March 2013 – Late Entry

March 16, 2013

The Plight of the Big Old Boat

The former City of Seattle Fireboat Alki was sold at auction this past week for the bargain-basement price of $71,100, pending a closure process that will include verification of the buyer’s ability to safely moor and insure the 127 foot, 86-year old steel vessel.

That latter portion of the process is a laudable one, and it is being mentioned prominently in the wake of reports indicating that the Port of Seattle sold the derelict vessel Deep Sea without such precautions, leading to environmental and financial disasters for shellfish farmers in Penn Cove last year when that vessel burned and sank there. A number of other problematic derelicts wound up in the hands of their current owners through similarly lax process, and the city is no doubt working hard to avoid the Alki becoming a similar story years down the road.

In that effort, they are already ahead of the game, because Alki is a working vessel that has been maintained by firefighters whose lives depended on her and whose resources were backed by city coffers. Most other big, old boats that port agencies find themselves auctioning off are well-past the end of their working lives, and have already suffered years of neglect before being sold. The buyers have big dreams, but rarely the big money required to refurbish the boats to match.

But despite the precautions, it’s all too easy for big, old boats to spiral past the point of easy restoration, despite the best efforts of owners and crew alike.

This was driven home dramatically, and tragically, by the recent sinking of the HMS Bounty during Hurricane Sandy in the North Atlantic. If there is nothing else to know about nautical misadventure, it is that there is always more to the story; on this story, no one has done more to uncover the rest than Mario Vittone, in a series of excellent articles on gcaptain.com covering the Coast Guard hearings on the disaster.

There is much to critique in the Bounty case that has little to do with her being old, or wooden, or poorly maintained. But it is clear that those factors were ultimately important ones in her foundering, and Vittone details testimony that is fascinating and informative in tracking the progression of decisions that led officers and crew to take to sea in a vessel that was barely hanging together in the first place.

It’s a familiar pattern in the history of disasters, described succinctly by Richard Feinman in the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident as “…gradually decreasing strictness.”

The paragraph that line is from is worth quoting at length:

The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.

For “flight” you can read “voyage” and find that the same factor is inextricably involved in disaster after disaster at sea. It’s a very human failing; we’re mostly optimists from birth, trying new things, and assuming, often reasonably, that if we’ve done it before successfully, then it is probably safe to do it again. In fact, as sailors, we often speak positively of this experience; we call it “gaining confidence in ourselves and our boats.”

But sometimes that confidence is mis-placed, and the trick is in knowing when you were well-prepared and well-equipped, and when you simply got lucky.

And the complication with old boats is that the circumstances of operation often devolve into a series of trade-offs, which you can get lucky with for a long time without fully realizing that it is just luck. The vessels cost so much to maintain and berth and insure that, for most owners, it is impossible to cover without operating them in some capacity to make money. In making their best efforts to earn more money to provide for a better maintained vessel, they are getting on a treadmill that will have no graceful exit for most of them. Even when they start out with the resources to moor and insure and maintain the boat, as the Alki’s buyer must, there is no guarantee that they will continue to have enough to keep it up, as expenses mount and funds dwindle.

The reality may be that there is only an ecosystem to fund a small percentage of all the surviving big old boats that are out there to the highest standards. The rest will scrape by, making difficult decisions about the distribution of limited funds between a wide variety of safety-related necessities, and hoping that somehow they will be the ones to raise enough money, have a big enough profile, to restore themselves to that pinnacle of seaworthiness. The choices that are made may be life or death, but they are not between life or death. They are between one dangerous possibility and another. If one comes to pass and the other does not, they will either look brilliant, or fatally misguided.

The fact that these boats are coming up for auction and selling for such low prices in the first place points to the problem. It’s easy to arm-chair quarterback these situations and say that owners should either maintain the vessels to a standard or get rid of them. But the fact is that there probably isn’t anyone else with the resources to buy most of them and the scrap value is negative. If government agencies can’t afford to break them up, then it is far, far beyond the capacity of most private owners. They’ve already spent all their money trying to avoid the scrapyard; by the time it gets to that point, it costs more to get rid of the boat than it does to just let it sit. At which point, almost inevitably, it will go on the auction block again, or end up in the headlines as another disaster.

