking their way out of the shells and spilling out as tiny balls of black fluff weighing about an ounce “and way too cute,” Robinson says.
At this stage, the young can be held, weighed and studied – a task favored by Robinson’s daughters.
The parent birds immediately go to work, diving for small fish and bringing them back to the young. The chicks grow quickly, tripling their weight in a week, growing primary feathers and losing their down. In the fourth week, they set off from the nest, caked in their own excrement and tumbling down the beach to the water to begin swimming and fishing.
By September 1, most are gone – on their own. But many return year after year as adults to nest in Robinson’s boxes, testimony to good design.
Robinson’s mission is to track wildlife populations, and generally the guillemots seem to be doing well, she says. This year, the state estimates more than 16,000 adults living around Puget Sound – more than 2,000 of them nesting on Protection Island.
But populations fluctuate. Productivity – the rate of successful reproduction – dropped in 1998, which was an El Nino year. And a number of chicks died in 2003.
The birds face any number of risks, she says. Hot spells, especially in July, can be hard on newborns. Otters and eagles may feed on the young. And thousands of glaucous-winged gulls nest there, some of them just inches from the guillemots. Robinson’s teen-aged daughter, Karen, has begun studying that problem as a school project.
But those hearty pigeon guillemots persist, patrolling our local shores year-round, entertaining beachcombers and boaters, and providing good data and good news for at least one growing family of bird-lovin’ biologists.

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Puget Sound in bloom: Invasion of the killer ‘corn flakes’

Down at the Marine Science Center at Point Wilson, Kristin Wilkinson’s normal job is to guide visitors into the silent, whimsical world of plankton.
Kids love to watch her dip an 18-inch plankton net into the bay alongside the dock, carry her jar of seawater back to the lab, then apply a couple of drops to a glass slide. From there, she leads her visitors down the rabbit hole into a microscopic Wonderland.
Magnified a hundred times or so, that drop of water reveals a strange and
marvelous micro-universe of tiny plants and animals in every imaginable shape and color. There are bug-like critters with spindly antennae, twisted chains of golden-brown diatoms, miniature shrimp-like crustaceans with wriggling tails, elegant necklaces of colorful dinoflagellates...
This microscopic zoo is a reminder that the waters off Puget Sound are some of the most productive on earth, teeming with life that we rarely see, but which serves as the basis for the marine food web.
These days, however, Kristin Wilkinson’s task is more sobering. An Americorps volunteer with a degree in marine biology, she finds herself doing sentry duty, on the lookout for a biological invasion of microscopic fish-killers.
Scientists around the region are tracking a massive bloom of a tiny, single-celled algae they call Heterosigma. In the past week, the infestations – scientists call them “harmful blooms” – have been detected at Port Angeles, where water samples showed concentrations of more than 2.5 million cells per liter of seawater. Similar blooms were found as far north as Cypress Island, where the algae is believed to have killed thousands of fish in net pens.
Anne Murphy, the science center director, says her staff is busy collecting and analyzing water samples from Port Townsend piers and from Mystery Bay. A volunteer is doing daily flyovers, looking for telltale bands of rust-brown water that signal something is amiss.
