en of the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-Op. I went back up the
ladder and observed a vessel that somehow made it to this Pacific
Northwest yard for a daunting yet momentous restoration.
Six years back, her future looked bleak. On a brisk January morn-
ing in 2013, the F/V Gemini descended to the bottom of Washington’s
Swinomish Channel for the second time in less than five months.
She had recently been refloated after her hull planks ruptured. This
time, she would remain in the mud for months.
For the residents and seafarers of nearby Anacortes, the Gemini
was a relic, a retired professional from a bygone era—she was built
of wood, for God’s sake—that stood idly on the sidelines as modern
steel and fiberglass fishing vessels made their way from nearby Skagit
Bay into Puget Sound, off to fish the deep offshore canyons of the Pa-
cific Ocean. A few graybeards had known her when she was a working
boat chasing her quarry of sardines, ocean perch, Pacific cod and oth-
er species from Oregon to Alaska. For others, she was only a passing
acquaintance: equal parts channel marker and Loran beacon, sitting
neglected under the Twin Bridges that span the Swinomish Channel.
About 1,000 miles south as the crow files in Monterey, California,
the attitude toward Gemini was markedly different—she was well-
known by her former name and revered. A hotelier named Gerry
Kehoe had bought the boat with the idea to use her as décor in a
sprawling seaside café. Before Kehoe inked his deal, a local non-
profit group—the Cannery Row Foundation—failed to raise the
funds to buy her outright. They saw a more magnanimous vocation
for the old vessel: as the centerpiece of the historical, literary and
ecological resurgence of Cannery Row. They were on the right track.
Monterey was her home port when she was called the Western
Flyer. A purse seiner built to fish for sardines, she was hired in 1940
along with biologist Edward Ricketts by a titan of American letters,
John Steinbeck, for a 4,000-mile voyage from central California to
the Sea of Cortez. With the rumblings of a second world conflict
erupting in Europe, the men and crew left to “collect marine animals
in a remote place,” Steinbeck wrote in The Log from the Sea of Cortez,
co-written with Ricketts and released just a few years after the Nobel
laureate’s most famous novel The Grapes of Wrath. Their six-week
voyage made the Flyer an icon of American adventure long before
Kerouac and company went on the road in search of meaning.
The Log has been called a pioneering work of intertidal ecology
and via Ricketts’ contributions, credited as a precursor of the mod-
ern push toward environmental awareness. “The book was a life-
changer that spurred the environmental movement... It changed the
trajectory of a lot of people’s lives,” Western Flyer Foundation (WFF)
project Director Chris Chase told me. Chase was among the most
senior members of the Co-Op who left to oversee the multi-year,
multi-million-dollar restoration of the Western Flyer soon after she
was refloated, bought by WFF founder John Gregg and towed to Port
Townsend, a mud and seaweed sarcophagus engulfing the leviathan.
The goal of the restoration is to transform the purse seiner into a
modern research and teaching vessel that looks as she did when sheEven with her deckhouse removed, the
77-footer looks massive. Right: A shipwright
works in the former machine room.62