August, 2021
The small town of Chimacum, where I was camped, is just a very few miles south of Port Townsend. Port Townsend is known among probably all wood boat owners in Washington State (USA) and British Columbia (Canada) as one of the premier locations to have your boat taken out of the water and have excellent work done on it (by you or by the excellent mechanics and shipwrights here). There are many separate businesses in this huge shipyard that do all manner of work on every system in all types of boats and all ages of boats, although the emphasis is on wood-hulled boats.
As a former wood boat owner, what could I do but take an afternoon and drive up to the shipyards at Port Townsend and wander about. I found a number of boats I was familiar with, whose owners had been or still are friends of mine. And I found lots of other interesting things too. I’ll share just a few photos here to give you an idea of what sorts of things go on here.
Built in Seattle in 1947, the 60-foot tugboat Susan H towed logs out of Ketchikan, Alaska, and continued to be a working tug in Puget Sound, Washington, until very recently when her new owners decided to make her shipshape again and use her for personal cruising.
The Hawaiian Chieftain was built in 1988 in Lahaina, on the island of Maui, Hawaii. She has the rig of a 19th century sailing vessel, but she has a very modern triple keel which keeps her steady without needing a deep keel. Her draft is only 5.5 feet and so she’s highly maneuverable in shallow water. She’s 65 feet long on deck, and 103 feet long including the bow sprit.
Pooka is a gorgeously maintained boat originally built by the Matthews Company in Port Clinton, Ohio. I can’t find it online, but if memory serves it’s about 38 feet long and was built somewhere around 1947 or so. Friends tell me that “pooka” or “puka” in Hawaiian, when used as a boat name, means “a hole in the water”. In Irish folklore it’s a magical, mythical creature that lives in the bog waters of Ireland.
Above, Savona was designed by Ed Monk, Sr., and built in Seattle in 1942. She’s 39 feet long and is currently home-ported in Bremerton, Washington.
Wow, look at this sailboat below. I walked around the corner and practically fell over backwards looking up at her!
I couldn’t find a name or a registration number, or any other information about her. I bet she’s a world cruiser and possibly a racing sailboat. Given the size of the red SUV vehicle in the photo below, I’d guess this sailboat might be about 90 feet long.
Besides work done by several companies on all types of boats in this yard, the Port Townsend yard hauls really heavy boats out of the water. My 40-foot Matthews boat, Pied Piper, weighed about 12 ton.
Another old thing on the property was this great old truck/van below. I’d guess it’s from 1950 or so. It still runs. My big white truck is a Dodge too, albeit a RAM but still a Dodge. 🙂
The fellow in the photo below was filling the space/seams between wood planks on the hull of this wood trawler fishing boat. Because wood planks are curved (horizontally and vertically) and the space changes in size too from the front to the back of the boat, this work must be done by hand … every inch of it, every seam, by hand.
Jollydogs, a 2008 38-foot catamaran sailing vessel, collided with an unidentified floating object in the Pacific Ocean on its way from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest (and Puget Sound). Thank heaven there was a collision bulkhead just a foot back that stopped water ingress. The owners reinforced that inner collision bulkhead, then fashioned a crude bow structure to cover the hole as best they could, and also filled the cavity with everything they could spare that had flotation stuff in it. Remember, they were out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just the two of them, and of course one of them had to be in the water to do much of the work. Obviously, they arrived safely at Port Townsend where the boat was hauled and repaired.
I’ve been on the vessel below. It was owned by an acquaintance/friend of mine. It’s absolutely gorgeous inside. The 70-foot Hecate Ranger was built in 1962 as a Forest Ranger Vessel for the British Columbia Forest Service in Canada. She was eventually sold to private owners and came down to Puget Sound in Washington for private cruising. New owners in 2021 (when I was here at Port Townsend and took these photos) hauled the boat and had loads of work done on the hull and other systems. After the work was done, the new owners moved her to her new home, back up in British Columbia, Canada.
The silver-colored metal squares on the keel of the boat (photo below) are sacrificial anodes designed to deteriorate more quickly than any other metal on the hull of the boat any time there is even the smallest electrical current in the water.
The green stripe in the photo below, is not the top of the hull, it’s just the water line. The draft of this boat is probably about 10 feet (when the boat sits in the water, the bottom of the keel is about 10 feet below the top of the water). This is one heavily-built, sturdy boat!
A fire axe (you can see it in the photo above, and there’s a closeup below) is common equipment on these old wood boats. In case of fire, you can use an axe to free up a stuck door on the boat. It can also be used to open up layers of the hull so you can put out a fire between the layers of the hull (parts of my “small” 40-foot boat had dual layers of hull), or to cut a mooring or towing cable during an emergency. Any type of axe is acceptable (including a small axe), but it best be extraordinarily sharp.
Besides old boats, this shipyard works on cool new stuff like the boat below … an inflatable boat with an aluminum hull. I’d bet this private fishing boat is fast!
No information was available about the boat below. I’d guess it was about 26 feet long, and I’d bet there isn’t much headroom inside. Looked like a very sweet little boat.
The vessel below had just been put in the water as I walked past. It was brand new, had a plywood hull, and was about 30 feet long. The black bags are filled with air and are temporarily tied on to make sure the boat floats while the wood planking swells and the boat becomes water-tight. Notice the water being pumped out of the boat in between the two black bags. Bilge pumps inside the boat pump out any water that does enter the boat. Since only two of the three pumps are pumping, that means the level of water inside the boat is dropping. Not long now and they’ll start the engine and get ready to move the boat to a temporary mooring spot on the dock in order to finish the work.
The boat below, Water Mark, was unknown to me until I spotted her in the shipyard today. As many years as I was involved in the classic wood boat club that I was in, you might think I’d know every wood boat around Puget Sound. But there are hundreds and hundreds of them here … the weather here is perfect for wood boats … and salt water is much kinder on wood than fresh water is. So I suspect only a small fraction of the wood boats around Puget Sound are in that old wood boat club. Mostly, I loved the name of this boat, and the way the name was displayed on the transom.
Of course, I chatted with a number of folks here in the shipyard … owners and workers. And I reveled in the smell of wood … newly sawn oak and mahogany and pine … and I especially loved the smell of old wood, solid old dense grain wood, with maybe a touch of the smell of dry rot but with years of solid service still in the wood. My attitude about my old wood boat was that, if I took care of her, she would take care of me. And she did, we always found our way to safe harbor at the end of every day. May it be so for every wood boat here today in Port Townsend.