As of the weekend, the main blooms had not rounded the corner into Admiralty Inlet. But scientists fear that this week’s powerful tides could help wash the problem into Port Townsend’s lap.
“So far so good, but it’s not over until it’s over,” says Dr. Jack Rensel, a contract scientist and plankton expert who works with state and federal officials to monitor what they call “harmful blooms.”
“Everything hinges on the weather and the tides,” he said. “Some cloudy, windy weather certainly would help.”
Heterosigma is a single-celled organism, typically about 25 microns, or 1/1000 if an inch wide. Seen through Wilkinson’s microscope, it’s quite splendid, an ovoid of mottled shades of brown and gold, with two long, hair-like appendages that whip the water to provide propulsion. With no cell wall, each organism adopts a slightly different shape, giving it the rumpled texture that one prominent biologist compares to an elegant “corn flake.”
Like most plankton, Heterosigma winters in a state of semihibernation, then comes to life in the spring, when it whips those tiny flagella and swims toward the surface. There it lives a life not unlike a garden shrub, collecting nutrients and photosynthesizing them with chlorophyll.
In a normal year, Heterosigma poses no problem – not to humans, nor to sealife. Just another member of the planktonic family.
But under certain conditions, usually in the long warm days of late June and early July, these critters go downright nuts. Those cells multiply at a phenomenal rate, reaching concentrations that kill fish – especially salmon and other fish confined in net pens or wild fish in shallow water such as river mouths and long inlets such as Hood Canal.
This is nobody’s fault, Rensel says. . The outbreaks appear to be completely natural, not caused by pollution or any other human activity.
And scientists aren’t quite sure how it kills fish, he says. “It’s not the classic toxin, but it produces hydrogen peroxide that affects the fishes’ gills and shuts down their respiration.”
Rensel and other scientists were not completely surprised by this year’s Heterosigma bloom. Blame it on nice weather. Unusually warm, calm weather in late June, and a strong freshwater run-off from Northwest rivers, especially the Fraser River south of Vancouver, BC., created conditions just right for an algae bloom.
Those conditions lead to “stratification” – plenty of ocean nutrients for food, and a layer of less-salty water at the surface, which breeds microscopic plankton. Cloudy, windy weather help mix local waters and break up any harmful blooms.
Heterosigma blooms have been observed around Puget Sound for at least 40 years. There was a major outbreak around Lummi Island in the late 1960s, fish kills in Puget Sound in 1989, 1991 and 1997.
Fisheries research or commercial net pens are especially vulnerable, because they are confined near the surface along with the blooms. “Fish farmers are constantly watching the water,” Rensel says. “They learn how to spot these blooms from the air.”
As of last weekend, the blooms around Cypress Island had subsided, he says. But Puget Sound will remain at risk for a while – or until the area gets some clouds and wind to break up those trillions of tiny corn flakes.
Fortunately, Heterosigma’s many evolutionary cousins will remain. Puget Sound’s plankton explodes in the spring, clouding the water and fueling the complex food web that supports everything from herring and candlefish to Orca whales and sixgill sharks.
That bloom lingers through the summer and well into the fall. Later this month, the full moon will wane and local kayakers will take to the water at night, each paddle stroke triggering a fireworks show of luminescent critters.
And down at the Marine Science Center, Kristin Wilkinson and friends can resume their normal tours into Wonderland.

