Today’s podcast is an interview with Chief Instructor and Master Shipwright Jeff Hammond of the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building in Port Hadlock, WA.  This is the first of my Interview an Expert series of podcasts focused on 6 methods of boatbuilding: Carvel, Lapstrake, Cold Molded, Stitch and Glue, Strip Planked, and Skin-on-Frame.   I [...]

WOW – I MADE IT TO 100 EPISODES and am PUBLISHING MY FIRST BOOK!!! I am super excited today as it is the 100th Episode of HOWB!  I can’t believe I have been doing this for almost 2 years  Time has flown by and I am having more fun than ever.  The other big news […]

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Leigh Coolidge was one of the Seattle region’s early yacht design luminaries.

Born in Boston and trained at MIT, Coolidge moved to the Seattle area in 1890 and became known for designing a wide range of motor yachts in the 1920s and ’30s. He conceived the standardized, raised-deck cruisers first built by N.J. Blanchard, which became known as Lake Union Dreamboats.

Considered a perfectionist, Coolidge was formal, slightly aloof and intimidating. A tiny man, he fancied formal attire, Homburg hats and a goatee so that others would take him seriously.

According to his colleague, Bill Garden, “He told me that he grew the Van Dyke beard because he was bidding on the job of designing a big steam tug, and he just looked too damn young. So he grew the whiskers and left ‘em on.”

Behind his back, Seattle maritime historian Scott Rohrer said, shipyard crews called Coolidge “The Duke” because of his imperious manner.

“But to his face,” Rohrer said, “they called him Mr. Coolidge.”

During Prohibition, Coolidge found success designing rum runners, obliquely referring to them as “fast freighters” or “utility vessels,” taking pains to protect the clients who commissioned them.

Meet The Duke in this vignette from the documentary “Throwbacks to a Golden Age of Northwest Boats.”

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From the late 1920s through the 1960s, Ed Monk designed vessels ranging from towboats to dinghies, military patrol boats to tugs. But he is best known for his sleek, classic powerboats. Early in his career, Monk worked at Seattle boatyards and took correspondence courses in naval architecture. He put in a stint at the N.J. Blanchard yard, and then went to work for naval architect Ted Geary.

In 1930, as the Depression quieted the Seattle yards, Monk followed Geary to Hollywood, where he assisted with projects such as John Barrymore’s yacht Infanta, now the Thea Foss. Three years later, Monk returned to Washington and established his own firm. He needed a home for his family and a place to work, so he built the 50-foot Nan and moored her at the Seattle Yacht Club.

His “office” was a cubbyhole in a corner of the house, an experience that informed his designs of well-planned, liveable pleasure boats. Get to know the man and his work in this excerpt from the documentary “Throwbacks to a Golden Age of Northwest Boats.”

Sarah gives a TED talk on her trip

After too many hours wrestling recalcitrant dinghies around in relatively calm and protected anchorages, I cannot pretend to understand what motivates people to want to row across entire oceans, let alone to do so by themselves. But you have to admit it’s an incredible feat of endurance, fortitude, and seamanship to row alone across the Pacific Ocean, and it’s a feat that Englishwoman Sarah Outen has accomplished as of last night. One hundred and fifty days and 3,750 nautical miles after departing Japan, Outen pulled up near Adak Island (westernmost municipality in the United States, and southernmost in Alaska!) in the Aleutian island chain for a short tow through treacherous conditions into Adak harbor.

This represents Outen’s second attempt to get across the Pacific rowing solo; in June of 2012, almost a month out of Japan on her first try, she was hit by Tropical Storm Mawar some 500 miles off-shore. After being rolled several times, Outen was rescued by the Japanese Coast Guard, but vowed to return and try again.

With a new boat and better weather luck, this time, she’s made it.

If that doesn’t sound like accomplishment enough, then realize that this is just one leg of Outen’s entirely human-powered circumnavigation effort; her next step is to bike across Canada, then row back across the Atlantic (solo, again) to London, which she originally departed way back in April 2011. She’s already cycled through Europe and Asia and made a tricky kayak crossing between Russia’s Sakhalin Peninsula and Japan.

If you’d like to follow along with Sarah as she takes the next steps on her journey, you can find her website here.

Grandpa’s Traveling Urn

Grandpa was a traveling man.

