So a group of young alums decide to build a wooden boat and sail it from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska. Crazy? Bold? Naive? Confident?
All of the above?
By Ben Gore '04
The Tern, her yellow cedar frames gleaming under deep blue skies, slid slowly from behind the sheltering lee of Malcolm Island. I stood on the aft bench, my hand on the tiller, and looked north towards the gray water of Queen Charlotte Strait, which separated us from mainland British Columbia.
Six of us were onboard the boat—a 24-foot-long wooden vessel we had built over the course of a year—and at that moment, the afternoon was sunny and warm, and all was right in our world. Isaac Pattis ’05, his big Greek face growing darker as the summer progressed, was kneading bread dough in our cast iron Dutch oven. Becca Leaphart ’03 was reading aloud to us from Steinbeck. Terray Sylvester ’05, our willowy, wild-bearded mountain man, was minding the sails with Cedar Charnley, a dark, wiry fellow from Evergreen College. Ben Brouwer ’04, the expedition leader, dozed amidships.
It was mid-June, several weeks after we had set sail from the San Juan Islands, and we were slowly making our way along the Canadian coast via the Inside Passage—bound for Ketchikan, Alaska. White caps bubbled cheerily out in the strait—a wide-open space of ten nautical miles without any shelter—and I gazed ahead, blissfully ignoring what those whitecaps foretold.
A minute later, we left the last of the island’s shelter, and the wind immediately picked up, blowing strongly and steadily in our faces. The boat began to heel. Lazy afternoon activities came to a quick halt, as the crew scrambled to duty, trimming the sails and shifting weight to keep the Tern upright.
Within five minutes, what had been flat calm seas was now rough water, with waves three feet (and rising) pummeling the boat. The tide was going out, which meant all of the water from the myriad fjords and channels was flowing north out to sea; a new moon meant the ebb was at its most powerful.. The wind was blowing against the water, tearing it to a violent chop. A gust hit our already straining sails, and the rail nearly went under. I gave Brouwer the tiller; my four weeks of sailing experience were not sufficient to keep the Tern on course (or upright for that matter).
Crawling forward toward the yawing and pitching bow of our open vessel, I retrieved my wetsuit and pulled it on. On top of that went my clothes, then a jacket, then plastic foul weather gear (affectionately dubbed “foulies” by the Northwesterners on our crew), then my life jacket. The others were pulling on rain clothes. I made my way aft, where Brouwer was straining at the tiller as the waves batted us about. There was a commotion next to me and suddenly the rudder was floating free in the water. (We had designed a catch to keep the wood rudder from floating off its open hinges, and I had been charged with machining this little bronze mechanism. Normally, I would have been deathly embarrassed by my substandard craftsmanship, but there was no time.)
Brouwer took full command, as we had discussed back on land. He barked orders, more like a drill sergeant than the dancer he is. Cedar, who has sailed ships many orders of magnitude larger than the Tern, took charge of steering the boat into the wind and waves, using the sails like a windsurfer.
The seas rose to four feet, and Cedar struggled to keep us in line; turning broadside to the waves now might have swamped or capsized the boat. With the sea heaving beneath us, Brouwer and I wrestled the rudder back into place. When it was on, I leaned far overboard with a pair of pliers to wrench the catch—just a little tab of bronze held into the soft wood with a single wood screw—back into shape. We could steer again, but the wind was still rising, the masts were bowing visibly, and white water was crashing over the bow.
Strangely, it never crossed our minds to turn around and return to our friends in Alert Bay, a little town just a few miles south. Although we were only halfway into our 42-day voyage from Washington to Alaska, we had on this day run aground, had a brutally honest discussion about the expedition’s leadership, and rowed feverishly through treacherous rapids just to get this far—all before three in the afternoon. And while the air temperature was in the seventies and the sky a brilliant blue, I was already soaking wet. With the wind blowing over the cold water, I began to shiver.
Brouwer hollered the order to reef—to shorten the sails to reduce the strain on the boat. Terray and Cedar dropped the sheets (the lines that control the sails) and suddenly we could hear nothing but agitated Dacron (the nylon canvas that has supplanted cotton and hemp). We worked smoothly, aware that mistakes here had very real consequences. Cold, swollen, salt-pruned fingers untied and retied bowline knots, hauled the halyards (the lines which raise and lower the sails) taut, sheeted in the sails. The uproarious crackling of loose sailcloth quieted.
Yet the wind kept rising—up to twenty miles an hour—and the waves got bigger. Spare wooden parts floated in standing water beneath the floorboards and clanked against the hull. Because the Tern doesn’t have a deck (it sits just eighteen inches out the water, fully loaded), five-foot waves rear above her menacingly. The pounding seas kept knocking us off course, killing our momentum when we tried to turn through the wind and complicating our attempts to avoid swamping. If the boat filled with water, there would be no way to empty it.