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The creepy, crawly bottom-feeders of Hood Canal

Face it, fisherpersons. Those crustaceous spot shrimp you crave are among the creepiest creatures ever to crawl the depths of Puget Sound and Hood Canal.
Look at them. Six inches of iridescent-orange cartilage, bristling with two-dozen flailing spines, legs and antennae, not to mention those beady, black, insect-like eyes.
Yet there you are with your new black, plastic coated traps, 300-foot coils of line and cases of canned catfood, lining up at the boat-launch ramps at Brinnon or Quilcene, waiting your turn to launch your 18-footer and set off in search of the elusive, butt-ugly Hood Canal spot shrimp.
For the May 5 season opener, there were more than 1,500 boats, and some 3000 fishermen out there. There were jolly millworkers from Everett or PA in their ragged Seahawks caps. There were Seattle lawyers decked out in Patagonia fleece. There were college kids skipping class for a day on the water, followed by an evening at the Geoduck Tavern.
And there were hundreds of gray-haired white guys who have convinced themselves that, despite shelling out $100 or more for gear, bait, an engine tune-up and gas, they are somehow living off the land.
That would be me. I have hunted the Hood Canal shrimp. A few years ago, I ventured out with a couple of pals, who deployed a veritable arsenal of pots, each armed with 300 feet of line, and baited with a slimy, smelly concoction of Fishermen’s Platter cat food and liquid fish fertilizer, scooped into plastic containers riddled with holes.
We got our limit in a few hours, beached the boat, gorged ourselves on fresh shrimp and washed it down with beer.
I was hooked, or potted. More recently, I’ve dropped my pots in Discovery Bay, but with little return for my effort. Wrong cat food, I suppose.
This year, the Disco Bay shrimp stocks are so slim that the state won’t allow any shrimping at all. But sports fishermen alone will haul some 40 tons – 85,000 pounds – of spot shrimp from Hood Canal. And biologists say that catch will hardly make a dent in shrimp populations.
So what’s with that? Why would spot shrimp prosper in Hood Canal, spiced by thousands of leaky septic tanks, while they avoid the relatively pristine waters of Discovery Bay? What do they have that we don’t?
Sewage perhaps? Remember, these are some of the strangest crustaceans in the sea. They are bottom feeders. They spend their lives crawling around the seafloor, feeding off dead and decaying fish. They thrive on garbage.
Or so it would seem.
Spot shrimp, known to scientists as Pandalus platyceros, are the most common of about 80 species of shrimp that crawl around local waters. So it stands to reason they constitute the majority of the local commercial and sports shrimp catch. And they are the honored guests at the upcoming Brinnon Shrimpfest.
They can be found as deep as 1,000 feet, but shrimpers usually catch them in pots on the floor at depths of about 175 to 300 feet. Biologists tell us they are omnivorous, feeding on marine worms and plankton as well as dead fish and plants.
Biologists are still trying to understand their life cycle. Shrimp, we’re told, live four to five years, depending on whom you ask. While they spend most of their time on the bottom, they’ll swim up to shallower water in search of food.
They spawn in the late summer, and the eggs spend the winter attached to the female’s specialized legs. The juveniles hatch as tiny larvae in the early spring and drift with the currents while they feed and mature. By summer, they have developed all those bristling spines and legs and begin behaving like shrimp.
And that’s where things begin to get kinky. I wonder if all those happy weekend shrimpers would be so enthused if they knew that virtually every spot shrimp is a cross-dressing transvestite.
When it comes to sex, Pandalus platyceros has it both ways. They mature as males, and remain so for one or two seasons. Then, triggered by some unknown impulse, they are transformed into females. Thus endowed, they reproduce for one or two seasons, dying soon after their final brood hatches.
But it gets even more weird. If shrimp populations are stressed by overfishing or some natural event, those male shrimp may transform themselves to females even sooner. And studies suggest that some shrimp may skip their male phase altogether and spend their entire lives as females.
OK, fair enough. Whatever works for the shrimp works for the shrimper.
So off we go, one eye on the depth-sounder, looking for a reasonably flat bottom, about 200 feet deep. We concoct a pungent bait and strap it to the bottom of a two-foot square cage, each with two or more funnel shaped entrances that allow shrimp to crawl in, but not out. Then we lower the device to the bottom, marked at the surface with a yellow buoy. And then we wait.
It has been done so for generations. And it appears that, among other things, spot shrimp are slow learners, because it still works.
State biologists report that the shrimp continue to thrive in Hood Canal. This year, there were more boats, more people, more shrimp pots, and they caught a combined 46,000 pounds shrimp in the first day alone.
Because, at the end of the day, a plate of steamed Pandalus platyceros, a dab of cocktail sauce and a cold microbrew makes it easy to forget you’re feasting on a bottom-feeder.

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Survivor: The Last Man on Protection Island