It wasn’t his business; he worked for the railroad, but he was a carman, a mechanic, working on the track and the big freight cars that traveled on it. Apart from frequent trips around the state to the site of various breakdowns and derailments, he spent all his working life around the big Burlington Northern shops in Spokane and, later, Wenatchee.

The job was a good, solid one of the sort that folks aspired to in the post-war years and I think he enjoyed it. But his heart seemed to be out on the road. Weekends, vacations, and sometimes even just after work, Grandpa was out driving. He had his favorite places, and he would return to them regularly, so regularly that, toward the end of his life, when he was starting to forget just about everything else, he could still accurately and cogently describe unmarked and un-named roads and routes in the remote parts of the West he had explored fifty years before.

Along the Swinomish Channel

By the time I came along, he liked to boast that he had been to forty-eight states; all of them except Alaska, and, he would reveal after a beat, New Jersey. Eventually he knocked those off the list as well.

It wasn’t long before I was going with him… since before my eyes had opened, he liked to tell people. Sitting in the passenger seat, I’d been to twenty-five of the fifty states before I was fourteen. I’d been to Wall Drug, the Corn Palace, saw Yellowstone any number of times before it burned, been to the Thousand Islands, toured Gettysburg, learned to see the stark and terrible beauty in Death Valley, bestrode the mighty Mississippi at its headwaters, watched the waves boil in off the Atlantic at Cape Cod.

People go cruising for different reasons. Some like the simplicity of life aboard, some love to sail, some like to go unusual places and see interesting things. I enjoy all of those, but for me I think most of it is the traveling. And I think I must have caught that bug from him.

That’s a real sailor’s uniform, but Grandpa spent his service ashore as an aviation ordnanceman

He wasn’t a sailor, though he had been in the Navy during the war (firmly ashore at Pearl Harbor for the duration)–he got terribly seasick. But the country we are sailing through would have fascinated him. He was a rockhound, enjoyed mountains and geography, and would have found a million things to notice in the tale of geographic history writ large on the upthrust granite walls lining our route. He also liked meeting people (and they him) and he would have gotten a kick out of the various characters who occupy the wilderness here as well as those who are simply sailing through it.

Grandpa passed away in 2008, only days after we returned from our first extended sailing trip up the Inside Passage. My mother had called to let us know he was going downhill fast and we rushed over to Spokane almost as soon as we had the docklines tied off. That night, alone with him for a moment in his room at the VA, listening to the labored breathing, I told him it was okay to go; I’d see him again, and we’d take another trip sometime.

He passed away later that night.

So, this trip, I brought him along. We’re traveling with Grandpa once again.

My uncle divided up the ashes amongst a few of our clan who continue to trek along the backwoods and backroads of the world, with the stricture that, when we came to a place we thought he might like, we should leave a little bit of him there. It’s an elegant way to remember and honor a man who went all over, but still never had enough time to get everywhere he might have wanted to see. My uncle carries his share around in a salt shaker.

So Grandpa is still traveling, and now he’s been a whole raft of amazing new places he didn’t have a chance to see in life: Desolation Sound, Princess Louisa Inlet, the Klaskish Basin, Rugged Point, Hot Springs Cove, Barkley Sound.

At first, I was leaving behind a generous dollop. But the further I go, the less I have been scattering. There are so many more places to travel! I don’t want to run out; I’m still riding with Grandpa.

Diana Nyad in the water

Swimming from Florida to Cuba is hard work.

Nobody knows this better than Diana Nyad, who had made four attempts at the crossing, without the assistance of a shark cage, over the course of the past 35 years, before successfully making the swim in about 53 hours early last September.

It’s not just the 110 miles you can expect to have to cover (swimming the lay line between the two points is all but impossible). It’s not just the sharks that swarm the Straits of Florida. It’s not the precarious state of US/Cuban relations. It’s not even the killer jellyfish, which necessitate the donning of a truly outlandish and uncomfortable suit and face mask which make it difficult to breathe.

It’s the weather. Weather and two-to-five knot currents in the Florida Strait are affected by the mountains of Cuba, the Florida Keys, and the Gulf Stream. Different segments of the passage can have different weather at the same time, but for a swimmer making the crossing under their own power, all of them have to align perfectly to allow a reasonable attempt at the challenge: winds less than 10 knots and not out of the North, Northeast, or East.

On that most important point, local meteorologist Lee Chesneau had Nyad covered.