Perhaps illustrating the difficulties faced by the new owner of the Alki is her older sister, and predecessor into retirement, the Duwamish. Moored today more or less permanently adjacent to the Museum of History and Industry on South Lake Union, the Duwamish has struggled since her own retirement in 1985 to attract the money and volunteers required to keep a big old boat seaworthy. Duwamish was a steal compared to Alki; the current owners, the Puget Sound Fireboat Association, picked her up from the city for a dollar in 1994. Yet, at the time, the prospects looked good for the old workhorse. The foundation had active volunteers, a fundraising effort, and a working fireboat to attract more interest.

As recently as 2006, complete cost to refurbish her was estimated at $3 million. For a few years, and with tens of thousands of dollars invested in her, Duwamish continued to make the rounds in central Puget Sound, amazing viewers with astounding water shows and the sheer brute pumping power that was unequaled by any modern vessel until 2003.

But despite the time, dedication, and efforts of the members of the Foundation, Duwamish has gradually continued to deteriorate, following the same unhappy path as most big old boats. If one magnificent old fireboat could not find enough funding for here for restoration, can two? There are few more dedicated volunteers than those keeping the Duwamish afloat today, and their efforts to raise funding have been heroic, but their situation now is illustrative of the general plight of big old boats… whatever they have put into her over the years, it will likely cost more to fully restore her now than it would have when they started. The choices aren’t easy.

The Alki in all her original glory (City of Seattle Archives)

One hopes for a brighter future for the Duwamish, after the years spent in the desert, just as one hopes the Alki will wind up in good hands and find the means to continue life on the waters of the Pacific Northwest. But the fate of the Bounty, and the Kalakala, and all the other big old boats from our storied past, point to the many whirlpools along that passage. And it takes so long to make that journey that there may be no way for anyone, seller or buyer, to judge how well they will navigate it.

March 12, 2013

Waterfronts

A few weeks ago, I happened to find myself in a conversation with several folks on the subject of public docks. I lamented the disappearance of the old Washington Street public dock just off Pioneer Square, which was the last, neglected public point of access on Elliot Bay to downtown Seattle when I first moved here. By the time I was sailing again regularly, it was long gone, and downtown Seattle is just a drive-by on our way elsewhere in Puget Sound now. It seemed criminal that such a great maritime city should have such lousy waterfront access for boaters.

Captain Dave Petrich, of farmboat.org and cedarwave.com fame, was one of the folks I was talking with and he mentioned, in passing, that in a recent report, Seattle was named one of the worst waterfront cities in the world. I went digging around and found the report in question; it’s not really that recent, but we’re number six on the “bad” scale.

The re-development that will accompany the massive Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Project will help remedy many of the report’s critiques, but there’s not much in it for boaters. The Washington Street Pier is slated to return. However, it was never exactly a model of accessibility or accommodation. Bell Harbor Marina will remain the only protected, publicly-accessible dock downtown, but it is ridiculously small by modern marina standards and it’s often full.

The other major saltwater marinas in Seattle, Elliott Bay and Shilshole Bay, are both excellent facilities with reasonable rates and solid amenities, but neither are anywhere even close to their respective neighborhood hubs, let alone downtown, nor are they even minimally served by public transit… a death-knell for any tourist-minded cruisers who might otherwise consider a stop in Seattle.

This got me to thinking about some of the other urban waterfronts along the Salish Sea we have visited. Vancouver, Victoria, and Nanaimo all have extremely integrated urban/shore interfaces… and, not coincidentally, a lot of visiting cruiser traffic.

Petrich is pitching an idea for re-using some of the old 520 bridge pontoons to form a breakwater on the downtown waterfront to shield a new marina in the area of Pier 48, using the Washington Street landing as a base, after the Viaduct replacement project is complete. I thought it was a great idea; in fact, with a little digging, I found that it is one that has sprung up in the imaginations of several participants in an informal challenge called Re-think/Re-use to determine the fate of the old pontoons. Dave’s idea is modest in comparison; some of the designs call for Shilshole-scale marinas sheltered behind several of the old 520 spans.

