This story was originally published on LincolnChronicle.org and is used with permission.
“It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then to the tide pool again.” – John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
John Gregg, then a 10-year-old kid growing up in rural Georgia, couldn’t wait for the bookmobile to trundle through town every other week. The books he’d grab stoked his love of adventure, science and a world very far from his own.
Then, one day in 1969, intrigued by the cover of one book, he went home with a copy of Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. It recounted the 1940 sailing saga Steinbeck and his friend, marine biologist Edward “Doc” Ricketts, undertook on a sardine boat to collect invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California.
It changed his life forever.
I realized then that a person could, with their friends, go to a remote place, and do real science while having a breathless adventure,” Gregg later wrote, adding, “The boat and its history mean more to me every day.”
Coastal residents will soon get a chance to experience firsthand some of that history and intrigue when the 77-foot-long boat, built in Tacoma in 1937 and christened the Western Flyer, visits several Oregon ports on a northward swing to Port Townsend, Wash.
Stops are planned for Charleston and Coos Bay from through Wednesday, May 13, and in Newport from May 15-22, with free tours, student field trips and educational presentations. And the public will get a close-up view of a craft that author and marine scientist Kevin Bailey calls “the most famous fishing vessel ever to have sailed.”
In Newport, events include a Sunday, May 17 gathering at the Hatfield Marine Science Center titled “Celebrating the Return of the Western Flyer.” It will include free tours and a ticketed screening of a documentary about the vessel We simply Liked It, filmed during the boat’s 2025 return to the Gulf of California. A panel of fisheries experts and researchers will gather Wednesday evening, May 20, at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center. The gathering is also ticketed event.
Not quite unsinkable
For the longest time, it appeared that the Western Flyer, despite its starring role in Steinbeck’s 1951 book, might be lost to history.
After its 4,000-mile journey ended in San Diego, it rejoined the Monterey sardine fleet for which it was initially constructed. In subsequent years, traveling as far north as Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, it also harvested salmon, crab and perch.
A series of misadventures followed, most notably when attempts were made to convert the boat, by now renamed Gemini, to decorate a floating restaurant in Salinas. The craft, which both Steinbeck and Ricketts swore had a personality all of its own, showed a stubborn side by springing leaks and sinking twice in 2012 and 2013. Despite efforts to refloat it, the vessel remained underwater for six months at one point.
By the time it came back up for air, the Gemini’s once-fine planking was covered in seaweed and full of rot. Chances of it ever cresting another wave seemed remote.
It was at this point in 2015 that Gregg, now a 55-year-old marine geologist, heard that the vessel that filled so much of his boyhood with inspiration might be for sale. He shelled out a reported $1 million and immediately entrusted care of the Western Flyer to the Port Townsend Shipwrights Coop, where experts spent nine years carefully restoring and modernizing the boat and in 2024 returned it to Monterey Bay.
Its new mission, under the auspices of the Western Flyer Foundation, aims to place the vessel, fittingly, at the very intersection of science and literature.
Gregg said as much, writing, “The relationship of the artist Steinbeck and the scientist Ricketts aboard the Western Flyer is a perfect metaphor of our larger goal.”
Science then
Jack Barth is a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University and a member of the foundation’s board. He remains amazed at the breadth of the scientific collections that Ricketts, with Steinbeck in tow, were able to amass during their Gulf of California sojourn.
In the course of their explorations of the intertidal areas of the gulf – the area roughly between high-tide and low-tide marks – they catalogued more than 500 species, discovered 50 new ones and recorded a brittle star that had not been seen for a century.
For Ricketts, in particular, this work was anything but new, Barth said. He noted that in 1939, the year before the gulf voyage, Ricketts had co-written Between Pacific Tides, a groundbreaking work documenting hundreds of invertebrates found in tide pools and along beaches from Mexico to Canada.
“In many respects that book remains,” Barth said, “the textbook for West Coast intertidal ecology.”
The same year Ricketts published his book, Steinbeck had come out with his own seminal work, The Grapes of Wrath.
Together, Barth said, the storyteller and the scientist shared deep loves of philosophy, music, science and literature. What better way to continue that discussion than to charter a boat and embark on an amazing adventure?
Throughout their trip, Steinbeck and Ricketts kept their focus not on individual organisms – the way so much field research had been conducted up to that time – but on a far more holistic approach.
“This all really predated things like the ecological monitoring and ecological restoration efforts that are commonplace today,” Barth said. “Theirs was really the very beginning of the field of ecology.”
While Steinbeck remains by far the better known of the two, Ricketts still has admirers – they call themselves “Ed Heads” — for his groundbreaking research, his expansive thinking and writing on myriad topics and his rugged good looks.
Ricketts died in 1948, three days after his car collided with a train near Cannery Row in Salinas. Steinbeck, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1962, died in 1968.
Science now
While the Western Flyer looks today very much as it did the first day it set sail, its restoration included modern scientific and engine-room modifications rendering it into something else completely.
The original 165-horsepower engine, for instance, has been replaced by a hybrid diesel electric engine capable of generating great power with far less effort. And where a large fish hold once cradled millions of Monterey Bay sardines, a modern laboratory now sits.
The vessel also has two primary scientific research systems that are advanced enough that marine scientists can and do lease it for private endeavors.
The first of those systems pumps water continuously in through the hull, where it is measured for temperature, salinity, turbidity and fluorescence. The second is employed by stopping the boat and lowering “vertical profiler” instruments into the water. It includes sensors for salinity, temperature, pressure, oxygen, pH and fluorescence.
Handy as these may be for researchers, some of the real magic happens with students come aboard to personally engage in the type of experiments that can only be done on a boat, Barth said.
“And it’s back to the confluence of education and research that we are really interested in,” he said. “It’s that chance to look under the waves that really lights up their imaginations.”
Back to the Gulf
Sherry Flumerfelt, the Western Flyer Foundation’s executive director, was on board the Western Flyer last year as it visited the Gulf of California for the first time since Steinbeck and Ricketts sailed its waters 85 years ago.
The boat stopped in several of the same small rural ports it did the first time around and even drew out the adult children of one of the guides who took Steinbeck and Ricketts hunting for big horn sheep.
A return trip is already scheduled for next year, and since the Western Flyer is too small to accommodate overnight guests, a companion cruise vessel, operated by Seattle-based UnCruise Adventures and offering 30 cabins, will tag along.
“What we’re really focusing on now is making our educational presentations as interesting as possible and helping students and others appreciate not only scientific research, but what Steinbeck and Ricketts did to promote that,” Flumerfelt said. “And so far, we’ve had a lot of interest and support.”
The boat itself, as impressive as it is, is also something of a relic, possibly one of the very last of the great Monterey sardine fleet. The fact that billions of sardines were fished from those waters even before Ricketts’ death all but guaranteed the end of a once-abundant resource.
Ricketts, always the realist, was once asked where all those sardines had gone.
A quick wit to the end, he replied, “They’re in cans.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com