PORT TOWNSEND — A public tour of the Western Flyer scheduled Saturday will continue an effort to connect the vessel to the community during its expected three-year rehabilitation period.
“We want to build awareness about its history and legacy,” said Elizabeth Welden-Smith, a project manager at the Western Flyer Foundation in Salinas, Calif.
“We want to make it accessible, as it is an incredible teaching tool, even when it is on dry land.”
The 72-foot purse seiner was once used by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, who used it as a basis for The Log From the Sea of Cortez, in which marine biologist Ed Ricketts played a prominent part.
Saturday’s soft opening tour will take place from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Shipwrights Co-op at 919 Haines Place, located in the Boat Haven across from the Blue Moose Cafe.
Weekly Saturday tours will begin May 7, scheduled at the same hours.
At that time, Tuesday and Thursday tours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. will commence and continue through the fall.
The free tours will allow visitors to walk around the boat and ask questions, but no one will be allowed on deck, according to Shipwrights Co-op partner Chris Chase.
The Western Flyer — built by Tacoma’s Western Boat Building Co. in 1937 — was chartered in 1940 by Steinbeck and his friend Ricketts for a six-week expedition to Mexico’s Gulf of California.
The boat fell into disrepair and had several owners before being purchased last year by California businessman John Gregg, who plans to spend several million dollars to turn the vessel into a floating maritime education center.
Gregg said its future home-port status is undetermined as yet, although he would like to keep a connection to the Northwest.
Welden-Smith said the current estimate of what is needed to get the boat back in the water is about $2 million, which will depend on the cost of the onboard laboratory, which will allow students to conduct experiments while at sea.
“We don’t know what’s scalable and how much fun stuff we can have on board,” she said.
The plans are to sail the vessel to ports along the West Coast and Mexico, according to the Western Flyer Foundation website.
On Wednesday, the boat was visited by historian Michael Sullivan, who spoke to Chase and Andy Gregg, a man who Welden-Smith said provides a “boots-on-the-ground” service for his brother, John.
Sullivan, the principal of Artifacts Historic Preservation in Tacoma, was called in to discuss the possibility of requesting that the boat be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
“With a formal historical designation, we usually deal with buildings, but boats and large objects can also be recognized as national historical places,” Sullivan said.
“We’re talking through the integrity question once the restoration is complete,” he added.
“With wooden boats, the evolution and deterioration leaves very little of what was there originally.”
Andy Gregg said the Steinbeck connection makes the boat historical but that that’s only part of the story.
“There aren’t a lot of boats that are of literary significance that are in existence anymore,” he said.
“There are a lot of fictional boats, but not many that were in a work of literature.”
The boat was purchased because of the Steinbeck connection, but as the owner started doing more research, he discovered other aspects of its history.
“It’s not the whole story, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that,” Gregg said.
“The boat was involved with fisheries from Baja, Calif., all the way to Alaska, although unfortunately, it was associated with these fisheries during their deterioration.”
Sullivan said the Flyer was a big part of the country’s environmental history, which he called “part of the American story that isn’t well-told.”
Since taking possession of the boat last spring, people have come into the co-op to ask questions, Chase said, but they are not all about Steinbeck.
“The star of this project is not John Steinbeck; it’s Ed Ricketts,” Chase said of the pioneering ecologist.
“After being with this project for a year, 90 percent of the visitors are drawn here by the Ricketts connection.
“It’s his environmental legacy that people are excited about.”
For information on the Western Flyer Foundation, go to www.westernflyer.org.
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Jefferson County Editor Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or cbermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