At this point, it seems unlikely that such a project will come to fruition (although Dave was also one of the original proponents for a deep-bore tunnel on the waterfront as a replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct; small ideas sometimes find their footing to grow into major initiatives). But as he and I were talking about the idea, I found myself thinking that it’s a pity that a city with so much to offer so close to the water, and with such a tremendous maritime heritage (and still a vital center for the marine trades) has such a terrible relationship with its own shoreline. Seattle is already a destination for larger cruising ships, a role that brings in thousands of tourists (and their hard-earned money) every summer. Why not smaller craft as well?

Life on Lake Union is as close as we have found here to the cosmopolitan marriage of cruising and culture other major cities manage to offer. Yet it’s a venue that is itself threatened both by the relative inaccessibility it holds for cruising boats and the regulatory environment that the city is attempting to construct in the name of saving it. Even if the former could be addressed by a new marina downtown, the latter seems likely to persist. The city’s original proposal to define and regulate as a “live-aboard” anyone spending more than four nights in a given week aboard their vessel has been scaled back sharply, but in it, and simultaneous efforts to otherwise restrict non-industrial waterfront uses, there is some indication as to the general direction in which local government is heading. And though the Puget Sound waterfront of the city is not favored with any terrific natural anchorages in the first place, it doesn’t matter much, because the city allows recreational anchorage in only one location, and that’s on Lake Washington. The red carpet is not exactly out for small-craft here.

Of course, it’s not as if other northwestern cities have not gone through similar growing pains and difficulties with their waterfront communities. Victoria and Vancouver both have gone through spasms dealing with the challenges of offering attractive and accessible space for cruisers alongside sometimes cranky permanent residents and challenging industrial spaces. Nanaimo is going through such difficulties even now.

Vancouver, particularly, had little success revitalizing the downtown waterfront until the international Exposition in 1986 provided motivation and funding to clean up the False Creek waterway, work that was furthered during the Olympics three years ago. Other Vancouver waterways, such as the Fraser River, remain relatively amenable to leisurely, unregulated anchoring, but that situation may not persist, either, as derelicts there prove an increasing threat.

Producing a waterfront that is friendly and amenable to cruisers requires a delicate balance between over-regulating them out of town, and at the same time providing effective tools for managing the inevitable floes of derelicts that may arrive under the same banner. I think Seattle’s fears of an exploding liveaboard population, whether well-grounded ornot, are serving to cripple the wonderful cruising destination it could be for transient boaters.

But as many other cities around the Salish Sea have aptly demonstrated, it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. False Creek is thriving, for all the controversy. Victoria’s harbour, despite being even more tightly regulated, manages to accomodate liveaboards and still provide substantial amounts of safe, affordable transient moorage. And smaller cities, from Poulsbo to Port Townsend to Port Hardy, are all managing to thread the needle between providing facilities for cruisers and turning into floating shanty-towns.

Seattle could do it, too, and we should.

March 1, 2013

Since that day on the beach…

Stepping aboard Lotus is always like stepping back in time. Entering the salon transports most visitors directly into the turn-of-the-century world of Downton Abbey… if the Crawleys had a family yacht, it would be the M/V Lotus. The wicker furniture, the gleaming wood floors, the dark, lustrous mahogany and vintage electric lights in lotus-flower wall sconces all call to mind that earlier era of transitions and compromises, of well-heeled gentility combined with a taste for the novel and intriguing. When she was commissioned, she was the largest private yacht yet built on the West Coast, and she was designed with all the most modern conveniences for carrying her wealthy owners and friends north into the still wild and exotic reaches of the Alaskan Panhandle.

So there is always an Edwardian air of gracious welcome when one steps aboard, a reserved but comfortable vibe that causes a lowering of voices and an increase in formality in conversation. But recent visits have been less reserved for Mandy and me. I found myself standing in the galley one recent evening, glass in hand, enjoying the warmth coming off the stove and listening to the laughter and chatter that brings a boat to life. The white paint seems to glow and light glints from silverware and heavy china plates. Overhead, rows of mugs jostle gently with a passing wake, some tug traveling past late. And I, too, find myself transported back in time… but not quite so far back as most visitors.

