RossInk : Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

       
   In mid-afternoon, the word goes out across the eastern end of Protection Island – a cacophony of seagull cries that might translate as: “He’s back.”
   And here comes Jim Hayward, that scientist, armed as usual with a clipboard and a portable scale, stepping carefully through the grasses, peering into nests and meticulously recording what he sees. 
   His reception is best described as mild annoyance. One by one, the gulls waddle off their rudimentary nests, turn and watch Hayward inspect their handiwork – one or more eggs the color of Army camouflage. If gulls could put their wings on their hips and roll their eyeballs like a Disney animation, they would. But then Hayward moves on, and they return to the nests
    Fact is, Hayward has become more or less part of the family. If seniority counts for anything, he has as much claim to this stretch of prime waterfront real estate as the gulls do. Each summer for 21 years, he has returned to resume his lifetime of research with glaucous-winged gulls, several thousand of which nest in the Protection Island National Wildlife Refuge.
    To most of us, the island is an alluring image, like Bali Hai, shrouded in offshore mist and strictly off limits to visitors. But to Hayward and his wife, both PhD professors at Andrews University in Michigan, it is a rare, outdoor laboratory, one of the best places on earth to study the biology and behavior of gulls and other seabirds. Each spring, they return to the island to resume that work. 
    If it sounds idealic, consider the living conditions. For three months, home is a rustic cabin atop the island.  They haul all their food, drinking water, fuel and anything else they need by boat from the Cape George marina. They sleep on a mattress on the floor, do all their own repairs and maintenance, and bounce around the island in a rickety pickup truck that is more rust than steel. And, for all this, you will never hear a single complaint. “We are grateful to be here,” Hayward says.
    In their own way, so are the gulls. These are the same birds you’ll see gliding in the slipstream of your Puget Sound ferry, or begging for French fries at McDonalds. And thousands of them, mostly glaucous-winged gulls, return each spring to nest on Protection Island – followed soon thereafter by Hayward and Henson.
    Funded by the National Science Foundation, they are studying the dynamics of breeding colonies – the factors that influence or govern gull populations. “We’re interested in patterns of behavior,” he says. “ What they do, and why they do it.”
    Gulls are ideal subjects for such work, Hayward says. They nest in large colonies and they’re comfortable around people. They’re larger than most birds, and they live in the open, where they can be monitored. They are active during the day. “And they have an interesting, complicated behavior, which has been studied for many years, so that it is fairly well understood.”
    They monitor gulls in several ways. First, they maintain an observation station from the top of the bluff, overlooking the grass-covered spit that extends half a mile to the east, toward Port Townsend. “This is one of the best places in the world to study gulls,” Hayward says. “You can see everything.”
   From that vantage point, they use high-powered spotting scopes to scan their research plots, carefully recording bird-by-bird what their subjects are doing at every hour of the day.
Meanwhile, they maintain banks of digital video cameras, trained on the same nesting areas, running continuously.
    When the birds begin to lay their eggs – usually in mid to late May – Hayward begins his daily tour of the research area, walking through designated plots, inspecting some 300 nests scrawled into the low grass near the shore, counting eggs. Each of hundreds of eggs is weighed, marked and recorded daily for two months – from mid-May to mid-July. Eventually, all this data is entered into Henson’s solar-powered laptop computer, where the number-crunching occurs.
    They’re trying to understand, and eventually predict, how gull numbers will fluctuate based on certain factors – sunlight, temperature, tides, predators and the like.
     For some years, Henson hoped to apply “chaos theory” to gull populations. Chaos is the idea, largely developed by the late Edward Lorenz, that attempts to use seemingly minute changes in biological systems to explain and even predict larger events that appear unrelated. To illustrate his theory, Lorenz suggested a butterfly that flaps its wings in Brazil and sets off a chain of events that leads to a tornado in Texas.  Gulls seemed like logical candidates for chaos theory; in fact, Lorenz is said to have considered using the illustration of a gull, rather than a butterfly, flapping its wings.
    Years of work, however, now suggest that gull behavior is best understood not by chaos, but by synchrony, Henson says. Gulls lay their eggs in synchronized “pulses,” she says – lots of eggs on one day, far fewer the next day, then back to higher numbers the third day. 
   “Why would birds lay their eggs in synchronization?” she asks. “That’s what we’re trying to determine.”
    Similarly, they used their data to create a mathematical model that uses tides and time of day to predict, for example, how many birds will perch on the pier at Protection Island. It worked. 
     And so what? Why should we care about when gulls lay their eggs? Hayward offers some practical applications. Gulls, for example, tend to become pests around cities and airports. As scientists increase their understanding of behavior, they could come up with strategies for dealing with birds.
     In a broader sense, gulls provide models that help scientists understand other animals’ behavior. “We’re trying to develop new mathematical techniques to do hard science and ecological field counts,” Henson says. If science can learn to predict fluctuations in gull numbers on Protection Island, they are likely to learn something applicable to ecosystems.
     And, Hayward adds, “I’m just curious. I want to know why gulls are calling now and not later. I want to know why there are more birds in one plot than another. I want to know why they lay their eggs in synchronized pulses.”
     Besides , it brings them back to a place that, despite the rugged living conditions, has become something of a second home. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s also play,” Hayward says. “Later in the summer, when we’re not collecting data so intensively, there’s time to relax in a unique place, with no TV, no Internet, no stereo, no cellphones. It’s a sanctuary for us as well as for the gulls.”

(  (From the Port Townsend Leader, July 2008.)

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   Pushed by a fresh northerly and a stiff flood tide, the tall ships returned to Puget Sound this week, sailing one-by-one through Admiralty Inlet and continuing down the sound for a gathering of traditional tall ships.
   Last to arrive was the familiar Lady Washington, the Grays Harbor-based brigantine which tied up alongside the Hawaiian Chieftain and Lynx at the Northwest Maritime Center dock. “We always look forward to coming here,” said Ryan Meyer, skipper of the Lady.
   They are among some two dozen tall ships that are stopping off here in route to a spectacular gathering over the Fourth of July weekend on the Tacoma waterfront.
     Tall ships are hardly a novelty to Port Townsend. The waterfront is home to the historic schooners Adventuress and Martha, and the Lady Washington is a frequent visitor. Three years ago, a similar fleet dropped anchor here in route to Tacoma.
   Sailing ships are embedded in this town’s genetic material, like madrona trees and facial hair. Tall ships were the reason the town was established in the first place. Arriving sea captains dropped anchor here to wait for tugboats to take them down the sound to Seattle and beyond. All those handsome Victorians were built by people who expected the railroad to terminate at Port Townsend, so sailing ships could be unloaded without dealing with the sound’s whimsical winds and currents.
   Then, of course, came steamships, and the Age of Sail came to an abrupt end. Those elegant tall ships, with their billowing trapezoidal sails and spiderweb rigging, were suddenly obsolete. Grand old schooners and clipper ships were dismasted and converted to barges, or left to rot on the tideflats. By the early 1970s, only a handful were left.
   Since then, there has been a comeback, perhaps triggered by TV images of the tall ships gathering in New York’s harbor for the 1976 Bicentennial. Old boats like Martha and Adventuress were painstakingly nursed back to life. The Lady Washington was built in Grays Harbor and turned over to a non-profit.
    Today, depending on who’s counting, there are perhaps 200 ships of various classes, ranging from relatively small schooners to a few grand square-riggers. Most, like Adventuress and Martha, are operated by private non-profits and used for sail training. Others are available for charters.
    And Port Townsend is a favorite stopping point. In part it’s because of the cadre of shipwrights, sailmakers and riggers who have chosen to live and work here. But Port Townsend’s waterfront is also the right scale for a tall ship. They moor here comfortably without being dwarfed by skyscrapers, cruise ships and oil tankers. The town and the ships share a common heritage.
   The tall ship comeback could be mistaken for just another toy for sentimental hobbyists. But anybody who has ever sailed aboard one of these ships understands that they fire people’s imaginations, much as they did in the time of Columbus or Cook. It still seems amazing that these big, beautiful vehicles can move at all.
    And at a time of $4 gas and a looming energy crisis, we’re also reminded that they are triumphs of energy efficiency. How can we not admire an ancient technology that can traverse oceans without burning a drop of oil.

   (From the Port Townsend Leader, July 2008)

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   Somewhere in the basement of the Seattle Aquarium, six Port Townsenders gather around a utilitarian saltwater tank, lift the top hatch, and peer into the watery blackness. “Hello, Harry,” somebody says. “ Come on out and see us.”
   A mottled-red tentacle slithers to the surface, up and out of the hatch. It keeps on coming, groping for something – food, or love, or just contact with another intelligent being. Another tentacle follows, finds a humanoid hand and wraps itself around it. The hand recoils, and the rubbery suckers break loose with a bubblewrap-like crackle. 
    “Meet Harry,” says our aquarium guide. “Harry Potter.”
    For 20 minutes or so, we stand around that inelegant tank, shaking hands with a slimey critter named for a wizard and equipped with enough limbs to greet us all at the same time.
    Harry, of course, is not just your everyday octopus. He is O. dofleini -- a giant Pacific Octopus – the world’s largest known octopus species. In addition, he is the aquarium’s octopus in waiting; soon he will be moved upstairs to the main octopus display tank, replacing the present occupant, who is about to be released into Elliott Bay. 
     Port Townsend is home to lots of giant Pacific octopus. They can be found living in the rock jetty at Point Hudson. A single shipwreck in Discovery Bay once proved to a rocky condominium for at least eight big guys. Steve Blazina, a Marrowstone Island diver with a longtime affinity for O.dofleini – recently found one living in a log just offshore from Swain’s ; that critter now resides at the Marine Science Center in Pousbo.
   But, for those without scuba tanks, the Seattle aquarium remains the best place around to get up close and personal. Staff biologist Roland Anderson has been caring for and studying local octopus for some 30 years, and he probably knows them better than anyone.
    At about 30 pounds, Harry is no monster. Giant Pacifics are rumored to exceed 100 pounds, measuring more than 12 feet from the tip of one tentacle to another. (Their smaller cousins, O. rubescens or "red octopuses," are teacup sized.) But most “giants” are more or less Harry’s size.
   Large or small, the octopus is a physiological masterpiece - eight tentacles, each of which can operate independently or in graceful synchrony with the others, all emerging from beneath a soft, hoodlike mantle topped by two eyes that seem to size up visitors with profound skepticism.
   Nothing else on earth moves quite like an octopus. Most of time, they move on the bottom, not so much walking as flowing and oozing, each tentacle doing its share of the work. But, when inspired to do so, they become jet-propelled, ingesting sea water and ejecting it at will through a flexible funnel, hurtling through the water like guided missiles.
   They are masters of disguise, instantly flashing from red to orange to brown to white – reflecting the whim or emotion of the moment, or the color of their environment. Unburdened by a skeleton, they are expert contortionists, squeezing through impossibly small spaces. They are strong enough to lift more than their own weight; if Harry’s tank weren’t latched, he would slither out and across the concrete, searching for an ocean.
    And they are very, very smart -- at least by invertebrate standards. Anderson has spent years studying and illustrating their intelligence.
   Octopuses are born, appropriately enough, under rocks, which is where mom deposits some 50,000 to 75,000 eggs, each the size of a grain of rice, and guards the nest four to six months. Once hatched, the newborn octopus floats with the currents, feeding on plankton, gaining as much as 2 percent of its body weight per day. Most will be gobbled up by larger creatures, but the fortunate few who reach maturity will live three to five years.
   As adults, they live in rocky dens and crevices, in shipwrecks or discarded tires or even beer bottles - any place they can squeeze themselves for protection from predators. Their strictly carnivorous diet soon graduates to crabs, clams and fish.
   Their feeding strategy is unique, Anderson says. Octopus have a rasping tongue, much like a small file. They may just pull a clam apart, or they may use that tongue to drill a pinhole in the shell of a clam and inject a saliva that kills the organism within seconds.
    Anderson has recently learned that they are smart enough to seek the easiest method available. But, given the opportunity, they relish their clams pre-processed – on the halfshell.
    The octopus has a parrotliike beak which, in combination with its venom, gives it a nasty bite. Anderson has never been bitten, but some of his colleagues have been. The toxin causes pain and swelling comparable with a bee sting, he says, and may leave a scar. Ironically, the smaller red octopus is more likely to bite than the giants, whom Anderson describes as "pussycats."
   They are somewhat transient creatures, moving from den to den, staying a month or so until it has depleted the local food supply. In some cases, octopuses will stay in their dens, wait for something tasty to swim by and snag it. Or they may venture out to hunt, gallumphing along the bottom on all eights until they find a crab and surround it. As adults, they use their jets only in emergencies - to chase meals or avoid becoming one.
   There is no reliable data on their populations, but Anderson is confident they’re faring well. Each year, he organizes an informal daylong survey, during which amateur divers are asked to look for octopus and report what they find. The results have been fairly consistent, he says – about 200 divers reporting a total of 70 or so octopus sightings. That suggests there are plenty of O. dofleini out there.
    This despite a rather Spartan sex life. They spawn just once, the male using its specialized tentacle to deliver a "spermatophore," or packet of sperm, to the female, who tucks it away for future use. When she's ready, she uses the sperm to fertilize her thousands of eggs and deposits them under a rock.
   That’s where the fun ends. After mating, the male "goes a little crazy," stops eating and abandons its den, which frees up space for his mate. Then he dies. The female hangs on, guards her brood for several months, manipulating the eggs, using her funnel to keep them clean. She, too, stops eating, her body shrinking until the eggs hatch. And then she dies as well.
    People have been fishing for octopus for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks simply lowered clay pots to known octopus habitat and left them there a day or so; when they hauled them back to the surface, the newly resident octopus became tomorrow's calamari. The strategy still works. Octopuses can be caught with a rubber tire tied to a rope.
    Anderson prefers to catch them by hand, scuba-diving into known "octopus holes" such as Neah Bay, Hood Canal, Tacoma Narrows. Collectors entice them out of their dens, grab a tentacle or two and stuff them into a plastic bag.
    Anderson has spent years figuring out how to keep them in captivity. They are comfortable in small spaces, and don’t seem to mind being handled, he says. And they’ll eat just about anything they are offered. But, if left in the main tank, an octopus will reject frozen herring and other handouts in favor of its live neighbors.
    But perhaps Anderson’s biggest discovery is that octopuses have emotions, and wear them on all eight sleeves. "Color changes seem to be linked to behavior," he says. "We're investigating how and why, but they seem to have a range of messages: `I'm ready to mate now,' or `Predator coming!' or "Leave me alone, I'm taking a nap."
    With its mammallike eyes and brains, the octopus exhibits un-invertebrate behaviors such as sleep. The journal Science recently reported Anderson's research on octopus "play." Each of eight octopuses was provided with a white pill bottle. Some ignored it. Some used their funnels to blow it away. Still others shot it around the tank, retrieved it, and shot it again, and again. Anderson sees this as "repetitive, long-term behavior with no apparent function - except that it feels good, which is the definition of `play.' " 
    Maybe that’s what Harry had on his mind the other day when he reached out and touched his Port Townsend visitors.

