Humans are a weird bunch. After a lengthy stay on this planet and having hung out with a few thousand of them, I have come to that rather solid fact. In the city if you get five or ten of them together and start up a conversation there will inevitably be someone who has some issue with something. They have opinions and attitudes and getting them to agree on anything is always an adventure. They are not like, say, whales or caribou, though there might be a comparison there somewhere. They can be very flexible on that emotional scale, shall we say.
I live in the country and the nearest human, not counting my wife, is at least a half a mile away and he is sort of a hermit. Another oddity. Are there any hermit caribou? I don’t think so. So, when I make an extended foray into a large human population, I am always very interested to see what varieties of cohabitation I will witness. (Please bear with me, I am going to eventually make a point here.) As I said, in my stay here on this planet, I have made quite an extensive study. So, in the first week of this month I shoved off, notebook and camera in hand, with my best fishing buddy, Chris, and we drove 900 miles north to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. My goal was to photograph as many boats and boat parts as possible in three days and of course, immerse myself in this very unique collection of humans and talk to as many of them as I could. I have been to Port Townsend many times before and have always noticed the same refreshing lack of weirdness. This is a happy, focused town. To those who don’t know, Port Townsend is the West Coast mecca for wooden boats and the festival held there in September is the largest wooden boat festival in North America. The town is focused on one thing, wooden boats. There were over 300 of them in every form of glamour and gleam. We sailed on a 100’ schooner, putted around the harbor in a ridiculous little steam launch and sailed a whaleboat around a crowded anchorage and missed every boat there.
The second part of our trip was, of course, fishing but that saga will have to wait.
The schooner Adventuress: 113’ in Length. 1913. She is one of two surviving San Francisco bar pilot schooners.
It was a bit foggy the first day but cleared by noon. Just in time for our sail.
Bronze hardware gets me every time.
Schooner Martha readying for the schooner race.
“Ziska” 1903 The oldest boat in the festival. A 54’ cutter. And possibly the finest boat there. Ziska broke a mooring line in a storm in 1974 and was all but wrecked on the rocks. She was heavily restored in 1998 by an 18-year-old sailor, shipwright, and Englishman, Ashley Butler, with no money. He reframed, replanked, redecked and rerigged her and then soloed her across the Atlantic.
Check out the splined joint in the cockpit coaming on this gem.
The highlight of the trip was seeing Leo Golden, of YouTube fame, meeting his crew and then the tour of Tally Ho. (On YouTube at Visiting Tally Ho – Rebuilding Tally Ho EP1.) We arrived at Tally Ho’s location 15 minutes early, for the tour, but there were about 500 people ahead of us. By the time the tour started there were about 2000. I somehow thought we would be able to go down below, but of course that would have been a huge bottleneck. So, in order to see what we could we were left with peering down the skylight. Perhaps if Leo had installed the front door in the hull (episode 150) it would have improved the flow of people through the inside. Much more efficient for the tour. I’ll just leave that kind suggestion for next year. Though I didn’t get much time with Leo due to overwhelming numbers, I did have quite an extensive interview with Pancho. I asked him if he was the brains of the operation and he informed me that, “No, but as chief building inspector he had crawled over, tasted and inspected every piece of wood and could verify that Tally Ho was indeed going to be seaworthy. His unique inspection methods can be seen in many of the early videos of Tally Ho.
Pancho, stalwart of perfection.
What a great crew.
Old hatch – New hatch. A significant improvement.
Check out the mainsheet horse in the fifth photo. It looks like wrought iron but I suspect bronze. I could get no closer.
Thank you crew, Tally Ho., You worked very hard to get her ready for this much foot trafic. More than most boats see in a lifetime.
And this is why we do what we do. I’d say these kids are focused.
Until next time:
Dave Ahrens
PS: I am chugging on with Theresa II. Fishing season is almost over. It’s time to quit lallygagging around and get back to work.
