The inside passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is a winding, turbulent, and deep –an ancient , thousand mile long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races. Here flourished the canoe culture of the Northwest Indians, with their fantastic painted masks and complex iconography and their stories of malign submarine gods and monsters. Here came the expeditions of explorers like Sir Francis Drake, Captain James Cook, Captain George Vancouver and they were followed by fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, miners, fishermen, tourists and now the Tugboat Alaska Pirates Pride. Each of us with our own designs on this intricate and haunted sea.
When I first set out in my own 88ft Tugboat to sail the Inside Passage from Olympia, Wa. deep into the Alaskan Panhandle I wanted to decode the many riddles of and meanings of the sea: in Indian art, poetry, paintings and mythology, in the journals of Vancouver and his officers, in journeys prior and in books such as, Voyages in the years 1788-1789, China to the American Coast, Voyage around the World, The Northwest Coast, Three years residence in Washington Territory 1858, The Indians of Cape Flattery, The Enormous Crocodile, Sleepy Bear, Gunkholing in the Gulf Islands and so many more. I wanted to decode the physics of the waves and turbulence in the sea, to understand their meanings as did the sea voyagers that travelled the seas prior to the compass and modern technologies. My voyage began as an intellectual adventure, a business in the making but I soon found myself in deeper more ominous personal waters then I could have ever imagined!
The Last Frontier
The slogan ‘’The Last Frontier’’ tinged with self cancelling whimsy and the contrast in terms appears on vehicle license plates, courtesy of the state licensing department. The now rebounding and once great fishery bonanza days had been exploited to exhaustion and in some areas the Chinook Salmon which used to pack the rivers and inlets so densely they swam back to back deep across the waters, had been nominated as an endangered species. Huge historic canneries lie dormant and falling into the sea. The once mighty timber industries had been regulated nearly out of existence. The once profitable fishing and timber industry““““ies demise caused great poverty in all cultures of the NW Archipelagos. Multiple mighty Glaciers retreat as mankind encroaches upon its territory. Further contrasted with governmental acquisitions of large blocks of wilderness set aside as National monuments, National Forest and Parks off limits without permits to all citizens less you are on or associated with the cruise line industry, Coastal Indians that had spoke most directly through the paint brush and the chisel had been influenced by their foreign invaders. Their stories nearly all transcribed much later and near the end of the 19th century and after they were well colonised with Christianity and tourism. – A major influence on native art. Little more than rags and tags were left of the aboriginal culture. The translations of local languages into German and English were crude : the eager to please Indian tellers were already familiar with imported Bible Stories and European folktales : and when the collectors were faced with strange disjunctions, they provided transitions and linkages that gave these narratives the smooth shape of something by Aseop or the Brothers Grimm. Somehow a ‘’The Tamed/Submissive Frontier’’ seemed justified and just as realistic to imagine. Still, the unconquerable sea of the Inside Passage and Archipelago’s of Alaska were and still are real wilderness, as wild and lonely as any territory in the American past. Once your gaze turns to the sea it becomes a place of Expectation and Freedom!
The Gulf of Alaska is a weather –kitchen. Pacific depressions, drifting over the ocean from the far southwest, hit the gulf, stall there, and then intensify. As the atmospheric pressure at the center of the system sinks, the winds spinning around the hub speed up, to forty, fifty, sixty, eighty knots. The waves build into untidy heaps: the sea goes streaky white. Made steeper and impeded by the powerful tidal currents that pour out of the narrow passages between islands, the wave trains turn near the coasts into a short, precipitous, hollow sea of rearing fifty foot crests and ship swallowing holes in the water. These storms were a regular assignment for the early explorers and later the fur traders and fishermen: But for a greenie and as I found out they offered a crash course in retching misery and terror, keenly sharpened by the knowledge that every year boats go down in seas like this, all hands lost, due, in the standard phrase ‘’to stress of weather’’.
San Juan to Olympia
After months of reconditioning the Alaska Pirates Pride it was time to journey from Orcas Island in the San Juan’s to Olympia, Washington for the semi-final preparations before beginning the expedition into the wild heart of North America. The Old Tug still needed work on the spronson guards; complete mechanic systems servicing; electrical reconditioning and the addition of the early days Tugboat designs.
Lifelong friends began arriving from the mainland on the day before the scheduled departure. We had a two day weather winter and the Pirate was to cross the Straits of Juan De Fuca and into Admiralty Inlet a place noted by Captain Cook and years later by Captain Vancouver. Weather predictions from NOAA weather stated the seas would be 1ft or less and winds less than 10 knots. This was the weather conditions the Pirate had been waiting for and the crew was excited to begin this journey. It was going to give us the opportunity to test the systems of the Pirate while it was under power.
The Pirate had lived many lives in the past. It was built in 1927 by the Stone Boat Works in San Francisco. It worked in the SF harbour for years until it was requisitioned by the military and deployed to the Aleutian Islands to support WWII. The Pirate moved and pulled barges, navy vessels, and provided food, supplies and water to the troops building Air Bases on Adak and other Islands. The Pirate would backup under waterfalls filling its 30,000 gallon water tanks and take it to the troops as they had no other source of water. Years later the Pirate would be acquired by Campbell Towing Co. in Wrangell, AK where for years it logged, pushed and pulled an emerging statewide expansion of the Alaskan coast. The Tug had been renamed Tyee, Roberts several different time over its lifespan and settled in Lake Union, Wa where the tug was sold at auction for $500. Slowly over a twenty year period of restoration the Tug began to regain its proud stature in the water. The Pirate is 88ft long with a beam of 22.5 ft, draft of 13.5 ft and even without its old 28 ton union engine it still weighs 200 tons. It has a 353 diesel cat that is turbo charged with a 4/1 ratio Capitol gear transmission. The Pirate carries 2500 gallons of fuel, 1200 gal of water, 80 gallons of black water, has 5 staterooms and three bathrooms. There are few land based homes that equal the wood workmanship that are throughout the boat. I think the Pirate may be restricted only by the novice abilities of its one in the same owner/skipper/Captain.