   When Marty Bluewater comes home to Protection Island, he gets a rather mixed reception. As he eases his boat into the windblown harbor, a beached seal lifts its head and rolls its eyes as if to say: Oh, him again. And the deer barely notice as he drives his rickety van up the bluff and across the grassy island plateau.
   But when Marty bounces up to his weathered home at the top of the bluff overlooking Discovery Bay, the result is sheer chaos. Hundreds of glaucus-winged gulls take to the air, swooping and screeching in protest while newborn chicks scamper off toward deeper grass.
   Marty takes it all in stride. As the last and only full time resident of Protection Island, Bluewater has reached an unspoken pact with his feathered and finned friends. For all their natterings, the gulls nest just steps from his house and his cabin roof is caked with guano. Rare rhinoceros auklets have burrowed under his deck. Lanky cormorants perch nearby, spreading their wings to dry.
   It’s all part of living in the middle of a federally-protected menagerie.
   “The yakkety-yak can be a little annoying,” he says, standing in the doorway of his home. “But you get used to it. And in October, the gulls head south, and this place gets very quiet again.” 
   As most everyone hereabouts knows, Protection Island is a federal wildlife refuge strictly off limits to people, boats, automobiles and virtually anything human. Signs on the beach warn boaters to stay at least 200 yards offshore. The only exceptions are the hired caretaker (and presently there isn’t one) and the occasional authorized wildlife researcher...
    And Bluewater, a retired Seattle Parks employee whose home is perched
atop the south bluff, commanding a spectacular view of Discovery Bay and the Olympics. He comes and goes year-round, loading groceries and fuel and other
supplies onto his small cabin cruiser at the Cape George Marina, making the short crossing to the island, then transferring them to his rusted van for the trip up the
bluff to his home.
    Bluewater is a tall, muscular fellow with long, salt-and-pepper hair, bronzed
skin and high cheekbones that suggest his Native American roots. His island home is a blend of rustic beach cabin and 70s bachelor pad, decorated with Plains Indian
art and driftwood scavenged from island beaches. Previously married and divorced, he’s grown accustomed to his solitary life.

   “I guess some people think I’m strange, living alone in a place like this,” he says as he steers his loaded van across the island. “But when they come out for a
visit, they see I’m living a dream. There’s no place in the world like this.”
    It may be true. The top of the island is about a square mile of windblown
trees scattered across a rolling, grassy savanna that serves as Bluewater’s back yard. After three decades of visits, and now three years of residence, he knows its every nook and cranny. He knows the skeletal trees where the bald eagles perch. He keeps track of the booming population of blacktail deer. He’ll tell you when the gulls migrate and nest. He reads the sea to know when a windstorm is brewing, and he’s liable to be island-bound for a few days, which is fine with him.
And when visitors, authorized or not, approach the island he’s likely to be watching from his living room window.
     All this in a place where, strictly speaking, he’s not supposed to be. The federal government allows him to stay for one simple reason, he says: “I was here first.”
   How this happened is a case study in the thorny relationship between people and their government and Mother Nature.
   Protection Island is a slightly bent triangle of earth, less than two miles long, stretching east to west across the mouth of Discovery Bay, some five miles west of Port Townsend. It’s something of a geographical oddity left behind when glaciers carved the Puget Sound region a few thousand years ago.
    The island was named by the English explorer George Vancouver, who stepped ashore in 1792and gushed about an island landscape “as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly furnished pleasure grounds in Europe.”
   Over the years, the island was inhabited by a series of less poetic pioneers, hunters, squatters and farmers who tried to grow wheat, potatoes, chickens and a
few cattle. But farming was handicapped by winter storms, the shortage of good water and the long boat trip to Port Townsend.
   In 1965, the island was sold for $275,000 to a group of Seattle investors, who
decided to subdivide it into some 800 vacation lots, complete with roads, a marina and airstrip. When they ran newspaper ads across the region, several hundred
people bit.
    One of them was Bluewater, who had just graduated from the University of
Washington. In 1971, he went out for a look, and promptly plunked down $7,000 for his dream lot on the edge of the bluff. A few years later, he built a rustic cabin.
   But there were problems with the development plan – the same problems that had discouraged earlier settlers.