The Main Salon of the M/V Lotus — The Main Salon of M/V Lotus

Exactly one year ago last Friday, I am standing in this same spot, wedged between the bulkhead and an awkward handhold where the stove used to be. The compartment is heeled at an insane angle, the floor as nearly a wall as the wall is a floor. The only light is the ghostly glow of powerful worklights obliquely hitting the starboard-side windows, over my head, from the bluff nearby, and the pale, darting beam of the headlamp I am wearing. These dimly illuminate a nightmarish, chaotic jumble of appliances, kitchenware, furniture, and equipment, and a yawning cavity leading down into the engine room, which I suspect is still sloshing with the remnants of the powerful waves that had pounded through the side of the boat earlier in the day.

The winds that drove those waves down out of the north, marching in long, serried ranks, have abated beneath a dark sky from which all clouds have been driven, and a glittering, starry chill has settled over the beach and penetrated the interior of the boat. I can see my breath puffing up raggedly in the beam of the headlamp as I play it about the room.

Someone has pointed me in here to retrieve some tool or piece of equipment deemed useful to the ongoing efforts outside, but I can tell almost immediately it is a hopeless errand. Even if I had been familiar with the interior of the vessel, even if the tool had somehow miraculously managed to keep its place as she went over, and not ended up, like the stove, in the chaotic piles against the port bulkhead, the combination of the darkness and the extreme angle makes all directions meaningless.

M/V Lotus aground and laying down on her port side — Lotus on her side

Generators and pumps rattle and whine in other parts of the hull, and I can hear muffled voices outside yelling back and forth, the slapping of plywood sheets dropping onto the beach, and the careful shuffling sounds overhead as other volunteers attempt to negotiate the canted upper deck, looming at a vertiginous 45 degrees over the tide flats below.

I take one last look around, my breath fogging out into the headlamp beam, wondering if there’s any hope at all that this cabin will ever be put together in one piece again. No one is thinking about it much right now, there is too much to do and only a brief window while the tide is out in which to do it, but it crosses my mind during this brief moment of isolation… just how much is going to have to go right for Lotus to survive. If Lotus doesn’t come off at high tide in six hours or so, there won’t be another chance at floating her for two weeks. More storms are coming in that time… how much more of a bashing could she take? And if she did come off, would we have patched her up enough to stay afloat for the five mile haul to the shipyard? Would she come apart, torn between the strain of the tow-lines and the friction of the beach? And if she made it that far, and was hauled out safely, would there be enough time and volunteers to put her back together again before the money ran out? Would she end up having to be scrapped after all that effort?

I turn and make my way back outside to join the others working to patch the holes on the port side of the house, before the tide returns.

Those questions were all answered, and tonight the galley is aglow, warm with heat from the stove, filled with some of those same folks who worked so hard on the beach that night to save her, and with many others who have labored since to return her to the condition she is in today.

Mandy and I have kept up with Lotus ever since. Some of her got into our blood somehow, as some of our blood got in her wood that night. It’s a strange effect that classic wooden boats have on people, an effect that had always mystified me when I saw others succumb to it… throwing years and dollars into beautiful, but quickly rotting, hulls that seemed more like chains and leg-irons than the passage to freedom that most boats offer their owners. While admiring the gorgeous, warm luster and classic lines and history, I couldn’t imagine what those people were thinking… we were happy enough with our modern, plastic tub.

But whatever it was those folks could never explain to us, we understand better now, even as we, in turn, find it impossible to explain to others.

Lotus at MOHAI — Lotus’ Berth behind MOHAI

Now Lotus is a neighbor once again… not quite right on the doorstep, but a short walk along the bustling shoreline of Lake Union from our marina to her current berth at the pier behind MOHAI, where she will be until May 15th as a part of the Center for Wooden Boats’ Visiting Vessel Program. Open for tours from 11am to 3pm most days, and as a floating lodge with berths starting at $50 per night, she has returned to her old haunts, and occupations, dating back to the early sixties.

As occasionally happens with near-catastrophes, the grounding sparked a renaissance for the Lotus Foundation, which owns and manages the vessel, one borne of necessity. As long as Lotus could sit comfortably, and cheaply, at her mooring off Hadlock, there was little urgency to her situation. The necessary maintenance and upgrades happened as money came available, or when someone was free to do them, and the money came when it came, when someone reached out for an event or made a spur-of-the-moment contribution.