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   Out on Mystery Bay, the nautical small talk usually revolves around winds and waves and tidal currents – the crucial factors to spending a day on Puget Sound.
   These days, a new topic has been added to the mix – fecal coliforms. And these microscopic bacteria, usually associated with four-letter words, could become the most significant maritime variable of all.
   Mystery Bay is the pastoral cove on Marrowstone Island, tucked deep in Kilisut Harbor. It has to be one of the lovelier bays in the area, surrounded by treed shores and broad oyster beds. In recent years, it’s also become a popular, year-round anchorage, home to dozens of pleasure craft whose owners have fled the rising moorage rates in Port Townsend.
    And thereby hangs our tale. State officials who regularly test the water quality in Mystery Bay and other shellfish areas recently downgraded the bay from “approved” to “conditionally approved” for shellfish.
    What this means is that the Department of Health is concerned that the number of boats will cause an increase in fecal coliform counts around the bay. And this, in turn, could affect the shellfish, including the family-owned Marrowstone Island Shellfish Co, which owns and leases tidelands in the area.
   Boatowners are worried. Most keep their boats attached to buoys which may or may not have up-to-date state and county permits, on tidelands managed by the state Department of Natural Resources. If they get kicked out, it’s not at all clear where else they could go.
   “This is ridiculous,’ grumbles one boat-owner who does not want to be identified, and who keeps his sailboat on a Mystery Bay buoy. “ I don’t know of anybody who is dumping their waste into the bay. This isn’t a problem.” 
    He’s right. State health reports  make it clear that there is no fecal coliform problem in Mystery Bay. The state regularly tests the water at five stations in the bay and the results range from 1.7 to 33 bacteria per 100 mililiters. The average count is just two critters per 100 ml -- well below the state imposed limit. It is as good or better than test results from Port Townsend Bay, or even from the famous oyster beds down in Quilcene Bay.
   All five stations in Mystery Bay meet the state standard, and the station considered most suspect – Mystery Bay State Park – was among the cleanest.
   So what’s the beef?
    “It’s not about fecal coliforms,” says Al Scalf, of Jefferson County Community Development. “It’s about too many boats.”
    State officials acknowledged this. Any place where ten or more boats are gathered together must be considered a “marina.” When I checked last week, there were about 45 boats of every size and shape scattered across Mystery Bay, and many of them near the dock at the state park, the area that state officials are watching closely.
     The conditional approval is based on “the potential for discharge from vessels,” according to Scott Berbells of the state Department of Health. If people start dumping their waste, the bacteria could begin to accumulate in local shellfish, with dire consequences.
    But people don’t dump their sewage in the bay, my friend insists. If they use their onboard head, they discharge the sewage at a pumpout station at the park. No problemo.
    Still, the flap become the subject of a meeting involving four different government agencies, shellfish growers and local Native American tribes who have shellfish rights. “We’re trying to come up with a plan,” says Scalf.
    State officials reiterated their concern that all those boats could create a pollution problem. OK, but so far they haven’t, local officials argued. And evicting the boats would create major problems in a region where boat moorage is scarce and expensive. Kick them out of Mystery Bay, and some of these boatowners might find something new. But why put them through all that if there is no problem?
   Mystery Bay’s little predicament appears to be much ado about nothing. But it is symptomatic of the broader challenge of restoring and protecting Puget Sound. Virtually everybody here understands that our inland sea is in trouble, and most are willing to spend whatever is necessary to fix it.
    But what exactly is the problem, and what can we do about it? I’ve been writing about these things for three decades, and every few years the conventional wisdom changes. At one time or another, it has been a problem of overfishing, or of suburban sprawl, or of urban sewage, or industrial wastes, or rural septic tanks, or of too much asphalt, or not enough eelgrass. It’s probably safe to say it’s all of the above, but that doesn’t help shape a smart set of solutions.
     In September, we’ll start over when the new Puget Sound Partnership issues its recommendations for a new strategy. Who knows what they’ll ask for? 
   But here’s some free advice. If you want to preserve Puget Sound, start by NOT wasting time and energy attacking water quality problems that don’t exist.

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   For most folks hereabouts, spring translates to some combination of flower gardens and sun. They revel in their tulips and rhodies and poppies. And that’s fair enough. But for f us saltwater souls, it’s all about the glitter. We look forward to that first warm, moonless night, when Puget Sound is flat and dark so we can launch a kayak, escape the city’s incandescent glow, and enjoy an all-organic light show.
   It’s a splendid display. Each paddle stroke ignites thousands of tiny explosions of bioluminescent light, reminding us that Puget Sound, for all its ecological woes, still sizzles with life. Puget Sound may be better known for bigger and more charismatic critters – leaping king salmon and frolicking orcas. But the real star power out there belongs to those ever-lovin’, dazzling dinoflagellates.
   Dino-who? OK, they’re microscopic, far too small to be seen by the naked eye. But what they lack in size and grandeur they make up for in numbers – thousands to the cup-full of Puget Sound seawater. And sparkle, because these are the invisible “bugs” which, on warm summer nights, flash an LED-like green across the surface of the sound.
   They’re best-known to kayakers, who ride closer the surface, the better to enjoy one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular displays. But other boaters see the sparkle in their bow wave, or when porpoise swim past, leaving a trail of glitter reminiscent of Tinkerbell in Neverland.
   It happens every year, when the sound awakens from its winter slumber. As the days become longer and warmer, sunlight triggers what scientists sometimes call the “spring bloom.” Countless trillions of microscopic plankton which have overwintered in semi-hibernation in the depths rise in the water column, and begin to feed, or to photosynthesize, and to reproduce like crazy.    By early summer, they dominate the ecosystem, clouding the water, triggering a feeding frenzy that sustains virtually everything that lives out there.
   The largest of these organisms are about the size of these periods...... The vast majority are much smaller.   The explosion is triggered by diatoms, wondrous, single-celled algae enclosed in an exquisite shell of silicon. Fed by sunlight, the diatoms begin to reproduce, one diatom becoming a million within a month. While an individual diatom is quite invisible, their massive blooms can be seen from the air or, in some cases, from space.
   The diatoms, in turn, provide food for zooplankton. There are euphausiids and copepods, which are essentially tiny shrimp, and trillions of chaetognaths, needlelike critters that can actually grow big enough to see with the naked eye. The same bloom includes countless newly-hatched fish and crabs and octopus and other sealife that spend their first weeks and months drifting with the plankton, feeding and being fed upon.
   In a rich ecosystem like Puget Sound, the result is a vast soup. Scoop a cup of water from the sound and it looks like, OK, water. But take a drop of that water and slide it under a low-powered microscope, and that droplet is transformed into a throbbing menagerie of copepods and chaetognaths and diatoms and everything in between. Watch long enough, and you’ll find the bigger guys feeding on the little guys.
   Given the opportunity, and perhaps a reason, some of those guys will sparkle. Hundreds of organisms, from the fireflies back east to deep-water fish, have the ability to glow in the dark or, in scientific terms, “bioluminesce.” It’s a chemical reaction that takes place either as a continuous glow or an instantaneous flash.
   Dr. Claudia Mills, a biologist at the University of Washington marine labs in Friday Harbor, studies some 60 to 70 Northwest species of jellyfish, about half of which are bioluminescent. When she paddles at night, she’ll occasionally glimpse the warm glow of a jelly.
   But most of what we see at the surface are those everlovin’ dinoflagellates, she says.
Dinoflagellates are actually a diverse family of single-celled organisms, all microscopic, that drift with the rest of the plankton. Each consists of two transluscent cones, joined at the base, with a whip-like appendage that causes it to spin, like a top, according to Richard Strickland, the University of Washington biologist who literally wrote the book – “The Fertile Fjord” – on Puget Sound plankton.
   Dinoflagellates don’t qualify as either plants, nor animals, but as algae. They photosynthesize like plants, converting the sun’s energy to food. But they also use those tiny flagella to propel themselves vertically in the water column. During the winter, they’re less active and less abundant. But as the days lengthen, they multiply and move closer to the surface, soaking up energy by day and, when stimulated, glowing by night.
   By midsummer, it’s showtime.  In most cases, they only glitter at night, employing a circadian rhythm so they don’t waste energy during daylight. Reversing the cycle in a laboratory might take a week or more.
   Scientists understand how the process works, Mills says. But why do they glitter? Some years ago, I toured the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, and spent a couple of hours with a researcher who was trying to answer that question. “We understand the chemistry pretty well,” she said. “But we’re still trying to figure out the function.”
   They’re still working on that, says Mills. The prevailing theory is that the luminescence is defensive, serving as a natural burglar alarm or “startle response.” When threatened by larger predators, the dinos flash green, which may attract even larger predators that hopefully will eat their predators, sparing the dino.
   Then again, maybe they’re just showing off, treating the rest of us to a glimpse of Mother Nature’s springtime brilliance.

