On the afternoon of March 11, 1940, the 77-foot purse seiner Western Flyer nosed out of Monterey and turned south.
“(A)s the breakwater was cleared and the wind struck us, we seemed, to ourselves at least, a very brave and beautiful sight,” wrote John Steinbeck at the start of a five-week, 4,000-mile expedition down to Baja California in “Sea of Cortez,” written with his friend Ed Ricketts in 1941.
The Flyer was built by the Western Boat Building Company in Tacoma in 1937 for the Monterey sardine fishery. The owner, Antone Berry, was the only one out of 100 skippers who agreed to carry Steinbeck and Ricketts.
The marine biologist, philosopher and pioneer ecologist Ricketts is well-known to Steinbeck fans as the model for “Doc” in the novels “Cannery Row” and “Sweet Thursday.” Ricketts published his seminal research work “Between Pacific Tides” the same year Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939). After Ricketts was killed by a train near his home, Steinbeck reissued their book as “The Log from the ‘Sea of Cortez’ ” in 1951, including a 50-page eulogy for his friend but without the catalog of specimens they collected.
Sales eclipsed the first effort and elevated their voyage, and the Western Flyer, to the literary heavens of sacred memory.
Historian Michael Kenneth Hemp, 82, moved to Wauna from Monterey in 2017 to follow the trail of Ed Ricketts. He had already written a definitive history of Cannery Row but stumbled on a clue that took the story north to the shores of the Pacific Northwest and Gig Harbor, and even Vaughn Bay.
“The stage I’m entering now is examining road maps for this area from 1930 to 1945 because he was up here in the ’30s for sure and I have it on hearsay that he was at Vaughn,” Hemp said. “I’d love to deputize the citizens of Key Pen to look back into grandpa and grandma’s scrapbooks and see if they can find (Ricketts’s) big black Packard in the background somewhere in any of the family photos.”
Hemp is preparing a sixth edition of his book (“Cannery Row: A History of Ocean Avenue”) to include what he learned about Ricketts and his work in the Pacific Northwest, his plans with Steinbeck for a book about a trip to Alaska recreating their Sea of Cortez cruise, and about the fate of the vessel that carried them there.
“I started my association with the Western Flyer in 1983,” Hemp said.
That was the year he teamed up with Bob Enea, a descendant of one of the Cortez crewmen and nephew of the captain, Tony Berry. He found a badly aging Western Flyer, renamed Gemini, still in service in Anacortes. He and Hemp tried to form a nonprofit to raise $100,000 to purchase the vessel and rehabilitate her into a floating learning center.
A California developer named Gerry Kehoe heard about the project and bought the boat out from under them to use as part of a restaurant in Salinas.
Instead, the Western Flyer languished in the Swinomish Channel, where she sank twice. When the Coast Guard ordered her removal in 2013, she was towed to Port Townsend and sat in a boatyard until 2015 when marine engineer and inventor John Gregg bought her from Kehoe for $1 million.
“John became interested in the marine sciences at about age 10 due to ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’ and ‘Between Pacific Tides,’ ” Hemp said. “He didn’t know he was going to pay a million bucks for it — a boat that wouldn’t float — but John said at the time, ‘It was worthless, but it was priceless.’ ”
The Western Flyer was restored in Port Townsend and refloated June 26, 2022.
“He had a good idea what he was getting into, wonderful guy, but they thought three years and it turned into seven, and cost $7 million,” Hemp said.
Western Flyer is now a research vessel homeported in Moss Landing, near Monterey, and hosts educational programs developed by the Western Flyer Foundation, Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University and the Naval Postgraduate School.
“They’re running a great program, it’s everything they ever said it was going to be,” Hemp said. “The boat is gorgeous, it’s a museum piece.”
During his research, Hemp traced Western Flyer’s career after Monterey fishing offshore for perch and cod, up to Alaska for halibut and crab, and then to Washington.
“(She was) one of the best fishing machines ever developed and helped nearly or virtually to make extinct five major fisheries during her career,” Hemp said. “Now she goes on to become the icon of preservation with her restoration.”
A fisherman named Clarence Fry bought Western Flyer, then called Gemini, in 1976. He and his son Dennis used it for crabbing in Alaska and replaced aging parts with an updated mechanical system.
Hemp found Dennis in Anderson, California, and learned he had kept the deckhouse compass, the flying bridge box compass, a brass articulated shifter and the three-part helm stand and brass wheel from the flying bridge.
“Honestly, I don’t know why,” Dennis told Hemp. “Something made me want to keep it. I had a skiff out in front of the house, full of flowers. Maybe I’d just put some of this stuff around as lawn ornaments.”
“That ‘stuff’ all came off the Gemini and it’s all original from the Western Flyer. The provenance is ironclad,” Hemp said.
It’s also worth about $75,000, according to the appraiser Roger Ottenbach of Cutty Sark Nautical Antiques of Seattle, a long-time maritime auctioneer.
Hemp and Fry offered the artifacts to Gregg for the restored boat but couldn’t agree on a price. After failing to find an interested museum or foundation, the lot is to be sold by PBA Auctioneers of Berkeley, California, Feb. 13.
“What would be ideal is if someone buys it all to donate to a museum for a tax deduction, so the public can still have access and maybe get to turn the wheel once in a while,” Hemp said.
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