A regular presenter at the Seattle Boat Show, Chesneau also makes the rounds at other shows around the country when he can spare time from teaching at five different schools. Many local sailors have gotten their first introduction to the foreboding 500mb chart at one of Lee’s seminars.

40 years of forecasting experience helped Chesneau puzzle out the meteorological intricacies of the swim problem. But it wasn’t just figuring out the forecast that was a challenge.

“I had to deal with people who knew nothing about weather,” Chesneau said. As challenging as providing a daily 3-5 day forecast every day for three straight months was, it wasn’t as difficult as educating Nyad’s expanding support team about all the reasons there was ultimately only about a two percent chance of conditions all aligning to the point where the swim would be practical and safe.

Chesneau ultimately dealt with that challenge with a lot of personal discussion and the production of a short “weather glossary” that would help explain his forecasts to the un-initiated. Team member Vanessa Linsley, who had minored in meteorology in college, also helped Chesneau fine-tune his forecasts to reach the appropriate level of detail while still being easily comprehensible to the laymen on the team.

The team education was vital exactly because the odds of the right conditions occurring was so low; volunteers of all sorts, coming from all around the country could not be expected to stand by on-site in Florida on the off-chance the swim would start at any moment. Picking the necessary 72-hours of good weather had to be done with enough notice to allow the team to converge and assemble in time to launch. Pulling the trigger on the decision to go set in motion 35 people from as far away as Hawaii, and could not easily be recalled once made.

Lee delivered the forecast that caused that trigger to be pulled on August 22nd. By the 30th, Diana was enroute to Cuba. In between, on the 29th, conditions worsened slightly. The final decision to go wasn’t made until she and the team were already in Cuba.

Just before 9am on August 31st, Diana yelled “Courage!” and jumped into the ocean.

Almost 53 hours and a little over 110 miles later, she emerged on a beach in Key West, Florida, the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage.

In retrospect, Chesneau’s call was dead-on: conditions in the strait after the swim have not aligned in any other adequate window for a passage, and water temperatures have declined to the point where an attempt would not be able to be made again until the next season. And he attributes Diane’s success to the strength of her support system.

“Everything had to line up perfectly, from the weather, the currents, the jellyfish problem,” Chesneau said. The jellyfish thing comes up a lot. “A lot of our failings on previous swims were because of jellyfish.”

The box jellyfish problem is an excellent illustration of Chesneau’s point about teamwork. Having been stung badly on previous attempts, Nyad worked with research scientists and prosthetics specialists to develop a defense against the swarms.

Chesneau had known Nyad as they were both growing up in South Florida as competitive swimmers, but his involvement with her record-setting swim only began in 2012, when her team approached him to act as lead forecaster.

Her original plans to make the swim that year were foiled by the confluence of conditions that eventually led to the formation of Super Storm Sandy. But Chesneau was still on board when the 2013 season rolled around. Working with another meteorologist, an oceanographer, the team’s lead navigator, and Diana herself, Lee coordinated by Skype and email from as far away as Spain to produce weekly forecast snapshots.

Despite all the intensive work he put in leading up to the start of the swim, Chesneau’s job didn’t end once Diana was in the water. Working with his normal forecast products augmented by on-the-water observations from the team, Lee continued to produce vital information during the event, including a timely thunderstorm warning to the small flotilla of boats accompanying Diana on the swim.

Chesneau is quick to credit Diana for putting together the team that got her into the water, but also to note that it was entirely her own fortitude and resolve that kept her going. Before the end, she was hallucinating, and found it impossible to keep down solid foods. It must have been tempting, surrounded by boats full of warm clothes, friendly supporters, and medical assistance, to call it a day. But Diana pulled through.

Nor, apparently, did she lose her taste or talent for swimming; a month later, she was back in the water, swimming for 48 hours straight in a pool in New York to raise money for the victims of her 2012 nemesis, Hurricane Sandy.

I just got a postcard from my old boat!  Ok, well, it’s an email from her current owner,  the fellow we sold her to a little more than a year ago.  But it was like a postcard.  A few words about where she was and how she had gotten there along with a photo of her berthed in San Diego.

