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.
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.
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.
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.