September / October 2024

Aboard: WESTERN FLYER

An inspiration once again

Paul Molyneaux • Photographs by Peter Lyons

WESTERN FLYER makes a run out of Moss Landing, California, the day after her triumphant return to Monterey. After a nine-year, $7-million restoration, the 77’ former purse seiner that once carried John Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts to the Sea of Cortez will return to research work under the auspices of the WESTERN FLYER Foundation

In 2019, I walked into the Port Townsend (Washington) Shipwrights Co-op to interview co-owner Tim Lee. I found myself standing next to the bow of a large wooden fishing vessel, and glancing at her, I turned and noticed a length of white tape on the weathered stem, with the words “WESTERN FLYER” hand-written on it.

“Is this...?”

“That’s it,” Tim said. She was the very boat that the author John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts chartered for their legendary voyage to the Sea of Cortez in 1940.

I touched the plumb stem that had cut through the long Pacific swells and probed the harbors and estuaries of the sea between Baja California and the mainland of Mexico. In the waters that the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau later called “the aquarium of the world,” Steinbeck and Ricketts studied the rich biology and documented their findings in a book published in 1941, republished as The Log from the Sea of Cortez in 1951. But the scientific voyage was a mere six-week interlude in WESTERN FLYER’s life of commercial fishing. She had had hundreds of crew members who were unknown, unremarked upon, mostly forgotten.

Built in 1937 by Western Boat Building Company in Tacoma, Washington, WESTERN FLYER was a relatively new sardine seiner working out of Monterey, California, when Steinbeck chartered her. She and her captain returned to fishing after the research voyage.

Sold and resold, and renamed GEMINI in 1970, she was used as far north as Alaska in a variety of fisheries. She hit a reef and sank off Ketchikan in 1971 but was raised and repaired. By the early 2000s, most wooden-hulled fish boats were long gone, including her sister ships, and the aging WESTERN FLYER appeared ready to follow. After sinking (twice) in Swinomish Channel near Anacortes, Washington, she was raised in January 2013 after six months on the bottom and taken to Port Townsend (see Currents, WB No. 243). It was there that John Gregg, who had been inspired early in life by the Steinbeck and Ricketts adventure, stepped in and bought the hulk for restoration as a full-time research and education vessel, based in Monterey, that would trade on her earlier fame.

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