   All this caught the attention of certain people in Port Townsend, who
understood that Protection is not just another island. It is a natural wildlife refuge, a
nesting area for untold thousands of seabirds, including rare puffins and rhinoceros auklets. To develop the island would be to push these species to the brink of extinction, they said.
It turned into a classic struggle between two groups of people equally enamored of the same unique piece of real estate. One group treasured the place as a vacation getaway, the other as a wildlife reserve.
    When the government held public hearings on the issue, Bluewater showed up to plead for his dream home.
    “What is great about our country is that a person, if he is willing can be free to pursue his dreams,” he said at the time. “I cannot conceive of giving up my property. I am willing to do anything to prevent this. I’m also willing to assist with any safeguards to insure that the unique, fragile character of the island is protected.
    “The swallows that nest under my roof, the chipmunks that live under my deck and the seagulls and auklets that nest in my yard share ownership of that land with me,” he said. “All I want from that land is to be able to enjoy the wildlife and the sounds of the land and the sea.”
    Some 20 years ago, Congress passed legislation designating the island as a wildlife refuge, and bought out most of the land owners. But there were a few “die-hards” who refused to sell, and they were allowed to keep their homes under certain conditions – for the lifetime of the original owner.
    Today, only a handful of rustic cabins remain, and their owners rarely visit.
    And Bluewater, since his retirement three years ago, is the only one who lives there.
   In a very real sense, he’s a survivor – not of Mother Nature, but of a legal and bureaucratic process that attempts to protect wildlife by confining it to designated
refuges.
    At times, the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the island, employs a fulltime caretaker who lives in a home near Bluewater’s. And Bluewater has been a good neighbor, says FWS supervisor Kevin Ryan.
    Bluewater comes and goes, driving to Seattle where he visits family and works with Native American programs. Now and then he has visitors, but he’s learned to appreciate the solitary life.
    “It didn’t come natural to me,” he says. “I’m pretty social and I’d never done
anything by myself. But living here was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done with my life.”
    While he is not a trained naturalist, Bluewater has learned much about the natural history around him simply by being there. He roams the island, snapping photographs and keeping track of the comings and goings. He’s seen the deer population explode from about six when he arrived to about 60 or 70 today.
     He loves the resident eagles, but he worries that their increasing numbers threaten other birds – especially the gulls, whose nests are easy-pickings for hungry raptors.
Summers are nice, he says. But he looks forward to the winter. Most of the birds move south as the storms move in from the north.
    “You can’t imagine the winds out here. If it’s blowing 30 in Port Townsend, then it’s blowing 40 on Discovery Bay and 60 or 70 up here on the bluff. There are days you can’t stand up right outside my house.”
    In a heavy blow, the cabin will shudder and Bluewater will hunker down, knowing he won’t be able to run his boat for a few days. He’s had windows caved in by 90-knot winds, replacing them one-by-one with tempered glass.
    But then it lets up, and the world survives Nature’s punishment.
   Perhaps the lesson, Bluewater says, is that human beings can learn to live with the natural world.
    “It’s a shame that the people who own this island have to look at it from a
distance” he says. “They should bring people out so they can appreciate it.”
    That’s not likely, says Ryan of the FWS. The government is beginning to
draft a new management plan, but the island is likely to remain off limits to most of us.
    Eventually, the issue will become rather academic. Each of those winter storms eats away at those exposed northern bluffs, and each year that shoreline recedes a little more. A few centuries in the future, Protection Island may be little more than a sandbar.
    Because nobody really knows how to protect Mother Nature from herself.

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Trollers to trawlers: A fishboat primer

   Strolling the docks at Boat Haven, one might wonder if commercial salmon fishermen are teetering on the brink of extinction. Other than a few aging purse seiners and gillnetters, what’s left of the commercial fleet seems to be shrinking before our eyes.
   But a few steps away, up in the boatyard, fishermen have been scrambling over aging wood or steel hulls, painting bottoms, checking fittings, preparing for the annual summer migration up the Inside Passage.
   Every year or so, we see another lament over the imminent demise of the Puget Sound salmon fleet. And each cultural obituary has proved premature. Salmon fishing, a Puget Sound industry still rooted in 19th century technology, has cruised into the 21st.
   There are fewer boats, a consequence of declining salmon runs, environmental pressures, shortened fishing seasons, competition with farmed fish.
   That makes it a tougher business. To make it, fishermen must fish smarter. They need boats and gear that can work a variety of fisheries – salmon now, crab later, then halibut or black cod. Most will fish Alaska waters, then come home to Puget Sound in the fall. And good fishermen will treat their catch better, cleaning and dressing the fish on board, catering to a high-end market.
   But we still buy fresh salmon, caught locally or in Alaska, at record high prices. In recent weeks, the seiners have been growling back to life, lumbering out of the Boat Haven and steaming north for Alaska. Later this summer they’ll be back, spreading their nets in the San Juans or Puget Sound, or anchored next to the Hood Canal Bridge, waiting for the next opening.
    As long as there are salmon swimming in Puget Sound, there will be fishermen anxious to catch and sell them. And you might as well learn which boat is which, and how they ply their trade. Here’s a glimpse at the salmon fleet.