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   Last week it was the Seattle Times’ turn to crank out the obligatory series on the ecological demise of Puget Sound. Several of their finest reporters and artists donned their rubber boots and waded into the challenge, delivering new tales of woe from the shores of Washington’s inland sea.
   It was good, smart, important journalism. Alas, each year it gets more difficult to find new ways to say: Gee folks, Puget Sound ain’t getting any better. I know, because I’ve been there. Over my 30 years at the Times, I worked on several Save-the-Sound series, most recently with some of the same reporters who delivered last week. I continue to write about it because the sound remains the primary reason I choose to live here.
   Still, one gets discouraged. Consider the comments of selected experts in the concluding installment in the Times series. David Dicks, director the Puget Sound Partnership: “We have a lot of studies, a lot of information… but we have to knit it together into a strategy….” Or Kathy Fletcher, director of People for Puget Sound: “We are in a race against time…We need to grab the urgency of the problem and deal with the fact that there is a lot of disbelief that we are going to make a difference…”
   These are genuine expressions of concern that also underscore the problem -- a complete lack of specifics, with utterly no agreement about what’s wrong and what we need to do about it. What is it about Puget Sound that seems to defy solutions?
   The list of suspects begins with us, the people who live here and lack the political will to fix it -- or so goes the argument. But wait a second! Public opinion surveys suggest that people understand that the sound is in trouble, that it will cost money to fix it, and they are willing to pay. And we have payed. Over the past three decades or more, state and local taxpayers have coughed up billions of dollars for salmon restoration, pollution controls, sewage treatment plants, research, and more. 
    A precedent was set in the 1960s, when government cleaned up Lake Washington, which had been turned into a cesspool by countless sewage outfalls around its perimeter. The solution was Metro, which started as a regional sewer agency empowered to build a sewer system around the lake and ship the crap elsewhere – to Puget Sound.
   In the mid-1980s, when I worked on my first Puget Sound crusade, local government decided to spend a billion dollars to build a modern sewage treatment plant at West Point, on the Magnolia waterfront. The feds had said we didn’t have to, because the sound is so deep and its currents so powerful that sewage is efficiently diluted. But local pols decided to build it anyway, and homeowners paid for it. Now the merged King County Metro plans to build another treatment plant – at roughly three times the cost. And ratepayers are going along with the program.
   We can always blame the other guys, the cigar-chomping special interests who call the shots in Olympia. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem, either. The state has cut back commercial and sports fishing, despite the lobbyists’ protests. Pulp mills and other waterfront industries have been shut down, and those that remain are under tougher scrutiny.
   So maybe the problem is, as Fletcher puts it, the “fragmentation of decision making.” While Puget Sound is governed mostly by the state, it’s also affected by at least eight counties, scores of cities, hundreds of special utility districts and more. And we’ve learned that it is part of a larger “Salish Sea” that includes the San Juan Islands, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Canadian waters.

  The greatest obstacle is not political,  but rather the biological complexity of the sound, and the scientific uncertainty that comes with it. It is not just an ecosystem, but a web of overlapping ecosystems that invite oversimplification and defy understanding. For all our best efforts, Puget Sound remains something of a black box. We assess its health by taking water samples and counting fish pulled up on hooks or nets. Sparkling blue at the surface, it turns pitch dark less than 100 feet down. And just offshore from downtown Seattle, the depths reach 900 feet. We have very little understanding of what lives there, or how the ecosystem works.
   A generation ago, people were energized in part by accounts of gray whales washing up dead on Northwest beaches. Those images helped fuel the efforts to upgrade sewage treatment plants. Only later did we learn that the whales’ deaths probably had nothing to do with pollution, and that gray whale populations were healthy and increasing.
    More recently, scientists have paid more attention to what’s happening on and near the shores of the sound – shopping malls and suburban developments that pave over wetlands believed to be crucial to the saltwater ecology. But those linkages are not well understood.
All these uncertainties contribute to a breakdown between science and politics. Marine biologists and oceanographers are comfortable with uncertainty; they understand that the scientific process is endless, that whatever they learn merely becomes a hypothesis for the next round of investigation.
   This does not work well for governors or legislators who need to decide how to spend the next billion dollars on Puget Sound restoration.
    And it drives the rest of us nuts. We yearn for understandable causes and effects, heroes and villains. We want science to provide us the evidence we need to ban that next shopping mall, to shut down fishing altogether, to build better sewage treatment plants, or preserve wetlands.
And the darned scientists simply won’t provide that convenient road map. On the contrary, with each new breakthrough, each new level of understanding, Puget Sound appears more complex and the solutions less obvious.

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    The Copper River snakes across the Alaskan wilderness, cuts through the glacier-clad Wrangell Mountains, tumbles down to tidewater just east of Cordova, and ultimately flows into the seafood department at your local supermarket.
    Or so the spring marketing blitz would have us believe. That, along with the idea that it makes sense to pay 50 bucks or more for a slab of sockeye, or “red” salmon — and twice that for a king. But I don’t believe that either.
    Still, lots of perfectly reasonable people do. Witness the folks lining up at the local supermarkets buy a Copper River red for the weekend barbecue.  My favorite fishmonger, down at the local QFC, can barely keep up with the demand for sockeyes, on sale at $10 a pound. “These are absolutely el primo,” she says breathlessly.
     They know their pitch: The Copper River reds and kings are the year’s first major wild salmon fishery, arriving weeks or months ahead of most. And these fish store up extra fat – good fat, loaded with Omega 3 fatty acids, whatever those are – to fuel their long migrations upriver to their spawning grounds. Hence the annual feeding frenzy. 
    But not everybody buys in. Rick Ottman, the seasoned Port Townsend-based fisherman who sells his own Cape Cleare salmon, sighs when he’s asked what he thinks of the Copper Rivers. “It all depends,” he says. “It depends on what they’re eating. It depends where they are caught, and how they are caught and how they are handled. And you can’t see all that at the supermarket.”
    And so it goes every year in late May, when the ads hit the newspapers, trumpeting the arrival of the first Copper River kings and reds.
    All this for a fish that, not all that long ago, died in a gillnet and sloshed around in used crankcase oil for a few days before being stuffed into a tin can and shipped off to England to be processed into fish cakes and fried in batter.
    Whatever else you say about them, Copper River salmon are a case study of how far the Northwest salmon business has come in a couple of decades.
    The Copper is just one of Alaska’s long wilderness rivers that serve as perfect habitat for the fabled wild Pacific salmon. It emerges from the mountains just east of Cordova, the funky coastal fishing village which has been living off salmon for generations.
     It’s best known for its kings and sockeye, which live very different life cycles but which return each spring to the broad, intricate river delta known as the Copper River Flats.
     Fifteen years ago, I crewed with a grizzled fisherman named Tom Copeland, who had been fishing the flats since he was a teenager. On the night before the season opening, we climbed aboard his small fiberglass bowpicker and headed for the flats, bucking into an ugly rainstorm driven by 20-knot winds. Two miserable hours later, we anchored in the lee of one of the grassy sandbars that make up the river delta.
      We fished for several days, spreading that shallow gillnet across one of those braided channels, drifting downstream, retrieving the net, collecting those gorgeous, silvery sockeyes and the occasional king, stowing them on shaved ice, then repeating the process. My fingers ached from picking through nylon gillnet, and from yanking the gills so the fish would quickly bleed to death.
     As we drifted, Tom filled the time with stories of fishermen lost in the treacherous currents, of wild storms screaming off the Gulf of Alaska, of boats that sank from the weight of their sockeye catch, and of perennial price wars between fishermen and canneries.
     For most of a century, the canneries monopolized Alaska salmon. Remote fishing grounds, poor transportation and a red-meat-eating American public left few choices for Alaska fishermen. Whatever they caught, from humpies to kings, went into cans – mostly for export to Europe.
    Down on the flats, those gourmet fish were gillnetted by the thousands, then tossed into the bilge along with the crankcase oil, and eventually sold to a Cordova cannery for a few cents a pound.
    In the 1980s, that began to change. The Japanese invested heavily in Alaska fisheries, and they had no desire to eat wild salmon from a tin can. So, from Ketchikan to the Bering Sea, fishermen learned to treat salmon the way it deserved to be treated. They installed chilled storage tanks, separate from the bilges. They cleaned and bled their fish on board. They learned how to air-freight fresh or frozen fish. These days, a Copper River red can be netted at 6 a.m. on the Flats, and served in Seattle the same evening.
    Seattle marketing guru Jon Rowley took it a step further. He figured out how to use advertising and good public relations to create demand for a good product.
   And the Copper Rivers were ripe for marketing. Alaska has other early salmon fisheries – such as False Pass in the Aleutians. But Rowley figured nobody’s going to shell out $20 a pound for a “False Pass fillet.”
    And thus was born the Copper River Mystique.    But are they the world’s best salmon?
     “The fish is fabulous, and the folklore is even more fabulous,” says Ken Davies at Key City Fish in Port Townsend. “You put a Copper River red alongside a Quinault red, or a Fraser River red, and you won’t know the difference.”
    The Copper River migration is no longer or more challenging than migrations up the Yukon, the Fraser, or our own Columbia River. 
     Some businesses say it's just too  spendy.   The seafood manager at my local Safeway is holding off a few weeks until the prices drop a little. “I’d have to sell the kings for $23 a pound, and that’s too much,” he says.
     That’s my strategy too. I’m ready for my first Alaska salmon, never mind which river. But I can wait a few weeks. Don’t give me a fish. And don’t teach me to fish. Just sell me one at a price that doesn’t require me to dip into the grandkids’ college fund.

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   Alaska beckons. Down at the Boat Haven, you hear its siren song, whispering through the shrouds of the schooners and seiners: It’s time to head North.
   You wander the boatyard, absorbing the sights and smells of sawdust and fresh varnish and $200-a-gallon copper bottom paint. People are aching to get back on the water, stock up the galley, fire up that diesel and point the bow north by northwest.
  So it has been for well over a century – that deep, maritime bond between Port Townsend and isolated fishing ports from Ketchikan to Dutch Harbor. As far back as John Muir and Jack London, adventure-hungry Americans have stepped aboard steamers or fishing boats or private yachts to explore the Inside Passage.
    For some of our neighbors, it’s an annual migration. Each fall, they deliver the last of their salmon or halibut and limp south for the winter. They hunker down for a few months, wondering if they want to do it again, until that spring day when they hear that call of the North like the howl of a gray wolf. So they haul their boats for a coat of fresh paint, new zincs, a reconditioned prop… and the cycle is renewed.
   I feel the same tug. I don’t own an Alaska boat, and it might be years between trips north, but I hear it all the same. My first trip was some 35 years ago, when a couple of pals and I took the Alaska ferry to Skagway, hiked the Chilkoot Pass and floated the Yukon River to Dawson City. Since then I’ve cruised the Inside Passage many times – via Alaska ferry, BC ferry, private yacht, commercial fishing boats and, yes, a big cruise ship.
   It never gets old. From Admiralty Inlet to Glacier Bay, there’s enough grand geography and character and adventure to fill a lifetime. And I’m always amazed to learn how many people have lived here for decades, yet never cruised the Inside Passage, never laid eyes on those 5,000-foot mountain ranges partially submerged in 1,000-foot deep seas, never watched a humpback whale breach the surface of a deep, green fjord.
   For all its remoteness, the Inside Passage is amazingly accessible. Most people, of course, see it from the deck of one of those gigantic cruise ships. For $1,000 and up, you can sit in a comfy, sip something pink, read some John Muir or Jack London, and watch the wilderness float by. I took a mini-cruise some years ago – along with some 2,000 other people, plus crew. When we steamed to the top of Desolation Sound, the clouds parted and treated us to one of the world’s most spectacular views. And I practically had it to myself, because most of my shipmates were down below, pumping quarters into slot machines.
  There are better ways to cruise the passage – lots of them, in fact. Last year, I travelled with an old friend at the helm of his 46-foot Monk. We took two weeks to make the passage to Ketchikan, counting sidetrips up places like Kingcome Inlet, BC. Several times, we relaxed in wilderness hot springs that we had to ourselves, caught enough crab to gorge ourselves.
    People make the trip in small craft, but most prefer a bigger boat – say, 30 to 40 feet or more. While most of the route is “protected,” it is also an uphill course, where most days are spent cruising into the teeth of the prevailing wind and seas. And there are three major crossings, where boats are exposed to the open ocean.
   The most popular option is the Alaska ferry, the Columbia, which remains one of the great cruising bargains. It’s essentially a small cruise ship, which leaves Bellingham at 6pm each Friday, year round, steaming the Passage to Southeast Alaska. The one-way passenger fare is $240 to Ketchikan, which takes two full days; $325 to Juneau or Sitka, which is another full day. Kids 6-11 sail for half price, under six for free. (The vehicle fare is much stiffer -- $740 to Juneau. But what would you do with a car up there, anyway?)
  The hitch, of course, is accommodations. There are a few cabins, but they’re pricey and they’re usually booked months in advance. So most travelers bring backpacking tents and inflatable mattresses, and set them up on the stern deck. I’ve always done it that way; the last time, I counted 80 tents, lashed to each other to keep them from blowing away in the slipstream.
There is a decent restaurant, a bar and a coffee shop on board. But no casino, no dancing girls. Entertainment is provided by the scenery, a good book, or the Alaskan in the next tent.
   Then there is the BC ferry, another small cruise ship that runs between Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and Prince Rupert, near the Alaska border. This route takes in some of the most spectacular stretches of the Inside Passage, with the added advantage of being able to transfer to other boats for travel into the BC fjords.
  The boat leaves Port Hardy at 7:30 am every other day and arrives Prince Rupert at close to midnight, so travelers need to book accommodations at both ends in advance. The one-way fare is $125, and kids sail for half fare. The drive to Port Hardy takes a very long day, or there are fast buses that run from Victoria.
   For Port Townsend folks, there may be yet another alternative. My most memorable cruise north was on an aging steel-hulled purse seiner run by a crusty Yugoslavian who agreed to let me tag along. Like most fishermen, he cruised straight through, day and night, without stopping, taking four days to reach Ketchikan. The skipper was short-handed; a couple of crew planned to catch up with him in Ketchikan. So, by the second day, the skipper had me standing a regular watch at the helm, steering this big, throaty seineboat through the night, guided by radar and the stars. 
   Each summer, a small fleet of commercial boats leaves Port Townsend and returns to the Alaska fishing grounds. Often they travel with few crew, or none at all. I’ve often wondered why they don’t sell berths to adventure-seeking passengers, who would rather see the Passage from the bridge of a purse seiner than from the windows of a floating casino.