Since that day on the beach, all that has changed. In addition to all the immediate repairs that were needed, the ongoing requirements were elevated. By mutual agreement with the state Department of Natural Resources, the Hadlock anchorage was no longer an option. Anywhere else she might drop anchor would have to be bomb-proof… everyone recognized that it had been a combination of hard work and luck that had saved her the first time and no one wanted to roll the dice again. So she would need moorage, and for moorage she would need insurance, and insurance for a hundred and four year-old wooden boat is not inexpensive. So she would also need fundraising, a role to fill that would generate revenue, and for that she would need an audience, and upgrades, and stewardship.

The Chief Steward and Head Bottle-washer, Christian Gruye, already exhausted from the salvage project and repairs, re-doubled her efforts toward marshaling volunteers and finding a sustainable way for Lotus to begin to pay her own way in the newer, more expensive reality in which she found herself. Lotus made the rounds at various maritime festivals and boat shows throughout Puget Sound during the latter part of the summer, but despite thousands of visitors dropping change in the donations jar, it wasn’t going to be enough to pay all the bills.

What Gruye hit upon was the same role her mother had envisioned for the boat when her parents first bought it as a private vessel in 1959: as a floating lodge. With the ’62 World’s Fair coming up, it had been an inspired choice; Lotus paid for herself in two years. The $5000 sale price had been, interestingly, the exact amount for which she had originally been built by the Sloan Shipyard in 1909 on the shores of Elliot Bay, of old-growth Douglas Fir (at the behest of Maurice McMicken, a prominent Seattle attorney and businessman).

Today’s bills are going to be much larger and take a lot longer than two years to pay off, but the response so far has been gratifying. A summer schedule with plans to hit most of the major Puget Sound waterfront festivals, and potentially a stint in the San Juans, boarding vacationers in those old haunts, should serve to increase her exposure and bring even more folks aboard.

With such renewed activity, there has been new energy among the volunteers that fuel the foundation. Efforts to complete the paperwork for federal non-profit status have been spurred ahead. The corking and painting over the summer has been followed by additional electrical and engine work. “Since that day on the beach…” is a phrase that frequently begins many of Christian’s sentences these days, and the changes are indeed remarkable since that cold, fraught evening. Plans to upgrade systems that have been long overdue for updates are well underway, and obtaining federal non-profit status will open up the availability of new funding sources, as well as providing more incentive for donors and volunteers to contribute time and resources.

Nowhere are those changes more dramatic than in Gruye’s own life. Where Lotus travels around the Sound these days, Christian goes with her; scrubbing, painting, serving guests, updating the website, dealing with masses of paperwork, wrestling with ancient electrical and mechanical systems, separated from home and husband in Port Townsend for weeks at a stretch. Volunteers can only take up so much of the slack, and until the Foundation’s fund-raising efforts hit the point where more full-time help can be acquired, Christian fills the gaps with deep resources of intimate knowledge and filial affection. Having more or less grown up aboard Lotus, the effort she puts into maintaining the yacht rival what most of us would only offer to the closest family. It’s as if Lotus were a sibling with special needs, and Christian seems no more inclined to turn her back on the boat than any of us might on a brother or sister with similar dependencies.

The beach itself shows little sign of what happened there a year ago. For weeks afterward, a long, straight crease could be easily seen in the soft sandstone where her keel had been driven in repeatedly by the heavy surf. Gradually, it has filled in. Now, all that remains there of all the efforts of that evening is significant only in the absence: two large boulders embedded in the sand are suspiciously flat now. Lotus’s stern had lain down right over those rocks when she came ashore. That night, in what at the time I considered an excess of exuberance and energy, a rotating cast of volunteers had crawled beneath the transom and, laying in the cramped space between the sand and the hull, had bashed those boulders dead-flat, so she could clear them again coming off. In the event, it turned out to have been a vital contribution… Lotus barn-doored right across where those rocks had been as they towed her free, and indeed caught her rudder on one of the stubs as she came afloat. Had they been more prominent, considerably more damage would have been done.

Whatever measure of dedication it takes in people that drives them to lay in freezing mud beneath a precarious 102-ton boat, hammering for hours at the bones of the earth, is still present in the volunteers of the M/V Lotus Foundation. Since that day on the beach, they’ve been working hard to make Lotus’ second hundred years as historic as the first.