As sailboats go, Sirena Gorda was my first love.  Before her, the boats I had owned were pretty much just tools.  Water vehicles.  And they were always quite simple.  I didn’t buy my first sailboat until in my mid forties.  That boat was an old El Toro that my son and I bought together.  It was eight feet long, made of wood and missing the mast, boom, dagger board and rudder.  We bought the plans and built the missing bits.  With an Ebay sail, we started to sail.  I still have that boat.  It currently sits in the backyard.  Now that I know how easy it is to capsize (ask my son how easy), I will not take her out in the sound until I invest in some flotation.

After the El Toro came Selma.  Selma was a Cal 21 trailer sailor that I bought with the proceeds from a guitar sale.  She lacked charm and creature comforts (except for an ice chest and a bucket that I kept in her rough, simple cabin.)  I lacked sailing skills!  Still, we sailed.  It wasn’t pretty, but we sailed.  That El Toro was the bait and Selma had set the hook.  I loved this sailing thing.  Like Columbus, I wanted to break the bonds of Commencement Bay and go farther.  

Enter Sirena Gorda, goodbye Selma.  Selma was sold the way she was bought… through Craigslist.  A week or two of advertising and she was gone.  Sold to a young gal with a jeep for the same price I had bought her for.  An apparent trend in how I sell boats.  I made 3×5 cards with stick figures for her showing how to step the mast.  I showed her the mechanism for raising and lowering the keel.  I spent an hour going over the trailer lights with the multimeter only to tell her that the shop had wired her jeep wrong and the trailer was wired correctly.  Then I watched Selma drive away.  It was a little sad, but hey, Sirena Gorda was sitting in her slip five minutes from the house.  No time for tears.  I had a “real” boat now.  I’ve never received a post card from Selma and I’m not sure I want one.  We weren’t that close.

But Sirena Gorda – Sirena was special.  She’s a Cal 2-27.  We bought her from a charity in Seattle where she was tied in amongst much bigger boats.  She was dirty and there was no upholstery on her lower cushions.  But she had nice lines and beautiful teak.  And a toilet, not a bucket!  I couldn’t wait to tell my friends that she had a toilet (until the toilet came apart in my hands on the maiden voyage.)  We picked her up in Fisherman’s Terminal on a Friday evening and took her through the Ballard locks 20 minutes later.  I spent my first night aboard in Shilshole marina and the next day my son, son-in-law and I took her home to Tacoma.

And I took sailing lessons!

Yes!  I took sailing lessons.  We took sailing lessons – my wife and I.  We joined a club.  We started to cruise.  We started to race.  Sirena made all of this possible.

We loved her.  We upholstered her!  We changed her 70s yellow to Pacific blue.  We put a new engine in her and a depth sounder.  We bought a bigger anchor so that we could be more independent.  We hosted our first and second annual boat parties on her.  Sirena took us south to Olympia and north, past Seattle, all of the way to the San Juan Islands.  She helped us through cancer.  She helped us make friends. And we loved her so much that she had to go!

That’s right.  She had to go.  We knew that we loved this boating thing and planned to keep on doing it.  We’d quickly figured out that money poured into a boat can never be wrung back out of it.  Mostly we knew that we had five grown kids, most with significant others, and they do not all fit on a Cal 2-27.  We needed more boat and I was getting too old to go three feet every couple of years.  Let’s just go eleven feet and call it good!

Enter Naughty By Nature, our Catalina 38, goodbye Sirena.  Sirena was sold the way she was bought – through Craigslist.  But she was much tougher to sell than Selma.  Thirteen showings.  Usually at least an hour each showing.  Getting questions like “how much is moorage”, or “is there much maintenance involved?”  And statements like “there sure are a lot of ropes.”  On a Cal 2-27?  Not really!

I’d about given up hope on selling her.  The guys in the club told me I was an admiral.  Two boats.  Two moorages.  Thank goodness both were paid for!  But with winter coming, I was worried.  Would I have to donate her back to the charity?

I was sitting in the Detroit airport on my way to Indiana when I got a phone call from a young fellow named Ronnie Simpson.  Ronnie had just arrived in Seattle sailing a boat that he was delivering from Hawaii.  He was looking to buy another boat while he was in town.  Could I tell him about Sirena?  So for 30 minutes with the airport PA blaring in my ears I told him all about Sirena.

Then he said, “I want to sail her right away to San Francisco where I want to live on her.”

“Right away?” I asked.  “That’s gutsy”.

Yes, Ronnie was in a hurry to get going.  I called my wife from Detroit and asked her if she was willing to show the boat to a guy we didn’t know.  She agreed.  Our friends Lew and Bev were living on their boat a few slips away and Lew agreed to keep an eye on things.  A just retired iron worker, Lew can be an imposing presence.