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                From the picture windows along Port Townsend’s North Shore, the Saturday morning seascape must have resembled the Normandy Invasion… or, perhaps, the beaches of Dunkirk.

                It started at first light, with a dozen or so small boats scattered across the horizon about a mile offshore between Protection Island and Admiralty Inlet.  By 9 am, the fleet had grown to well over 75 and counting – flecks of white fiberglass set against a deep blue Strait of Juan de Fuca, with a hazy silhouette of Mount Baker as a backdrop.

                It was a motley fleet.  There were big white cabin cruisers and sleek speedboats and 18-foot aluminum skiffs and a couple of inflatable dingies.    Each carried at least a couple of Jefferson County souls – from grampas in overalls to 20-something Bubbas in Eddie Bauer parkas.  And then there was Cape George fisherman extraordinaire Jack Scherting, assisted by your waterfront correspondent. 

                We were all out there early on a Saturday morning for the same reason – the continuing quest for the ever-elusive, Giant Cross-eyed Flatfish.

                In case you missed it, halibut season is back again.  That’s the annual rite during which hundreds of us landlubbers set aside whatever else they’re doing and put to sea with an armful of fishing gear and a thermos of black coffee in hopes of snagging that  prized 150-pound slab of whitefish.

                This occurs in many places, but one of the favorites is off Port Townsend’s north shore, where  halibut are reputed to feed on a long, wide “halibut hump”, about 150 feet below the surface roughly parallel to the shoreline. 

                There is something a bit odd about the halibut mystique.    One can understand the appeal of Northwest salmon.  They’re sleek and silvery and quite pleasant on the eyes as well as the tastebuds. 

                But the halibut is ridiculously asymmetrical and, to put it bluntly, butt ugly   It is mottled brown on one side, white on the other, with a sideways mouth frozen into a permanent frown, and two beady eyes crammed onto one side that sort of stare at each other in disbelief.  Its lifestyle is even less romantic; it lives on the ocean bottom, blending with the detritus, waiting for something edible to swim past. 

                For years, halibut were caught almost exclusively by Norwegian fishermen in prosaic wooden boats, and sold for pennies per pound, mostly to other Norwegians.

                No more.    Today those ugly bottom-feeders have risen to the top of the Northwest seafood ladder.    Something called Individual Fishing Quotas have made a few commercial halibut fishermen very wealthy.  And your local fishmonger sells halibut filets for upwards of $15 a pound – more than salmon or ahi tuna or, for that matter, the gourmet steak at the other end of the supermarket case.  

                Last year, some 65 million pounds of halibut were caught on the Northwest Coast , mostly by commercial boats using miles of longline gear.   Most of that was in Alaskan waters, but local fishermen reported about 2,500 halibut, averaging about 25 pounds each. 

                How halibut get ugly is an interesting tale.   Hatched in the depths of the Pacific, they begin life like any other fish.  But at some point, as they approach maturity, a very strange thing happens.  The halibut turns on its side and spends the rest of its life hugging the sea bottom.  Since the lower eye is now useless, it undertakes an anatomical journey, migrating across the snout to the other side of the head, where it takes up residence alongside the upper eye. The result ain’t pretty.

                Fishermen have grown to like them because, while the typical halibut comes in at about 25 to 30 pounds, there are stories of halibut weighing 150 pounds or more.   My friend Jack caught one of those just off North Beach a couple of years ago.  I once watched a couple of fishermen land a 250-pounder in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

           And, of course, when it comes to fishing, size matters a great deal.

                The fish is solid muscle and a fierce fighter.  There are legends of commercial fishermen being battered to death by oversized halibut that kept fighting long after being pulled on deck.

                But something else was at work on the Strait the other day.  It’s been a long winter, marked by ugly, wind-whipped seas and no fishing.    Eavesdropping on the marine radio channels, one sensed a throbbing  pent-up demand, an urgent need to satisfy the needs of the fishing gene.  This is the gene that drives otherwise-rational people to spend great sums of money and time on boats and gear in order to drag themselves out of bed at 4 a.m. and spend more time and more money on the water trying to hook a fish that could be purchased for a fraction of that investment at the local QFC.

                My friend, Jack, carries this gene.  When the state and the seas are favorable, he is out fishing for salmon or halibut or crab.  When he’s not fishing, he’s dragging his bride out to the ocean beaches to go clamming.  When he takes a vacation, it is to the Baja, where he fishes for tuna and swordfish and brings it home to the freezer – except when he heads north to Alaska or British Columbia to fish for king salmon, or halibut.

                I do not carry this gene.   Each year, I faithfully buy my fishing license, which I consider a charitable contribution to the governor.  Now and then, I venture out with Jack.  But the fish know me, and laugh at me.  Mostly I take notes, trying to figure out the nature of a subculture I still don’t fully understand.

                But most of the people floating on the straits for the season opener were carriers.    You could tell by listening to the radio.  “God, it’s great to be out here….. Not a bite yet, just a couple of dogfish, but it’s worth it just to be out here….   Nothing biting here either, but that’s okay….”  And so forth.

                So went the day.   The fishing gene consumed hundreds of gallons of fuel, approximately 100 jugs of black coffee, 200 frozen herring, and countless sea stories of dubious credibility.   All this for half a dozen Middlin’-Sized, Cross-eyed Flatfish, none of which landed on our boat.

                I don’t get it.  I called Jack to ask what it was all about.  But he was gone fishing.

 

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     An unusual phenomenon appeared on the surface of Discovery Bay the other day -- Boats.   Not just one or two, but a veritable fleet of a dozen or so sailboats, their sails framed by the forested shores and snowy Olympic peaks.
   They weren’t exactly racing yachts, but a rather motley assemblage of local sailors who turned out for the first-ever Cape George Regatta. But that was still more sails at one time than anybody has seen on Discovery Bay in a very long time. This happened weeks ago, and people here still talk about it.
   Fact is, not much happens out here on Disco Bay.  There are homes and barns scattered along 16 miles of shoreline, from Cape George down to old Port Discovery and back to Diamond Point.  Highway 101 skirts its southern shores.  And there’s that fellow at the south end who likes to blow things up now and then.
   But most of the time, the closest thing to excitement out here are the seagulls and pigeon guillemots who show up each spring to nest on Protection Island. Compared to big cities like Port Townsend, Discovery Bay is something of a backwater. It’s a deep, glacial fjord between forested walls, extending eight miles to the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, its entrance guarded by Protection Island.
   Every year, thousands of boaters cruise through Admiralty Inlet, just five miles to the east. But few venture into the bay. We’re just a bit out of the way and, when boats do pass nearby, they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else before the weather turns.
   This wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, Discovery Bay was more or less the Center of the Puget Sound Universe. This is because, in the spring of 1792,  George Vancouver and his sea-weary crew sailed off the Pacific into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, making their way along the starboard shore until, on May 2, they anchored in a deep, broad harbor that he named Port Discovery, for his trusty ship.
    “A picture so pleasing could not fail to call to our remembrance certain delightful and beloved situations in Old England,” he wrote in his journal. “A variety of stately forest trees pleasingly clothed its eminences and chequered the valleys, presenting extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art.”
    He was particularly impressed by the strategic placement of the island. “Had this insular production of nature been designed by the most able engineer, it could not have been placed more happily.”
    For nearly three weeks the ship remained at anchor near Carr Point, halfway down the bay. While much of the crew worked at repairing sails and spars, the skipper and others set out in small boats, exploring Port Townsend, Hood Canal and beyond. Still others set up camp at the mouth of a stream, taking celestial sightings and brewing “spruce beer,” a concoction of fir needles, water, molasses and yeast.
    Eventually, of course, they sailed on. But Vancouver’s published journals and maps placed the world’s spotlight on what became Discovery Bay, which offered safe anchorage and ample timber and steep shores that enabled giant logs to be moved down to the water. By the 1850s, there was a major mill at Port Discovery, with scores of workers, saloons and more. In one year, that mill produced some 18 million board feet of fir and cedar, most of it bound for the Bay Area, where old San Francisco was framed with our timber.
    In time, however, the trees were gone and the loggers moved on.   In the 1890s, the government built a quarantine station at Diamond Point, which was the subject of recurring rumors of escaped lepers orbubonic plague. That station continued to inspect arriving ships well into the 1920s.
Then things got very quiet.
   For those of us who live here, that’s fine. Even at the height of boating season, this “picture so pleasing” is all ours. But, for the record, boaters are welcome. There is decent holding ground in about 30 feet of water along the western shores, next to a small and under-used boat ramp at Gardiner; or on the eastern shore in the lee of Beckett Point. These are fair-weather anchorages, because either spot is prone to stiff southerlies. There is good beachcombing at low tide, especially at extreme low tides, when folks make their way out to “Glass Beach,” the old city dump near McCurdy Point.
     While here, you’ll want to circumnavigate Protection Island. It’s strictly off-limits to visitors, but the adjacent waters are rich with whimsical puffins and rhinoceros auklets, harbor seals and the occasional elephant seal. Keep an eye out for the rustic cabin perched atop the southwest bluff, where Marty Bluewater holds out as the last resident of an island otherwise restored to Mother Nature. But be aware: There is virtually no public shoreline here. The tiny Cape George Marina is strictly private, and its entrance is dangerously shallow at low tides. There is no fuel, no restaurant, no pub to be found.
     So why come at all? Because it’s here, and nobody else is. And because, with the aid of Vancouver’s journals, a voyage into Discovery Bay is a journey in time. Vancouver and company anchored here longer than any other spot on Puget Sound, and the journals offer detailed descriptions of the land and seascape as it looked for untold thousands of years before we started to change it.
    Archibald Menzies, the Scottish naturalist who sailed with Vancouver, explored the shoreline and forest floor, and offered the first descriptions of the Douglas fir, madrona, Olympic oyster and scores more plants and animals. His descriptions, and those of Vancouver, offer a sort of biological baseline by which to assess the impacts of two centuries of development that have profoundly changed most of Puget Sound….
     But not Discovery Bay.

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 A journalist sets a course for Port Townsend 
  
     My long, private affair with Port Townsend began 29 years ago this summer, when I first surveyed the waterfront from the helm of a small boat on the bay.
      It was one of those still September days when the sky was hazy blue above a dense band of autumn fog that hugged the shipping lanes. Cruising north from Seattle in my 21-foot sloop, bound for the Wooden Boat Festival, I clung to the Peninsula shore, hung galley pots from the rigging to reflect radar, occasionally rung a bell to announce my presence to any fellow mariner who cared.
     Rounding Marrowstone Point, I emerged from the fog and gazed transfixed at the Port Townsend seascape dead ahead.
      I had been here before, driven up for a weekend, strolled Water Street, snapped some photos, stopped for a beer at the Town Tavern. But the vista from Port Townsend Bay was of another place, a dreamy maritime image available only from the sea. An hour later, I eased into Point Hudson and rafted alongside a big wood-hulled halibut schooner.
     That was the day I knew I wanted to live here. It’s taken nearly three decades to make it happen. As a professional journalist, I thought I needed a city, worked 30-plus years for The Seattle Times, covered politics and environmental issues and, whenever I could get away with it, the waterfront.    When I needed to recharge my batteries, I’d come back to Port Townsend, preferably by sea.
     Now, finally, I’m here, living in a shingled cottage overlooking Discovery Bay. My wife, Mary Rothschild, is a newly-anointed master gardener well underway toward creating a garden worthy of her botanical title. I moor my 24-foot Monk sedan, vintage 1941, a short walk down the hill at the Cape George Marina.
      We’re growing to love the Mediterranean summers, the views across the strait, and even those gray, wintry gales that whip across the peninsula, seeking their shortest route south into the sound.
      I realize that the same qualities that lured us here are drawing too many more like us -- refugees from Seattle and other cities looking for a better life. And I regret that we collectively are beginning to stress the fiber of this community, driving up rents and home prices, jamming the roads, threatening to turn Port Townsend into something resembling what we left behind.
      But, for better or worse, I‘m here to stay. And now the editors of this intrepid journal have offered me a chance to write about the maritime life of my new home. As the new guy on the docks, I have much to learn. But I’ll learn it the way I know, as a journalist. And perhaps I can bring some homeport readers along on a voyage of discovery through the nature, culture and politics of this salty outpost on the edge of the continent.

