Not many fishing boats are immortalized in literature by Nobel-Prize-winning authors. But not all boats are the Western Flyer.
Eighty years ago, John Steinbeck described the elegant, wooden fishing vessel.
“She was seventy-six feet long with a twenty-five-foot beam; her engine, a hundred and sixty-five horsepower direct reversible Diesel, drove her at ten knots.”
He and marine ecologist Ed Ricketts chartered the Flyer for an adventurous research expedition to the Sea of Cortez — also known as the Gulf of California — in March of 1940.
“Her deckhouse had a wheel forward, then combination master's room and radio room, then bunk room, very comfortable, and behind that the galley. After the galley, a large hatch gave into the fish-hold, and after the hatch were the big turn-table and roller of the purse-seiner. She carried a twenty-foot skiff and a ten-foot skiff.”
Steinbeck noted details important to other seafarers.
“Her engine was a thing of joy, spotlessly clean, the moving surfaces shining and damp with oil and the green paint fresh and new on the housing. The engine-room floor was clean and all the tools polished and hung in their places. One look into the engine-room inspired confidence in the master.”
He expressed a fascination with the boat’s graceful design.
“We had seen other engines in the fishing fleet and this perfection on the Western Flyer was by no means a general thing.”
This very boat, the Western Flyer, is revered today for its history of blending fishing, art and science.
Fast forward to this May: the Flyer made a northward journey from its home in Monterey, Calif., stopping along the Oregon coast, including Charleston, Coos Bay and Newport, before continuing on to Washington.
Keeping history afloat
The Flyer was part of the Monterey sardine fishery in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the heyday of an industry also captured by Steinbeck in another one of his novels, “Cannery Row.” Ricketts, Steinbeck and their crew eventually used the vessel in the spring of 1940 to collect and preserve marine invertebrate specimens and record oceanographic observations before returning home.
“They collected 500 species and discovered about 50 new ones,” explained Sherry Flumerfelt, the executive director of the Western Flyer Foundation. “But what made it really unique is that you had this storyteller on board, John Steinbeck. He was able to capture the trip and the experience.”
The “Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research” was released in 1941. It included scientific logs as well as a narrative of the expedition, co-written by Ricketts and Steinbeck.
However, two days after the book was released, the bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor.
“So, it soon went out of print,” Flumerfelt said.
Ten years later, not long after Ricketts’s unexpected death, Steinbeck published “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” the narrative storytelling part of the original book, along with a section titled “About Ed Ricketts.”
Flumerfelt said, “That's the book that most people know about and have read.”
The Western Flyer, resurrected
After the adventure in the Sea of Cortez, the boat continued fishing off the West Coast, including along the coasts of Oregon and Washington. It even had stints as a Bering Sea crabber and a research vessel off the coast of Alaska and British Columbia for the International Pacific Halibut Commission in the ‘60s.
The boat then faded into obscurity, passing through several owners and changing names. Seafarers may note that changing a vessel’s name is often regarded as bad luck — perhaps with good reason, because in the early 2010s, the Western Flyer, then called the Gemini, sank twice while moored in Anacortes, Wash. It first went down in 2012, when it spent two weeks underwater, and again in 2013, when it remained submerged for six months.
A man named John Gregg, who read and was captivated by Steinbeck’s novel as a young boy, recognized the boat and paid $1 million for the Flyer, a price he said was motivated by sentimentality more than any inherent worth to a barnacle-encrusted vessel. Gregg established the Western Flyer Foundation and, with the aid of skilled wooden boat builders from the Port Townsend Shipwrights Coop, restored the Flyer to its former elegance. The boat was rechristened the Western Flyer in June 2022.
Now, the Western Flyer lives out this chapter of its storied life as a marine research, education and outreach vessel. In 2024, the Flyer made its first modern expedition south to the Gulf of California to follow in the footsteps — or, more appropriately, the wake — of the trip taken by Steinbeck and Ricketts’s crew.
This year, the Western Flyer made its way north to the Pacific Northwest.
A stop in Newport
Newport resident Paul Tate’s maritime career has spanned the Coast Guard, fisheries science, commercial fishing, private yachts and research vessels. He’s known about the Western Flyer for decades.
He said he pinches himself now that, since 2023, he’s the captain of the famous vessel.
“She's a perfect boat,” Tate said, “doing what she was meant to be all those years, and that never would have happened without everybody contributing so much.”
Tate said he sees the boat’s current success “as a completion of everybody's dreams.”
While the Flyer was in Newport this spring, a group of local Western Flyer enthusiasts, fishermen and scientists participated in a panel discussion at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Museum.
Panelists discussed the current state of West Coast commercial fisheries, ongoing research efforts and the Western Flyer’s legacy. The conversation took place in the museum’s Doefler Family Theater, with the ship visible through the windows in the harbor just beyond. The evening also included a documentary, narrated by known woodworking enthusiast Nick Offerman of “Parks and Recreation” fame.
Jack Barth, professor of oceanography at Oregon State University and board member of the Western Flyer Foundation, was the panel’s moderator. He’s used the Flyer for some of his work as an oceanographer and has sailed aboard for several research trips.
Barth said they’ve taken out OSU students — a Steinbeck-Ricketts mix of young people with scientists, engineers, historians, writers and environmental scientists.
“And they got to work with each other,” he said. “The historian was working alongside the marine biologist. So, in a sense, we tried to recreate that partnership between a natural scientist and someone from the arts and humanities.”
Though the Western Flyer’s home base is in Monterey, the foundation has pledged to bring the boat to the Pacific Northwest every other year, alternating with expeditions to the Gulf of California. Most days the vessel is in port, there are students, ranging from elementary school to college age, on board.
The boat is now making its way south from Puget Sound and heading home to Moss Landing. Its position can be tracked in real time at the Western Flyer Foundation website as the crew makes its way back to the central coast of California. Next year, the Flyer is scheduled to make another trip to the Gulf of California in honor of Steinbeck and Ricketts’s landmark adventure.