   The gillnetters: For decades, these were the mainstay of the salmon fleet -- small boats that are relatively economical to buy, operate and maintain. This year the state licensed 450 gillnetters, 200 of them here in Puget Sound. But most live on trailers, parked in driveways, awaiting the next opening.
   The boats are typically under 30 feet, with fiberglass or aluminum hulls and cabins set forward to allow room for the net. One variation, the “bowpicker,” uses a stern cabin, deploying the net from the front to avoid fouling in the propeller.
    The technology is simple. They use an aluminum reel, like a huge spool of thread, to deploy a net made of translucent nylon. The top edge of the net floats at the surface, forming a long, almost invisible fence that extends 20 to 30 feet down. The strategy is to set the net across a channel or tidal current, so that migrating salmon swim into the net and are snagged in the webbing.
Gillnetters usually work inside waters, often near the mouth of a river, where salmon are schooled up, preparing to move upstream to spawn.
    Some years ago, gillnetters got a bad rap because of Asian fishermen who used enormous nets, sometimes 30 miles long, in the open ocean, snagging tuna and salmon and anything else that happened to swim by. But Puget Sound gillnetters tend to be a cleaner fishery with minimal waste.

    The purse seiners: These are the most visible of the local fleet -- big 60-foot boats, many of them wood-hulled, with high bows and low, broad sterns for working the nets. Some 75 are licensed across the state, several of them here.
    Seiners frequently fish the same runs as the gillnetters, often on alternating days. But they use a very different strategy.
    The seine net is much longer, deeper and heavier. And it catches fish by enclosing them, like a floating corral. Fishermen scan the surface, looking for salmon jumping or finning at the surface. Then they use a powerful, aluminum power skiff to pull one end of the net off the deck until it extends perhaps half a mile across the water. The boats close the trap, encircling the fish at the surface, then reel in a line that closes the bottom of the net, like a purse.
   The seine boat then pulls alongside the net and gradually reels the net back in, shrinking the circle and concentrating the catch. The fish are harvested from the net either with enormous buckets, or hydraulic suction hoses.
   The process isn’t romantic, but seiners often fish in fleets, and their huge circles of nets can create artistic patterns on a calm sea. Look for them this fall on Hood Canal or off San Juan Island.

   The trollers: This is the gentleman’s fishery, favored by the loners and sportsmen who spurn nets in favor of catching salmon individually by hook and line. They fish the outside waters, so their boats are small – 30 to 40 feet -- and seaworthy, with cabins capable of sleeping one or two fishermen.
   Trollers are handsome, traditional boats, many of them wooden-hulled with canoe sterns. When fishing, they resemble giant dragonflies, their trolling poles extended port and starboard like wings. Most trollers drag six weighted lines, two from the stern, and two from each of the poles. Each of those lines in turn drags several shorter lines, or leaders, baited with herring or lures – more than 40 lines in all. The lines are retrieved one at a time, using hydraulic winches powered off the engine.
   Troll-caught salmon are valued because the fish are caught at sea, sometimes hundreds of miles from their spawning grounds. And each chinook or coho salmon is cleaned and iced on board.
   Alas, trollers are also difficult to manage. They intercept salmon that may be from healthy stocks, or from endangered runs. Washington trollers catch fish headed for Oregon rivers; Canadian trollers catch fish headed for Washington; Alaskans catch fish headed for Canada; and vice versa.
But the fishery persists, with about 150 licenses – mostly at ocean ports like Neah Bay and Westport. Despite tighter regulations, their catch brings a premium price back at the docks. And when salmon season closes, they steam further out to sea to troll for albacore tuna, another moneymaker.

The trawlers: While the name is frequently confused with trollers, the boats and gear could hardly