      There were plenty of good reasons to live here. I wanted an authentic town, a place with a soul, a community big enough to attract a broad range of people and small enough where any one of them can help make it an even better place, a culture that equally respects people who work with their hands or with their heads, a town where rich people are welcome but where wealth is trumped by character.
      My town needs real architecture, buildings with personality, and PT is famous for that. But it also needs people who are determined to preserve that ambience. My town needs a thriving arts community with theater and music and galleries.
      My town needs a healthy business district where I can buy what I need from people knowing that my money supports neighbors and their families. It needs a good book store, and Port Townsend has three of them. I need a town able to govern itself, with a grand old city hall and courthouse full of people trying to make local government work.
      I wanted a town of smart people, critical thinkers, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, blue collars and white collars and striped collars, Christians and Buddhists and atheists, each looking for wise solutions and each respectful of the other‘s views.
     I needed a legitimate local newspaper, and Port Townsend has this, too. Like every other town in America, people here love to trash their local paper. But the truth is that most towns of this size are stuck with flimsy rags owned by somebody who lives somewhere else. The Leader is owned and produced by people who live here, and that makes for good journalism.

     I was looking for all these qualities. But, most of all, I needed a town with an ocean. Port Townsend is many things to many people, but it is first and foremost a port. Without the port, there would be no townsend. To live here is to live with water views, ferries and foghorns, the omnipresent scent of salt air and seaweed. Walk a straight line from any point in town and, sooner or later, you’ll step into the Pacific Ocean. From our docks and picture windows, we watch that daily parade of fishing boats, cruise ships, freighters and Trident submarines steam through Admiralty Inlet.
     Many of us have our own kayaks, dories, gillnetters or wood-hulled sloops. We must own more boats per capita than anywhere in America.
    This town is home to people who need to live on the edge of the continent, and frequently yearn to escape it. We are a community of salmon fishermen and skilled shipwrights, flat-water kayakers and blue-water yachtsmen, seafood gourmets and fishmongers, PhD biologists and self-educated naturalists. We are people who don’t just play on the water; many of us work on it, harvest it, study it.
     And we understand that what we value is in jeopardy. It’s not just the ever-diminishing runs of salmon and herring and shrimp. It’s leaking septic tanks and concrete bulkheads that kill eelgrass beds. It’s million-dollar mega-homes with great views that inflate rents and home prices beyond the reach of shipwrights. It’s franchise restaurants and big-box stores that would blithely drive our neighbors out of business. It’s the threat of turning an authentic harbor town into a cutesy Kirkland or, worse still, another Aspen.
      Still, for all this, Port Townsend and its natural environment seem remarkably healthy. Many of our neighbors arrived long ago, got their piece of real estate and a share in the economy. The boatyards and hardware stores are bustling. There is the promise of a classy public project that preserves the essence of Point Hudson. So far, so good.
      I live here because Port Townsend is absolutely real, and can remain so. And I believe that good journalism can help us to understand who we are, what is important and what is not, and preserve that authenticity. This is my professional mission. I intend to learn everything I can about the culture and history, the ecology and economics of this place -- and write about it as I go.
      I’m a reporter, not a teacher. I begin this voyage with a small boat and an open mind. If I do the job, I learn at least as much from my readers as you learn from me. If you have a question about Port Townsend’s maritime life, send it my way; reporters often can get answers that other people can’t. If I get something right, I’d like to hear from you. If I get it wrong, as I know I will, let me know that as well.
     Because we sail as a crew.

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            In the seventh year of the third millennium, war and famine and pestilence plagued the world. But there was contentment in the Land of Jefferson. 

            The people lived quietly beside the Waters of Puget, paddling their kayaks, hiking in the woods, soaking in hot tubs, and sustaining themselves with organic soy milk and leavened breads of whole wheat grains. And to pay for these things, the people rented rooms or sold pizzas and T-shirts to travelers from distant lands who arrived at their shores aboard the Ark of Quinault or the Ark of Klickitat.

            And the people and their visitors were soothed by the harmonious chords of David the Minstrel, who plucked his Celtic harp and peddled his CDs in the upper chambers of the Ark of Klickitat, there to serenade the people and the orcas.

            Now it came to pass that Queen Christine, who ruled the northwest provinces, no longer favored the music of David, for the Minstrel and his CDs were not officially sanctioned. And thus the minstrel was banished from the upper chambers of the Ark of Klickitat.

       At hearing of this, the people were sorrowful. But, yea, the travelers continued to come to shores of the Land of Jefferson, renting the rooms and buying the pizzas and T-shirts. And, lo, the people were happy.

       But in the eighth year of the reign of George the Second, a dark, ominous cloud moved across the Waters of Puget, and settled over the Land of Jefferson.   And a great deluge soaked the lands of the southern provinces.  And snow inundated the mountains, blocking the roads. And a fierce, cold wind arose, whipping the Waters of Puget, and buffeting the homes of the people, and rocking the Ark of Klickitat and the Ark of Quinault. 

            And it came to pass that Queen Christine was greatly troubled, for her advisors reported verily that the Ark of Quinault and the Ark of Klickitat were growing old. And the advisors said unto her: “Beware, O’ Queen, for the ancient arks  were built in the Time of Moses, and they are in great danger of breaking up and sinking into the Waters of Puget.”

            And it came to pass that, on the Eve of the Feast of Thanksgiving, Queen Christine said unto the people: “Behold, the ancient arks shall be banished from the Waters of Puget. No more shall they carry tourists to the shores of the Land of Jefferson.”

            Thus it was spoken. And thus it was done.

            Hearing this, the people were contented no more. For the great storm had laid waste to the roads and bridges.  And the ancient arks were banished, thus deterring the tourists from travelling to the Land of Jefferson. And thus the merchants and moneychangers were unable to rent their rooms or to sell their pizzas and T-shirts.

            And the people descended into the streets and made a great noise, falling to the ground and rending their garments and calling aloud: “Woe unto us! What hath Christine Wrought? For the arks of Klickitat and Quinault shall sail no more!”

     Now, hearing this, Queen Christine was troubled. And she said unto the people: “Lo, my people, I feel thy pain, and I will address thy plight!” 

     And, behold, the Queen offered to build new and larger arks, carrying more travelers and more cars, with great piers and parking lots.

     But the people said unto her: “No, Great Queen! The great arks shall bring too many cars and parking lots. And this will disrupt the tranquility of the Land of Jefferson. Thou must bring back the Ark of Klickitat!”

      And so the Queen offered unto them another vessel, the Ark of Snohomish, with two great hulls and turbine engines that guzzled fuel and drove the vessel at very high speed.

      But the people said unto her: “No, Great Queen. Because the Ark of Snohomish carryeth not cars.   And, hath they not cars, the travelers will not come to our shores.”

     And, verily, when the Ark of Snohomish came, it carried not visitors from distant lands, but rather carried the people of Jefferson to the Great City to the South, where the people visited the dens of iniquity.  So the people of the Land of Jefferson were even more greatly distressed, saying unto the Queen: “The Ark of Snohomish hath only worsened our plight!”

      So Queen Christine said unto the people: “Fear not. For I shall give you a smaller vessel, the Ark of Steilacoom, and surely this shall bring happiness to the Land of Jefferson.”

     So it was that the Ark of Steilacoom sailed upon the Waters of Puget and moored at the shores of the Land of Jefferson.

      But again the people cried aloud, and fell upon the ground and rended their garments, saying: “Behold, the Ark of Steilacoom is too small, and it carryeth too few people and there shall not be enough travelers to buy our pizzas and T-shirts.”

     Now there arose from the north another dark cloud, which descended upon the Land of Jefferson, bringing even greater winds and fearsome seas.   And a great, rogue wave smote the Ark of Snohomish, breaking its doors and windows.   And another great wave smote the Ark of Steilacoom so that the car deck was awash with the green Waters of Puget.   And yet another great wave smote the very large Ark of Yakima, cracking its hull so that it sailed no more.

     Now the people were sorely afraid. And Queen Christine was even more greatly troubled, so that she cried upon the heavens, saying: “Woe upon us all! What hath we done to bring such troubles upon us all? What must we do to atone?”

     And, lo, the Waters of Puget were quieted. And winds were calmed.  And the rains subsided. And the dark clouds parted, and a very deep voice from on high said unto the Land of Jefferson:

    “Thou shalt bring back the Minstrel David. And only then shall peace return to the Waters of Puget.”

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    Strolling through the Port Townsend Boat Haven feels like a tour of other people's maritime fantasies, the shells of aging vessels that were supposed to rescue somebody from a complicated life and carry them off to Shangri-La. How many of those voyages end prematurely on a tattered blue plastic tarp tacked to this graveled graveyard? 
    But for every dream abandoned there is another realized, like that of Steve and Judy Dundas. Perched on a corner among the hauled-out fishing boats is their "Fiddler's Dream," an eye-catching, 48-foot schooner with a shapely, wineglass hull of deep blue steel, varnished fir spars, a deck and house crafted from hand-picked hardwoods, and a story to be told even before she's afloat.  
   Sometime this month, Fiddlers‚ Dream will be hoisted and lowered into Townsend Bay for her first sweet taste of seawater, thus completing the first leg of a strange saga that began four years ago on a mountaintop near Missoula, Montana. Along the way, she had to be skidded through the lodgepole pines, down a dirt road at the brink of a 300-foot cliff. But more on that later. 
    Fiddlers' Dream is the personal vision of Steve Dundas, a tall, quiet former Californian who describes himself as a iconoclastic loner. Some 35 years ago, he was drafted to play pro football, but instead found himself patrolling Vietnam's jungle rivers with the Navy Seals. After the Navy, he wandered the country, learned to sail with a friend in Maine, met his bride-to-be in Vermont, tried farming in Idaho and later in rural South Dakota, and finally took up woodworking in Missoula.

    He and Judy loved Montana, especially their 40-acre homesite 1,000 feet above the town, bordered on three sides by the Rattlesnake Wilderness. But eventually they grew tired of the hard winters and began conjuring up a vision of a stout, sturdy sailing ship.

   He studied scores of plans before deciding on a 75-year-old design by John Alden ˆ a beamy, gaff-rigged schooner with a classic sweeping sheer line. The choice had mostly to do with aesthetics. "The schooner rig may not be the most practical, but it is the prettiest on the planet," he argues.

    Dundas had never built a boat. But he has spent much of his life as a farmer, doing what needs to be done. Judy, an experienced nurse, worked fulltime to support his habit. 

   While the hull was designed for wood, Dundas opted for steel. "It's cheap, durable, and I could build it myself," he says. He made the necessary conversions, lofted the design at full-scale onto plywood, ordered a truckload of 3/16-inch steel in 400-pound sheets, and went to work  alongside the house, at the top of that mountain.

   It took 20 months, 150 individually-cut sheets of steel and a full mile of welds, but eventually the deep-draft hull took shape. "It's not perfect," Dundas said. "Fitting and bending steel into a traditional hull is tough. If you look closely, you'll see my mistakes, some hard angles and edges. But most of that will be beneath the waterline."

   Over time, Dundas became a familiar face at the local recycling center and tire shops, scavenging scraps of lead to be melted down for the 18,000-pound keel.  The salon, galley, bunks and cabinetry took another two years. The result is sheer art, a rustic masterpiece constructed of Virginia oak, purple heartwood, black locust, cherry and more, much of it salvaged by friends or set aside by a nearby sawmill.

   This year, as he applied finishing touches, the couple sold their Missoula place and bought an 11-acre homesite on Stuart Island in the San Juans. Which forced the issue. It was time to move that boat ˆ all 45,000 pounds of her ˆ off that mountain.

    Dundas had tried to anticipate this challenge. He'd built the boat on a steel cradle set on skids, ssentially a custom-built steel sled. So, when the time came, he contracted with a well-known boat transporter who brought in a trailer and equipment. "They took one look at the road and turned white," he laughs. "Another outfit came in, moved it 20 feet, lifted it onto the trailer, and the trailer collapsed. They gave up."

   Eventually, they found a local mover who reverted to Dundas' original idea ˆ to move it down the mountain on the sled. So off it went, one bulldozer pulling, another pushing along that narrow, dirt road, a mile and a half down the mountain. "It was a bit surreal," Dundas says, "watching this schooner move through the pine trees."