We reefed again, down to as little sail area as possible, balancing the need for power with the strain on the boat. The waves came in occasional bigger sets now, big enough to completely stop our tiny vessel. Brouwer yelled for Cedar to take over, exhausted from his battle with the tiller.
It had become clear that there was a distinct possibility that the masts could snap and the boat would swamp. I glanced around. No one else was wearing a wetsuit. In water as cold as the northern Pacific, the muscles will only work for a minute or two. If the boat went over, I would be the only person able to work to right it.
**
The Hunter Bay Boat Project sprang from the restless mind of Ben Brouwer. A native of the earthy, rural enclave of Lopez Island, Washington, Brouwer is a veteran of 6,000 miles of bicycle touring, a semester at sea, and myriad elaborate pranks. In the year after graduation, he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, with his girlfriend, Becca Leaphart, but he was restless. He considered heading down to Newport to hang around the docks, looking for passage to the Caribbean as a deckhand, but the pull of his native Pacific Northwest—with its deep forests, dark waters, and looming mountains—was too strong and eventually he decamped for home.
He had designs on an expedition through the fjords and islands of the Inside Passage, a protected waterway stretching from Puget Sound in Washington to Glacier Bay in Alaska. There, the coastal mountain ranges tumble into the Pacific Ocean, and the resulting archipelagos form a maze of narrow channels sheltered from the powerful swells of the North Pacific. Human settlements have existed along this band for as long as people have inhabited North America, but neither the First Nations nor the European usurpers have managed to crowd it much. It is a rugged, wild, and empty stretch of coast, 1,500 miles long, filled with bears, old growth cedars, and rocky shores.
Never content to do things the easy way, Brouwer envisioned a journey without internal combustion. All power would be provided by wind on sailcloth and oar on seawater.
Because the crew would need to row, there couldn’t be a cabin; the necessary ballast would make the boat too heavy. Rowing also meant it would have to be large enough to seat all the necessary muscle power. So Brouwer asked his father, Steven, where he might find a suitable craft. Being a wooden boatbuilder, Steven suggested that the crew could build its own, thereby making the whole endeavor that much more adventurous.
I landed squarely in the middle of this scheming when I swung south from Vermont to Rhode Island in the winter of 2005 to visit Brouwer and Becca. I was acutely aware that I would soon be adrift in the post-graduation doldrums, so I jumped aboard without hesitation. It was of little matter that I knew nothing about boats or sailing. The chance to do something bold, live with good friends, and explore a wondrous new place was more than enough incentive to downplay my ignorance.
Later that winter, seven of us descended on Lee Purlow’s homestead in Waltham, Vermont, where reggae hummed from the stereo as we sat around his octagonal living room and planned our adventure.
Present were Isaac Pattis, a passionate giant with a love of English literature who, at six foot seven inches, stood more than a head taller than anyone else; the whip thin, wall-climbing Zen lunatic Terray Sylvester, his gaunt frame topped by a mop of unruly blond hair; Lee Purlow, heavily bearded, dark haired, and short, more of a mountaineer than sailor, and a computer nerd to boot; Lee’s willowy, quiet girlfriend, Nicki Morris ’04; Becca Leaphart, an actress and educator, keeper of journals, and perhaps the most creative in the group; and, of course, there was Brouwer, a modern dancer, photographer, cyclist, and purveyor of radical geographic theories. (Missing were Alana Sagin ’04, who would have been sitting quietly in the corner waiting for the chance to murmur a very dirty joke under her breath, and Cedar Charnley, a woodworker, singer of chanties, and the other elfin offspring of Lopez Island.)
Eight people would participate at any one time. (Finding the communal life in Washington State was not for them, Lee Purlow and Nicki Morris left in late July.) We would camp on the Brouwer sheep farm on Lopez and live communally. Four people at a time would work in the shop, with Steven as instructor, building the boat. Four people would labor on the farm to repay Steven for his time. The groups would switch every two weeks. When the boat was done we would sail to Alaska and back.
Which is how I found myself on the passenger deck of the M/V Yakima with Pattis in June as the ferry cut through the coastal fog en route to the San Juan Islands. South of the city of Vancouver and east of Vancouver Island, Lopez Island is the first stop on the westward journey from the mainland at Anacortes, Washington, ninety miles north of Seattle. It is just one of the hundreds of shaggy islands in the San Juan Archipelago, lodged in a pocket of dark water on the Canadian border north of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In the first half of the 1900s, Lopez was a prosperous fishing and farming community. Then the salmon population went into decline and big agribusiness made small farms less tenable. The early 1970s saw an influx of young people moving to the country to get back to the land, to live peacefully and communally, to grow food and work in wood. Now the economic base of the islands has shifted to tourism and second homes, the economy propped up by affluent Seattle. Much has changed since the Brouwer family moved to Lopez in 1983, while many things—independent artisans, locally harvested food, back-to-the-earth labor—remain the same.
