OF SARDINES & STEINBECK
THE WESTERN FLYER LAUNCHED IN JULY 1937 AS A COMMERCIAL PURSE SEINER, BOUND FOR THE BOOMING SARDINE FISHERY OUT OF MONTEREY, CALIF. THE BOAT HAD A FIR KEEL WITH WHITE OAK RIBS.
Skipper Tony Berry ran the boat until the fishery’s collapse just after World War II. The Western Flyer was then sold to Armstrong Fisheries in Ketchikan, Alaska, from 1951 to 1952.
John Steinbeck chartered her during the sardine offseason, for six weeks in March and April 1940, round-trip from California to Mexico. On paper, the purpose of the charter was to “collect marine animals in a remote place on certain days and at certain hours indicated on the tide charts.”
When reading for the first time, one quickly realizes that this is no simple adventure story. It is an ambitious work that swings for the answers to life’s big questions on every page. Between the relentless focus on the connection of all things, lamentations of observed overfishing and passion for life forms big and small, the book that resulted from that journey was an early champion of the field of ecology decades before environmentalism became American mainstream.
One good thing about all the years spent on the restoration is that battery technology and a ordability has improved. The project’s original battery budget was around $1 million. It’s now $100,000. “We’ll have enough to run four, ve or six hours without turning the engine on, which is enough to do what we’re trying to do: get it to kelp paddies and other places where we want to be quiet in the water and not disturb anything we’re looking at,” Gregg says.
NEW LIFE
The Western Flyer Foundation’s stated mission is to inspire deeper appreciation of marine environments, see the world through the lenses of science and art, and understand the place of communities in a larger world.
“All along, the goal wasn’t to create a museum piece,” Gregg says. “Ricketts and Steinbeck were always forward-thinking guys. They didn’t like dusty old remembrances. They liked things that were looking forward. They wouldn’t have liked a boat that couldn’t earn its keep.”
The plan is to do research with the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the next decade or two, the boat is expected to take readings along the Paci c Coast that haven’t really been done in the past.
“It’s about that spirit of Ricketts and Steinbeck, and working on getting real research done,” says Sherry Flumerfelt, executive director of the Western Flyer Foundation, who previously was with the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. “We will work with kids and people who might not normally get access to these kinds of things.
Snow agrees. “Would I love it if a bunch of kids came through the shop and became boatbuilders? Absolutely. But what would be more important to me is if a bunch of kids came to the shop and decided that they could do anything, and went after it with a passion.”
It’s still uncertain when that programming will begin, but Gregg is pondering a nature-inspired timeframe: “We’re thinking the leaves will either be really red, or there won’t be any leaves at all, but no green buds. No cherry blossoms. Maybe a straggling leaf or two.”
As the reborn Western Flyer prepares to return to the Paci c Ocean for her new working life, one cannot help but draw a parallel to the conclusion from The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Steinbeck and Ricketts depart the sun-drenched glory of their Mexico expedition and re-enter the gray fog and foul seas of the Paci c and mainstream America. They grasp for the meaning of the expedition—and life itself—in prose, contracting and dilating their lens from the nucleus to the universe. They invoke the jars of sea creatures in formaldehyde, but we’re clearly not exploring the con nes of marine science or beer-fueled antics anymore.
The story’s end hints that the answer may be less a statement and more a divine unifying musical note that Steinbeck described so poetically in his day: “The Western Flyer hunched into the great waves toward Cedros Island, the wind blew o the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast, took up its vibration like the low pipe in a tremendous organ. It sang its deep note into the wind.”
THE WESTERN FLYER IS NOW A MODERN BOAT WITH A STATED MISSION TO INSPIRE A DEEPER APPRECIATION OF MARINE ENVIRONMENTS.