   Finally, the bizarre contraption arrived at the valley floor, where it was loaded onto a trailer and trucked off to Port Townsend. 
    A month later, Steve and Judy Dundas are living in the boatyard, stepping masts, fitting sails from Carol Haase's loft at Point Hudson and applying finishing touches to the good ship Fiddlers Dream. If all goes right, she'll be sailing by late August.
   It's been an amazing journey, Dundas says, but perhaps not so unusual in this salty corner of Puget Sound. "Port Townsend seems to attract real characters, people who aren‚t fazed by challenges," he says. "You walk through this boatyard, and I have to guess we see more interesting boats than any yard in the West." 

   Dundas could have saved a little time and money by shipping his schooner to another port. But Fiddlers Dream would not have fit well in those Seattle marinas jammed rail-to-rail with big, white luxury yachts that rarely leave their slips. Down at the Boat Haven, she's just another maritime fantasy waiting to be sailed and lived.

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Tall Ship U: Higher education at sea 
 
   When Jesse Maupin stepped off the tall ship Lady Washington this month, he was the same tall, handsome, blue-eyed youth who climbed aboard nine months earlier.
     But, then again, he wasn’t. He was a year older and a lifetime wiser. Jesse had graduated from time-honored Tall Ship U, the ancient institute of the high seas.  At age 19, he’s learned things many people won’t learn in a lifetime – not just the physics of wind and waves and sails, but the greater lessons of personal integrity and humility, of leadership and organizational behavior.
    A couple of years ago, he confesses he didn’t have a clue. As a Port Townsend High School student, he was something of a misfit. A poor student, he took to wearing gothic black, made poor choices and was suspended twice.
    "The social atmosphere didn’t work for me," he says. "We were punks. We did things for shock value. I wasn’t coping."
    Eventually, he transferred to the school’s Mar Vista alternative program, which focuses on individual learning. Each Thursday, class convened at Point Hudson, where students climbed into the Bear, one of the heavy, traditional longboats operated by the Wooden Boat Foundation at the Northwest Maritime Center. Each of the kids gripped an oar, and rowed the open boat out into the bay. When the wind blew, they raised the sails.
    For Jesse, things began to click. His parents are both avid sailors, and Jesse had learned to sail small boats at his grandparents’ summer home on the shores of Lake Ontario in upstate New York. This was something Jesse knew and loved, something he was good at.
    "I liked the freedom of being in control of your environment," he says. Then he stops to think. "And also being out of control, at the mercy of the wind and the sea. It helps me clear my mind. Just me and the elements."
    Last summer, he graduated to the volunteer crew of the Lady Washington. A frequent summer visitor to the Port Townsend waterfront, the "Lady" is home-ported in Aberdeen, where she was launched in 1989 to help celebrate the bicentennial of Capt. Robert Gray’s exploration of these waters in 1792. At 112 feet, but just 68 feet on deck, she sails as a non-profit educational enterprise, relying largely on volunteer crew.
     She’s also something of a Hollywood personality, having served as Johnny Depp’s command in Disney’s film "Pirates of the Caribbean."
     Jesse’s joined the crew in September, at the end of the Wooden Boat Festival.
He was astounded by the intricate spider’s web of lines and spars that control 11 sails atop the stout wooden hull.
     As the rookie, he drew menial duties – swabbing decks, cleaning toilets, polishing brass, raising and lowering flags.
     "That was Ok with me. My job was to learn the boat, and the only way to do that is to watch and listen and try things one at a time. It may look easy, but when you’re actually under sail, you have to know what you’re doing, which line is which, and what it does. That takes time."
     Jesse’s personal voyage renews an ancient tradition. For centuries, young people have climbed aboard tall ships to see the world, and to find themselves. Those journeys inspired leaders from Columbus to Kennedy, writers from Melville to Conrad.
     Capt. James Cook, perhaps the most famous sailor of all time, first went to sea as a teenager. On his historic third voyage around the world, when he explored these Northwest shores, he did so with a raw, young crewman by the name of George Vancouver. A generation later, Vancouver returned as the captain of his own voyage of discovery, placing Port Townsend and Puget Sound on the world map. His longboats, in turn, inspired the Wooden Boat Foundation to build a replica – the longboat Bear.
    So Jesse’s personal odyssey merely continues the cycle. His first volunteer stint on the Lady was just two weeks. He came home, and promptly decided he wanted to go back. He rejoined the crew at Sausalito, where it stopped on its annual fall voyage to Southern California.
     A month later, he was promoted to storekeeper. A few months later, he rose again, this time to bosun’s mate – managing the sails at the staggering executive salary of $500 a month. He loved the vessel, loved his fellow crew members. He loved climbing aloft in a 25-knot wind. He loved sailing through the night, steering by the stars. And he was learning to like himself.
    "I get seasick every time we’re out in heavy seas," he says. "But it doesn’t matter. I get over it. And we work together out there. We’re a family, moving from one port to another port. We’re never in one place for very long."
     By this spring, Jesse had been on the boat longer than any his crewmates. The student had become the teacher. The rookie had become the seasoned sailor.
     And what had he learned? Jesse peers across Port Townsend Bay as he thinks about it.
"I’ve learned that I’m far more adaptable than I ever knew. I can endure exhaustion, seasickness, cramped living quarters. I’ve learned that privacy is greatly over-rated."
    The Lady Washington may be an elegant sight, but the living conditions are rugged. Most of the 12-person crew sleeps in one small room, which they share with the galley table, cook stove and three heads. Crew are climbing in and out of their bunks around the clock. If somebody snores, you learn to ignore it. If you need privacy, you climb into the rigging, or you go home..
    "But maybe the most important thing I’ve learned is humility," Jesse adds. "It doesn’t matter how much you know about that ship. Nobody can sail it alone. It takes a crew. You have to work with people. There has to be one skipper, and you have to do what you’re told."
    Sometimes, getting along with people requires extraordinary measures. Jesse recalls cruising in heavy seas and a 25-knot wind when the topsail came loose and began flapping in the gale. He and a mate climbed aloft to secure it.
    He was already feeling seasick. But, 60 feet up the main mast, the ship’s roll is amplified. And so is the motion sickness.
    "We lashed the sail, and I could feel my stomach turn. I knew I was going to lose my breakfast, but I had to time it so that we were heeled over."
    The seasoned sailor made his deposit over the Pacific Ocean, not the deck of his own ship. Jesse earned an "A" in maritime sociology.
     Back on shore, Jesse has been looking to the future. He wants to visit his crewmate and new girlfriend in Southern California. He’s thinking about more schooling, or finding another ship.
   But there was one more job to do. The Lady Washington was sailing back up the coast, and needed a bosun’s mate. He’s back on board for a few weeks, doing graduate work at Tall Ship U.

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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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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 be more different. Trawlers are the steel-hulled battleships of the fleet, often over 100 feet long, dragging huge nets through the water in search of cod, pollock and other groundfish – not salmon.
   Only a half-dozen are licensed in Washington waters, but we see Alaska trawlers plough through Admiralty Inlet in route to and from the Bering Sea, where trawlers reign supreme. The larger boats include processing plants belowdecks, where fish are butchered and flash-frozen for sale largely to Asia.
   Trawlers are frequent targets for environmental protests, and there is reason to believe that bottom trawls, which target flatfish on the ocean floor, damage the marine environment and scoop up tons of unwanted “bicatch.” But the majority of the Alaska fleet uses midwater trawls that target massive schools of pollock and other groundfish; and midwater trawls are far less wasteful. 
    The longliners: While the other fisheries suffer, some of these fishermen have prospered – thanks to a revolutionary change in the halibut fishery.
   Longliners are mid-sized, seagoing boats that catch fish by lowering a long, weighted line with hundreds of baited hooks to the bottom. The line is marked at the surface with a buoy, and left for a day or more. Longlines are used to catch a variety of bottom-dwelling fish, especially halibut.
   Commercial halibut used to be a wide–open fishery, but inevitably too many boats joined the hunt, and it became unmanageable. The federal government finally instituted an individual quota system, awarding harvest quotas to seasoned fishermen based on their catch history. A few fishermen did very well, and hundreds more were frozen out of the fishery.
   A number of the winners live and work here.

    Crabbers: Crab, shrimp and other shellfish are caught mostly with “pots”, or traps, lowered to the seabottom and left for a few days. Shellfish can crawl into the traps, but can’t crawl out. Up north, where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed, crabs are caught from huge steel boats that do nothing else.
   In local waters, however, crab is usually caught from smaller boats – seiners or other salmon boats trying to make up for lost fishing time. There are nearly 500 commercial crab licenses across the state, more than half of them in Puget Sound.
    And, unlike salmon, there seems to be plenty of crab out there to go around.

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The Duke on the Northwest: A memoir


    On a summer’s afternoon in 1972?, Pete and Sue Hanke found themselves and their guests stranded at the dock at Roche Harbor, waiting for a customs inspector to check out their 65-foot wood-hulled schooner, Alcyone. When Pete, then an Eastern Washington orchardist who cruised the Northwest during the summer, stepped ashore to inquire about their status, he encountered a tall, strapping figure with a chiseled face under a yachtsman’s cap.
   Hanke immediately recognized John Wayne, the Hollywood icon. The skippers exchanged brief pleasantries, pointed out each other’s boats in the harbor, and went about their business. Nice fella, Hanke thought. And that was that.
   Until 7 a.m. the next morning, when the Hankes and their guests were down below in the Alycone, brewing their morning coffee. A skiff pulled alongside and an oversized figure poked his head in the main hatch and bellowed in perhaps America’s most-recognized voice: “Morn-in’, Sailors. Wheeerre’s the skipper?”
    “He sat down for a cup of coffee and pretty well filled the cabin of the Alcyone,” Sue Hanke recalls.
    They chatted about boats – power versus sail, wood versus fiberglass. Wayne toured the relatively cramped quarters of their classic schooner. Later, he lured his new friends across the channel to show off his own boat – the 139-foot converted minesweeper “Wild Goose,” which had become his summer home in the Pacific Northwest. 
    So began a warm, summer friendship among the Hankes, John Wayne and the spectacular inland Northwest wonderland that for much of a decade became their common denominator.
To most of the world, the late John Wayne is the definitive Hollywood cowboy, with the deliberate, Midwestern speech, who starred in dozens of westerns and war films from the 1940s to the early 1970s.
    In the Pacific Northwest, however, Wayne’s image is a bit more salty, defined less by a Stetson and sixshooter than by his wool cap and his unmistakable boat. He’s remembered as the guy on the bridge of a big, wooden-hulled, World War II vintage minesweeper that became, beginning in the late 60s, something of a cruising fixture from Seattle to the Strait of Juan de Fuca northward to British Columbia and Alaska.
    For more than a decade, from the mid-1960s to the late ‘70s, Wayne summered in these waters. Each June, his crew would nose the Wild Goose out of the harbor at Newport Beach, turn north and spend six days climbing the uphill course to Puget Sound and Seattle, where Wayne would climb aboard. Then they would continue north the San Juans, the Gulf Islands, to Pender Harbor, Desolation Sound and Princess Louisa Inlet and beyond.

    It would be another year before the Hankes again encountered Wayne. Southbound from Canadian waters, they pulled into Friday Harbor and called their friends, novelist, mariner and pioneer aviator Ernie Gann and his wife Dodi, who lived on their San Juan Island farm.
   “Duke’s here,” Dodi Gann reported. “Come on over for dinner!”
    It was a lovely evening. Wayne was fond of Gann, “that little bookwriter” who had penned the bestseller “The High and the Mighty;” Wayne had starred in the Oscar-winning film based on the novel. He was a frequent guest at the rustic farm, where the actor and the novelist would spend hours on the porch, quietly playing chess.
    But this evening, Wayne was considerably more animated, in part due to something his old pal, Ronald Reagan had done as governor of California. To seat her many guests, Dodi Gann had contrived a makeshift leaf for her table, and it was a tad rickety. So when Wayne wanted to make a point in his cowboy manner – by pounding the table – he rattled the entire dinner and amused his friends.
    From that evening on, Wayne and the Hankes remained fast friends, corresponding and linking up each summer at Friday Harbor or various points further north.
   “Duke always looked forward to that day when we’d pull up alongside the Alycone and catch up with the Hankes,” recalls Bert Minshall, the droll Englishman who crewed aboard the Wild Goose for some 15 years and eventually became her skipper. “He valued their friendship.”
    That friendship was a large part of what kept luring Wayne back year after year. One year, when the Hankes were celebrating their wedding anniversary, Wayne showed up with a couple of bottles of champagne, and expressed disappointment that each of his three marriages was relatively short-lived.
    Those sentiments defied his Hollywood “tough guy image,” Sue Hanke says. “He was truly a sweet gentle man, and I don’t think he liked pretentious people. Our daughter, Jenny, crewed for him for a while, and he treated her like his own daughter.”
    “And he didn’t look like this,” adds Pete Hanke Jr., pointing to a canned studio photo from the family collection. “He was as bald as a billiard ball. But you only knew that if you spent time on his boat.”