On the Yakima’s passenger deck, Brouwer bounded up to me wearing preposterously huge pants (he was fresh off the plane from performing an interpretive dance routine in New York City), and he greeted me with a huge bear hug. When the boat docked, we jumped into my truck and drove south, towards Hunter Bay.
The Tern, as she came to be called, is based on a long tradition of Scandinavian and British boat-building. The design was a custom drawing by yacht designer Tad Roberts of Gabriola Island, British Columbia, based on the long boats designed by the famous British boatwright, John Watkinson. Twenty-four feet long and seven feet wide at the widest point, the Tern is made entirely of wood. The frames and benches are cut from the yellow cedar trees of the Olympic Peninsula; most of the planks are mahogany plywood from Africa. The hull was constructed using lapstrake planking, which means the planks overlap each other, rather than butting together at the edges. The rig—the sails and their support—is a turn-of-the-century style gaff-rigged ketch: there are two masts, the larger one in front, and a second boom up high to give the sail four sides. When Captain George Vancouver explored and surveyed the Pacific Northwest, he used boats very much like the Tern.
Over the course of three months, we puzzled, drew, sawed, drilled, and bolted. We cooked, cut barbed wire, drank beer, and picked and ate sugarsnap peas. We rowed a little dory over to Friday Harbor, on the next island, to retrieve a modem.
And slowly, the skeleton of a boat grew. After two weeks of struggle, the first planks went on, and then after a few more weeks another set of planks and then another. Brilliant summer faded into a moody fall. Soon there was school to attend, rain to escape, and jobs to work.
People began to drift away. Terray was already long gone, departed for more education in Vermont. Alana left soon afterwards to work on med school applications in Santa Fe. I returned to the East Coast in October, followed shortly thereafter by Isaac, who decamped to Connecticut. Becca managed to stay into December, before retreating to her native Montana, leaving just Brouwer and Cedar, to continue building.
In Steven’s woodshop lay the Tern, a skeleton with half its skin off, growing slowly, piece by piece, waiting for the spring.
**
The Tern was bucking more waves, my teeth were chattering, and my wetsuit was soaked. A log, as big as a telephone pole, surfed past us, followed by another and another—a virtual horizontal forest threatening to batter a hole in the Tern’s planking. Cedar steered deftly through the maze of wood. And then as quickly as the log onslaught had begun, it stopped. The logs were caught in an eddy line created by Broughton Island, and we were on the far side of Queen Charlotte Strait. We cruised slowly into Cockatrice Bay, adrenaline at an ebb, and scanned the densely wooded shore for a place to tie up. The forest was far thicker and more deeply green than on Vancouver Island sixteen miles south, but soon we saw a landing spot and approached the shore. That night we grilled a salmon and slept deeply.
For the next five days we inched up the northern coast of Queen Charlotte Strait towards Cape Caution, where the protecting barrier islands of the passage give way for fifteen miles. (There the waves fetch all the way from Japan and smash themselves on the sand of Burnett Beach.) The two days following our crossing we got ourselves caught in dangerously strong north winds again, so strong that at one point we couldn’t make any forward progress at all. But eventually we caught on. In foul weather, the seas around Cape Caution can build monstrously high—as high as the lighthouse on the cliffs of nearby Egg Island—but we rounded it in a quiet, deep fog with long low swells ten feet high gentle as a rocking cradle.
The days blew away in the wind. Skin peeled from our hands. Migrating gray whales breeched around the Tern. The salmon began to run, and we started to see eagles soaring above the shoreline by the dozen. Smacks of jellyfish—ten thousand strong—drifted in the fjords. One night we kept on rowing, well after sunset, when the water began to glow a fluorescent pale green. We began to sing old Kwa’kwakiwak canoe chants and rowed until our arms gave out.
**
A few days later, Ben Gore would return to his life on the East Coast, but not before standing on the deck of a cannery manager’s boat and watching his friends pilot the Tern through Revillagigado Channel toward Alaska’s Misty Fjords.
The Tern would eventually circumnavigate Revillagagido Island, before embarking on the return journey southward. Back in the Gulf Islands, she sailed in the Shipyard School Raid, a revival of the old European tradition of racing with small workboats. The Raid, sponsored by Tad Roberts, who designed the Tern, finishes at the annual wooden boat festival in Port Townsend, Washington, where the Tern was a big hit and everyone partied like rock stars. Or rather pirates. Or pirate rock stars.
The crew has now dispersed, and the Tern lies in dry dock on the Brouwer farm on Lopez Island, awaiting more adventures in other summers.