PORT ANGELES — Susan Scott of Hawaii met her friend Alex Wegmann when both were grieving lost love.
They worked together on Tern Island, a wildlife refuge in the Hawaiian archipelago, and when not banding birds, they grew close by talking openly about their lives.
Their age difference — he was 29 and she 56 — didn’t matter as they helped each other cope with heartbreak.
Wegmann, who was born and raised in Port Angeles, had recently broken up with a woman.
And Scott, long married to her soul mate, Craig Thomas, had watched their relationship turn cold.
An emergency room doctor, Thomas was spending nearly all his time off training for Ironman triathlons; he’d all but stopped communicating with his wife, she said.
Scott’s response wasn’t what anybody expected. Though she missed her husband terribly, she charted an adventure of her own.
On Honu, the 37-foot ketch Scott and Thomas owned — and only he knew how to drive — Scott decided to sail from their home in Hawaii to Palmyra Atoll, a wildlife refuge 1,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean.
First she had to refit the boat. Then Scott, a registered nurse and marine biologist, had to learn what it takes to be a captain.
She did it, driven by her ardent love of the ocean and its creatures — and accompanied by Wegmann, who agreed to be her crewman.
Then a doctoral student in botany at the University of Hawaii, he encouraged — even challenged — her to get out there.
They set sail together for Palmyra in December 2004, and lived to tell about it.
Scott, who has since reconciled with her husband, is now on a West Coast tour promoting her book, Call Me Captain: A Memoir of a Woman at Sea.
She’ll give a presentation, replete with photographs from Tern Island and Palmyra Atoll, in the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library tonight.
Admission is free to the 7 p.m. program at the library, 2210 S. Peabody St., while Scott’s books will be available for purchase and signing.
Not much went smoothly on Scott and Wegmann’s voyage.
But they made it to Palmyra to do the wildlife work they dreamed of — with masked and blue-footed boobies, South Pacific plants and coconut crabs, the largest land-living arthropods in the world.
Their friendship stayed strong. Scott got to know Wegmann’s parents, retired Port Angeles physician John Wegmann and his wife, Dr. Mary Wegmann, who are hosting the author in Port Angeles.
Scott is also an artist.
Since participating in a beach cleanup on a remote island of the Hawaiian archipelago, she has been making mosaics out of marine debris — not unlike Port Angeles artists Sarah Tucker and Jennifer Bright, who created marine debris sculptures for the 2014 Dungeness Crab & Seafood Festival and worked with local children on beach-debris projects.
In her book, Scott homes in on how she navigated her most trying chapter — and emerged into the best time of her life.
She and her husband have reinvented their marriage, doing some things independently, then coming back together with much to talk about.
Call Me Captain covers more than one journey, though.
It’s about her friendship with Alex Wegmann, which has flourished since Palmyra; he’s recently married and living on Oahu, where he’s program manager at the nonprofit Island Conservation program.
Scott, Thomas, Alex and Coral Wegmann are great friends to this day.
Yet another fold of this tale: the healing power of nature and wildlife.
Being surrounded by birds, fish, even crustaceans “is the most wonderful thing I can imagine,” Scott said.
For more about her work with wildlife, her new book and her marine-debris art, visit www.susanscott.net.
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