    John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa – about as far from
any ocean as an American can get. But he was raised in southern California. He yearned for a naval career, but failed to get the academy appointment. His acting career began in silent movies, but took off with John Ford’s “Stagecoach” in 1939, followed by a flood of war movies and westerns that soon made his one of the world’s best-known faces.
    His first forays north were to cruise with his old friend, Max Wyman, aboard the Wild Goose which Wyman had converted and renamed. In about 1962, Wayne bought the boat and hired a crew to remodel it to accommodate his 6-foot-5? frame. In the summer of 1965, the boat cruised north.
    Bert Minshall believes Wayne was never happier than when he was cruising Northwest waters. Occasionally, he hosted movie stars ranging from Bob Hope to Julie Andrews. “But I think he liked getting away from Hollywood,” Minshall recalls. “He was a true sportsman who loved to fish, and he became quite a good fisherman.”
    His sporting instincts were fired as he neared Big Bay, the fishing resort on Stuart Island, near the entrance to Desolation Sound. Over the years, Wayne developed a keen friendship with John Davies, a fishing guide who ran a rustic lodge along with his jovial wife, Kay. By the time the Wild Goose arrived, Kay Davies was waiting with a plate of freshly-baked biscuits that became the Duke’s favorites. The crew always looked forward to seeing “Ol’ Crip,” an injury-hobbled bald eagle that scavenged from its perch near the Davies’ lodge.
    Ethan Wayne, the youngest son, grew up largely on the boat, and remembers with special warmth the times at Big Bay.
    “Of course, we all loved the salmon and the orcas and the oysters. But it was the people who were always so good to us,” Ethan recalls. “Back then, the resorts were more like wilderness camps. It was so remote that my father could get clear of all the stuff down south. People recognized him, of course. But he was treated as another boater and sportsman rather than a movie star.”
    Each trip north made the Hollywood man a little more of a Northwest man. One year, the Wild Goose tied up at Friday Harbor near Alycone, and Wayne spotted Sue Hanke plodding up the dock with two big bags of laundry, headed for the town laundromat. Wayne grabbed a bag, slung it over his broad shoulder and joined the venture. So, while the tourists flocked down to the Wild Goose, hoping for a glimpse of their idol, he was strolling through their midst, disguised by the Hankes’ dirty laundry.

    More than anything, Ethan says, his father loved that boat. By today’s standards, the Wild Goose was a rather utilitarian and prosaic vessel – wood-hulled, 139 feet with a narrow military profile and a coat of Navy gray paint reflecting its wartime roots. Built in Seattle in 1942, she had been used by the Canadian Navy, then surplused and passed from one owner to the next until Wayne in the early 60s.
    The upper deck consisted of the barebones wheelhouse with its stainless helm, basic engine controls on simple pedastals, an ancient depth sounder with one big rotating eye, a military radar, Loran C and a brass compass. There were brass speaking tubes linking the bridge to the engine room, but these were eventually replaced with an electronic intercom. Other than that, the wheelhouse and engine room remained pretty much the way they’d looked during the war.
    Just aft of the bridge was the chimney stack, which became young Ethan’s favorite climbing platform. Further aft was Wayne’s stateroom, with raised roof and a big oak desk.
     The main deck consisted of a crew dining room, the galley and the main salon decorated with 60s style wet bar and couches around a wood-burning fireplace. This opened to a big aft deck enclosed in sliding glass, which usually doubled as a dining room. That deck featured a large aquarium, which rarely held any fish because the contraption leaked every time the boat rocked and rolled.
    On the lower deck were four guest staterooms, downright spartan by most standards, but nobody seemed to complain. Forward of these was the engine room, with its twin GM diesels, the originals, and the same engines used in WWII submarines. At the bow were crew quarters.
    The boat generally had a crew of six or seven – skipper, two deckhands, cook and one or two stewards and an engineer named Arnie who was reputed to be fascinated with ancient alchemy.
    Wayne loved spending time in the wheelhouse, Minshall says. “But he really didn’t know how to run the boat, so he left that to us. But he liked to run the ski boat, which had a big 125-horse motor. He must’ve put a million miles on that boat, most of it at full throttle. But he generally had trouble bringing that boat alongside the Goose.”
   Underway, the Wild Goose was slow – 11 knots cruising speed – and uncomfortable. Her narrow beam and lack of stabilizers left her susceptible to crossing seas, so she rode “like a whale in its death throes,’ Minshall says.. She had been built hastily just after Pearl Harbor, probably using green wood, which left her prone to rot and warping. Her crew learned not to shift to reverse too quickly.
    Peter Hanke, Jr., the Hankes’ son who spent a year crewing on the boat, recalls their efforts to figure out why the engines were prone to overheating. “Turns out, the boat was so limber that she would twist and turn underway, and the shaft was binding.”
    The boat, of course, was a means to an end. Wayne loved it in part because of where it took him. Minshall recalls nosing the bow of the boat to within a few feet of the bottom of 120-foot Chatterbox Falls in Princess Louisa Inlet. And he would lead guests up the trail to the top of the falls, which offered a sweeping vista of the magnificent fiord.

    Wayne died of cancer in Los Angeles in June 1979, and the Wild Goose has never returned to Northwest waters. She changed hands a couple of times in Southern California before undergoing a $2 million remodel, and now hauls boatloads of tourists around Newport Beach.
    Minshall, who is retired in Costa Mesa, near Newport Beach, wrote a book about his experiences, “On Board with the Duke,” which has become something of a collector’s item, selling for $100 and up on eBay. Now and then, he ventures down to the harbor to visit the boat he ran those many years. “They changed everything,” he grumbles. “Looks like a floating wedding cake, with seating up top for 130 people. I cringe when I see her.”
    Wayne’s heirs remain based in Southern California, where several have worked in movies. Ethan Wayne, who spent his childhood climbing around the Wild Goose, is a sometime actor who runs the family business, Wayne Enterprises. The family donated the waterfront site that became the John Wayne Marina on Sequim Bay, operated by the Port of Port Angeles. And they still own a home near the marina, and some 160 acres of prime land on Sequim Bay, which they plan to develop with 232 clustered retirement homes, 25 rental cabins, a lodge and spa. Work could begin as early as this year (2008).
    Ethan visits the home in Sequim once or twice a year. “And I suppose I inherited the boating bug,” he says. “I keep my trawler here at Newport Beach, but I look forward to cruising on a friend’s boat out of Friday Harbor each year.”

    The Hankes long ago sold their Eastern Washington orchard, moved to Port Townsend and started Puget Sound Express, which runs tourist and whaling cruises, including summertime routes between Port Townsend and San Juan Island. The younger Hanke, who earned his sea legs on the Wild Goose, now runs the family charter business.
   They’ve kept a few letters, photos and mementoes of their encounters with John Wayne. But they have to rummage through cardboard boxes to find them. And it’s not their style to market their friendship to their tourist clientele..
   Because that relationship was never about celebrity. It was about people and boats in a corner of the world where celebrity and wealth are ultimately trumped by character, and where all are dwarfed by the sheer scale and magnificence of Mother Nature.

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           Gunnar Thompson navigates the globe.  On any given day, he may ride the Atlantic trade winds, thread the Straits of Magellan, or search for the fabled Northwest Passage.   He traverses oceans, calculates longitude and latitude, and plumbs the visions of the great explorers, from the ancient Chinese to Marco Polo and Francis Drake.

          And he does most of this without leaving his modest Port Townsend home.  Thompson’s vessel is an intellectual time machine, guided by ancient maps and journals.  And his mission is to sink what he considers the greatest myth in history: That Columbus discovered America.

          “I’m proving that Columbus was not the first,” he says. “Everybody beat Columbus.”

            For some 30 years, he has been obsessed with that mission.  He has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly – by the ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English, and who-knows-who-else.

          He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, sailing in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas, and he has copies of maps to prove it.  He says Marco Polo sailed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to the beaches of Port Townsend in the 13^th century.  He believes that Sir Francis Drake did much the same 300 years later.  And he has copies of those maps as well..

          Need some proof?  Give him a chance, and he’ll fill a room with his hand-drawn and photo-copied maps – Chinese maps that he believes depict Puget Sound and the Columbia River, Roman maps that show the Florida peninsula, signs of Asian and European art among the ancient Aztecs and Incas.

          Now he’s compiled much of what he’s learned into a 265-page, lavishly-illustrated volume called “Secret Voyages,” or “True Adventure Stories from the Forbidden Chronicles of American Discovery.”

          “This book represents the culmination of nearly 30 years of research,” he says.

          But it’s a lonesome journey. Most of the time, Thompson sails single-handed.  Established historians dismiss his theories.  Google his name, and you’ll find pages of bluster from academics who sniff and pick at his research, clearly outraged by his heresy.

          “They seem to be very angry,” Thompson says.  “They don’t like people questioning these things.  But history is too important to be left to historians.”

          Thompson is an affable 60-year-old bachelor with a mop of dark brown hair over a round Nordic face.  He lives in a small “shed” he rents from a friend in the housing cooperative just north of the golf course.

          He attributes his skeptical nature to his parents.  His father was an engineer and artist, his mother a nurse who crusaded for the polio vaccine before it was widely accepted.  “They were troublemakers who taught me the value of truth.  I struggled early at church, constantly asking: Is what I’m hearing really true?”    As a youth in suburban Chicago, the family took cross-country car trips, stopping along the way at museums and Native American sites, where Thompson developed an interest in art, history and anthropology.

          At the University of Illinois, he “figured out what was going on.”  He asked questions and learned to write “from an artistic standpoint.” He went on to graduate school in anthropology, where he became fascinated by archaeology and by striking similarities between art forms from ancient China and the Americas.

          “I was experimenting with other cultures and religions, and this didn’t go over too well.  I was kicked out.”

          In time, he grew accustomed to academics who didn’t welcome his maverick ideas. He taught anthropology, but was fired because he refused to conduct an exam that conflicted with an antiwar protest.  

          Eventually, he earned his PhD in “rehabilitation counseling,” and set out looking for a job.  He taught at five colleges, from Wisconsin to Hawaii and the University of Washington, but never earned crucial tenure.  He kept moving, always keeping one hand in ancient art and maps, until he found his way to Port Townsend, and  worked four years for Jefferson Mental Health Services.  “That was my last real job,” he says.

          Since then, he’s devoted full time to his global quest, launching a website while writing and illustrating his books on ancient explorers.

          Three years ago, Thompson finally found an intellectual ally in Gavin Menzies, a former British submariner who had written his own controversial book, called “1421,” about the pre-Columbian voyages of Zheng He.   They spent three days in a Seattle motel room, studying each other’s maps and exchanging ideas.  Menzies eventually wrote a glowing introduction to Thompson’s new book.

          Together, they’ve made a bit of impact.  They’ve given talks at the Library of Congress and at a couple of conferences.  There have been stories in “The Economist,” and on British television, focusing on a recently-discovered Chinese map which Menzies and Thompson believe proves Chinese knowledge of the Americas a century before Columbus.

          Still, a bit of publicity for the heretics only doubles the criticism. Historians argue that Thompson and Menzies essentially started with their conclusion, and search the globe for fragments of evidence to support it.  “Given only one data point, you can draw any line you want to,” one critic argues.

          Thompson is undeterred.  “I’m reminded of the bumper sticker I see around  town,”  Thompson says. “Don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”

          The history establishment is hopelessly handicapped, he says, by its insistence on written documentation. Such records of ancient voyages either don’t exist, or haven’t been found, because they were systematically suppressed, censored or destroyed by ancient rulers intent on secrecy.

          “For me, the real breakthrough came when I began to understand the importance of secrecy in early exploration,” he says.  “Why would Marco Polo lie about what he’d seen?  Because he worked for a maritime government (Venice) with a huge incentive to keep that information proprietary.”

          If journals were suppressed, maps tended to survive, passed along from one ship’s captain to the next, but always preserving the crucial information, he says.

          That’s the gist of “Secret Voyages.”  In each case, from the ancient Chinese to Francis Drake, Thompson attempts to explain why and how the details were kept secret.