By time I’d reached my hotel room, my wife had called me with an offer.  It was what I’d paid for SIrena a few years earlier.

“Hmm!” I said, “outboard too?”

“Outboard too.”

“How do you feel about this?”

“I feel good” she said.  “I like him.”

So she closed the deal and I shed a few tears.  Something I have never done for a thing!  An hour or so later she called me and said, “Google “Ronnie Simpson””.

There was an Outside magazine article on Ronnie.  Ronnie was a soldier in Iraq.  When his Humvee hit an IED he was badly burned and had both retinas detached.  Shortly afterward his father died.  Out of the military, legally blind, suddenly fatherless he seemed to have a death wish and then he discovered sailing – but that’s Ronnie’s story.

The date was September 11.  9/11.  Selma had gone to a wounded vet.  We’d made the right sale.  I didn’t look back and neither did Ronnie or Sirena.

And now Sirena Gorda is in San Diego.  Next stop Mexico.

I’m glad she took the time to write.

Maybe it’s time Naughty sent a post card to her previous owner.

More on Ronnie Simpson:

www.openbluehorizon.com/‎

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/water-activities/sailing/The-Long-Way-Back.html

NSHOF Inductee Bill Buchan and NSHOF President Gary Jobson
(Photo Credit NSHOF/Jack Hardway)

Local sailing icon and Olympic Gold Medalist Bill Buchan was inducted this week into the United States National Sailing Hall of Fame in Annapolis.

Buchan’s 1984 Gold Medal-winning appearance in the Los Angeles Olympics racing Star class was just the cream on top of a long career sailing the one-design boats; Buchan won the Star world championships in 1961, 1970, and 1985.

“If it wasn’t for Seattle Yacht Club arranging for the 1948 Star North Americans, I wouldn’t be standing here today,” said Buchan, crediting Seattle’s flagship yacht club with launching his racing career at the tender age of 13. Captivated by the championship races on Puget Sound and Lake Washington, Buchan quickly convinced his father to help him build one of the 22′ keelboats. A succession of Stars later, Bill was a builder of record for the class, eventually originating a hull shape that became standard in the fleet.

Buchan has raced, and won, in other classes, but it’s the Star to which he has always returned. And to the Seattle area–Bill still lives in Medina. After an exceptionally long and winning career, it’s hard to think of a more deserving inductee.

Some sad news from the classic wooden boating community: Stan Bishoprick, founder of Legendary Yachts, passed away on October 25 at the age of 76.

Bishoprick founded Legendary Yachts in 1994 to bring back to life some of the classic wooden yacht designs of yore. Among the company’s first projects was his own S/V Radiance, an L. Francis Herreshoff design re-creating the famous Ticonderoga. Bishoprick retired in 1996 to sail Radiance on a three-year voyage.

Legendary went on to produce a number of other L. Francis Herreshoff designs, at least one Sparkman and Stephens motor yacht, a few newer Sam Devlin designs, and a number of smaller projects.

A memorial service will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Tues., Nov. 19th, at First Presbyterian Church, 4300 Main St. in Vancouver, WA.

You may view his full obituary online here.

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From the 1920s to the 1950s, the Alaska Coast Hunting and Fishing Company pioneered excursion travel to the remote state, serving a clientele of famous Americans ranging from Wall Street tycoons to Hollywood celebrities.

The company’s guides took clients fishing and hunting for game. The main target was the brown bear — specifically, the subspecies known as the grizzly.

The most notable of the guides was Alan Hasselborg, aka The Bear Man of Admiralty Island, then home to the highest density of brown bears in North America. An eccentric character, Hasselborg lived alone at Mole Harbor, with the island’s estimated 1,600 grizzlies his only neighbors.

Down on his luck, Hasselborg had come to Seattle around the turn of the century with visions of cashing in on the gold rush. Legend has it that he was shanghaied and put on a cod boat bound for Alaska, and soon came to realize that the isolation suited him.

Described by one source as “a rough-cut old bugger with a big long beard” and not much to say, Hasselborg preferred not to mix with clients but would instead row ashore after a day out hunting and sleep under a tree, returning to the boat in the morning.

Meet Hasselborg in this vignette from the documentary “Westward in the 21st Century.”