          But the controversy continues, he says.  “Academic historians hate Gavin Menzies and his book,” Thompson says.  “When he spoke at the Library of Congress, they tried to prevent it.  I can’t name a single historian who accepts our evidence  – except in China.”

          Challenging historical orthodoxy isn’t easy.  Literary agents won’t look at his books.  Publishers won’t stick their necks out.

          But this is the Age of Google and Wikipedia, which provides troublemakers a chance to bypass the establishment and confront conventional wisdom without costly corporate backing.   Whether the historians like it or not, Thompson’s theories are out there, bouncing around the Internet, challenging us to rethink what we thought we knew.

          None of this pays Thompson’s rent.   His savings are almost gone, and soon he’ll be back on the streets, looking for a job to support his obsession.

          But he won’t quit.

          “I’m a reluctant detective,” he says. “I’m an artist by nature, not a historian.  But when an artist gets an inspiration, you have this need to express it.”

                  

         

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The Boater’s addiction: One sailor’s story

   I needed another boat like I needed another hole in the water.
In a salty port like ours, most people know the time-honored aphorism defining a boat as a hole in the water into which you pour money. And this weekend, we’ll have thousands of Wooden Boat Festival visitors, some who have learned that lesson, and others who are about to learn it the hard way.
    But, friends, before you take that plunge, hear my story.
   For me, there were a hundred reasons not to get a boat. I can’t afford the time or the money. My wary spouse and domestic skipper of 20 years has a deep-seated aversion to most boats, especially mine.
   And, oh yes, I already own four of them – two wooden stitch-and-glue kayaks, a plywood rowing dory and a lovely little 66-year-old Monk cruiser that lives down at the Cape George marina.
And I’m not counting the derelict on blocks over at the in-laws’ place on Whidbey Island.
Obviously, I am an addict. And I desperately need help trying to understand the nature of my condition.
   I suffer from an affliction disturbingly common in this sodden corner of the continent. I am hopelessly wedded to saltwater, and to anything that floats on saltwater, or which might, with just a little work, float at some future point.
   And, while I love my old cruiser, I desperately miss sailing.
   And so it was that I began noticing the little green sloop, propped on blocks in front of a barn on Cape George Road.
   It’s not a pretty boat. A 40-year-old, British-made Westerly, about 25 feet long, with a small cabin, an oddly blunt bow and twin keels that give it a profile a little like the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
The fin-like keels combine with an oversized skeg and rudder, allowing it sit, firmly but rather awkwardly, on dry land. And so there it had sat for more than a decade, like an archaeological relic encrusted with moss and algae and fir needles. The cockpit hatches were rotted out, and the rudder was frozen solid.
    So let’s review: I don’t need a boat. I can’t afford a boat. This boat needs work. It will never be pretty, and it will never be fast. And, worst of all, it is constructed from (Oh, the shame of it!) fiberglass.
    But still, I kept stopping, and looking and studying the odd little yacht. And I found some merits.
First, my answer to the boat-as-hole-in-the-water argument is this: If you obtain a hole, make it a small one, thereby consuming less time and money. And the Westerly is small.
But it’s big enough. I can stand in the cabin, under the raised hatch. There are four berths, a tiny galley with a wood stove, plumbing for a head, lots of stowage. The owners had kept the mast, boom, rigging and seven bagged sails (including two spinnakers) in dry storage.
    While slow, the Westerly is famous for its seaworthiness. And, best of all, that three-point stance means the little sloop can sit on the bottom at a low tide, so it can be moored where other boats can’t.
   Still, the domestic issues seemed insurmountable ...
   Until my neighbor and almost-sister-in-law intervened. For a couple of years, she’s reminded me that she wants a sailboat for her visiting kids and grandkids. And when she spotted the little green Westerly, she saw the same possibilities I’d seen.
   So the deed was done. My neighbor bought the boat, and I agreed to bring it back to life. And that, dear reader, is why you haven’t seen my column the last few weeks.
    The first challenge was move the beast. I converted a rusty Cape George trailer into a temporary flatbed, hired a local crane, and found another neighbor who was happy to tow the beast, which became something of a neighborhood spectacle.
    Next came a good bath – a full day of pressure-washing – followed by a week of scraping and sanding , fiberglass and paint.
   It’s become something of a community effort. One neighbor, a retired American studies professor and Fulbright scholar, took it upon himself to buff the hull back to a deep, British racing green. Another neighbor, a retired 3-M engineer, helped beef up the rudder. Others helped loosen the rudder. And on and on.
   And, Dear Reader, that little Westerly has come back to life – testimony to the magic of paint and elbow grease and terrific neighbors.
   Even my ever-dubious spouse chipped in, scrubbing the scum in the cockpit.
   Meanwhile, my almost-sister-in-law and skipper, a retired professor of history and women’s studies, has re-christened her the Susan B, in deference to Ms. Anthony, the famous suffragette.
We have a slip at the Cape George marina; it will go dry at low tide, but the little Westerly doesn’t care. And, one day soon, the Susan B will sail on Discovery Bay.
    That’s all very well. But it does not resolve nor diminish the issues surrounding my obsession. Why, my wife asks, can I get so passionate and obsessive about an old, ugly boat, while utterly failing to address the honey-do list at home?

   I’m not alone, of course. Take a stroll through the Boat Haven marina, and you’ll see scores of boats, sail and power, large and small, propped on wooden blocks in various stages of restoration or decay. Each is the embodiment of somebody’s passion – past or present.
It’s not just a guy thing. I inherited by love for boats from a woman who had grown up on the shore of Rhode Island, and who had saltwater flowing in her veins. And Port Townsend is home to countless women who share my sickness.
And whatever the nature of my affliction, it is nothing new. For centuries, boats have fired the imaginations of otherwise-rational people, draining their bank accounts and stressing their marriages. It is what it is.
So that’s my story. Tell me yours.

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      A hard-won tugboat reported for winter duty this week at Neah Bay, where the vessel stands ready to keep wayward oil tankers from running aground on Washington's coast.  The Barbara Foss gets her name from the Seattle tugboat dynasty that owns it. But if boats were named on the basis of tenacity rather than sentiment, this tug would have to be the Fred Felleman.
    It may have been the power of argument, or political pressure. Maybe it had to do with getting Felleman off somebody's case. But the word along the Seattle waterfront is that this 119-foot tugboat is on duty today, at a cost to federal taxpayers of more than $350,000 a month, because of Felleman.
    The only voice that disagrees is that of Felleman himself, who shares credit with other environmental groups and particularly the Makah Tribe, which also campaigned for the tug.
And, even as the tugboat moors at Neah Bay in Clallam County, despite opposition from the local shipping industry and skepticism from the U.S. Coast Guard, the scientist-turned-advocate grumbles that this tug is not enough.
    "I suppose something is better than nothing," he says, his voice brittle with tension. "But we're testing what the shipping industry wants to prove, which is that a relatively small tug will suffice."
There is another tug, bigger and better, that should be at Neah Bay, he says. And anybody who disagrees "is a fool."
   The long voyage to Neah Bay is a glimpse at the power of Washington's environmental movement and how a single-minded and tireless individual can marshal that power.
The issue dates back at least to 1989, when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound. That spill re-charged environmentalists across the country, including Felleman.
    A native New Yorker, Felleman describes himself as an "aquatic personality" who yearned to be a marine scientist. At the University of Michigan, he studied orcas long before he ever saw one. Then he moved to Seattle, where he began photographing whales while studying them, and eventually earned a master's degree in fisheries from the University of Washington.  "Those were the best years, when I was actually spending time on the water," he says, "instead of the last 10 years, when I've been in offices talking to bureaucrats."
    The more he learned about local waters, the more he worried about their future. Washington had an active environmental movement, he says, but it was focused largely on trees and forests. Nobody was going to bat for the marine ecosystem.
    "I'd look through my camera lens at a whale, and I'd see a tanker steaming past in the background, and I wondered, `What's that doing here?' "
    Felleman first took on the oil industry by lobbying full time for a marine sanctuary on the Olympic coastline. Five years later, in 1994, the sanctuary was a reality - because, in part, of Felleman's work. "I was a pretty good photographer, but I was predisposed to advocate," he says. "That was what was different about me."
   The Exxon Valdez provided something to advocate. Within weeks after the spill, two other Exxon tankers lost power near the Washington coast. Neither went aground and neither spilled any oil, but people were alarmed.
   Fueled by the Valdez spill, the state passed legislation that required escort tugs for oil tankers from Port Angeles to Puget Sound refineries. But tankers were still left unescorted along the outside coast and 70 miles up the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
    "Washington is the only U.S. port where environmental protection begins 70 miles inland," Felleman argues. "We have less protection, and more to protect."
     That includes Cape Flattery, where notoriously rough seas pound a coastline relatively unspoiled by development - an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen, he says. In 1994, a citizens committee set up under the state oil-spill law agreed. It called for a full-time rescue tug at Neah Bay, capable of keeping tankers and other ships off the rocks.
   The shipping industry opposed the full-time tug, arguing it would be too expensive. "It doesn't make sense to spend $4 million to $6 million per year on a tug at Neah Bay when we have an existing fleet of tugs that can be used to respond to a wide range of events," says Harry Hutchins, director of the Puget Sound Steamship Operators, a maritime-trade group based in Seattle.
   The industry responded with its own plan - the "Tug of Opportunity" system, which uses more than 100 tugs working Northwest waters. Each is tracked electronically from Seattle so that, in an emergency, the closest can be dispatched quickly to a potential accident.
     Felleman has no use for that system. The tugs are too small, he says, and most operate far from the area most at risk - the Pacific coastline.
    With the passion of a Northwest environmentalist and the temperament of a New York cab driver, Felleman took on the tug issue with a full-time, full-court press aimed at state and federal decision makers and the media. During the past five years, he has fired off countless letters and e-mails, critiqued government reports and delivered scathing testimony at public hearings.  He has become a human database on oil spills around the world, on tankers and their failures, on tugboats and on the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
    He hounds elected officials - all the way up to Vice President Al Gore - until they agree to meet with him. And then he hounds them some more until they do what he wants them to do.  His tactics are fiercely combative. When a recent Coast Guard report suggested that a rescue tug would not be cost-effective, Felleman accused the agency of "cooking the books" and of "falsifying their reports." He routinely accuses his critics of conspiring with the oil industry.
    "Fred is a bright individual who pursues his ideals in a dogged fashion, and I respect that," says Hutchins, the shipping-industry spokesman. "But you either agree 100 percent with Fred, or you have to be crooked, and he will treat you accordingly. I obviously don't agree 100 percent, so he believes I'm a crook. That's the way he deals with the world."
   David Ortman, a veteran Seattle environmental activist who has worked with Felleman for many years, says he admires Felleman's tenacity - even though it offends people. "His passion is refreshing, but it gets in the way when he deals with institutions like the Coast Guard."
    Felleman concedes only that he feels no obligation to be "nice."  "This whole thing about niceness in Seattle is ridiculous," he says. "Yes, people are entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts."
   The Coast Guard, he says, is a law-enforcement agency that only reluctantly took on its environmental responsibilities after the Valdez spill. "They are incredibly bent on protecting the maritime industry," he says. "Somebody has to ride herd on both the industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it."
   There are plenty of people, from environmental groups to members of Congress, who agree with Felleman's views.  The state Department of Ecology has applauded the rescue tug, pointing out that the risks of a spill have increased.
    The heart of the debate is not whether a full-time tug will diminish the risk of a spill; virtually everybody agrees it will. The argument is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Critics argue that taxpayers are being asked to spend $4 million or more per year to slightly diminish the risk of a catastrophe that is not likely to occur in the first place.
    Pat Jones, spokesman for the state ports association, fears the next step will be full-time tug escorts for all vessels, including more than 10,000 freighters that traverse the Strait of Juan de Fuca each year. Today's tug escorts from Port Angeles are paid for by the oil companies. But shipping companies would have to pay the costs of escorts for freighters, taking Northwest ports out of competition for Pacific Rim shipping, he says.
    "It's a question of how much risk we are willing to live with," Jones says.
     The recent Coast Guard report concludes the rescue tug or escort tugs reduce the risk, but at a cost far greater than the Tug of Opportunity system.
    Which makes Felleman ballistic. "Yes, it's all relativistic," he says. "A major oil spill is a digital experience; it's a `one' or a `zero.' "
   But he can't sit by and ignore the risk of one catastrophic spill, especially with increasing numbers of tankers and freighters navigating through channels crisscrossed by state ferries, naval ships and thousands of pleasure boats.
    "I have one of the world's finest pieces of marine habitat on my doorstep, and that's all I care about," Felleman says. "I can't do everything, so I made a strategic decision to focus my efforts on River City, right here at home."

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