FROM SEA TO SHRED
If the refurbished Western Flyer has life anew, so does the old—but in the form of surfboards, snowboards, musical instruments and more. That renewed life began, as many good things do, by happenstance: David Dennis, the co-founder of Ventana Surfboards, gave a talk in 2016 at the Monterey Aquarium on sustainable business practices. After the talk, an Aquarium volunteer working on refurbishing John Steinbeck’s first house asked Dennis if he was interested in some old-growth wood from the house’s foundation. The first wave of a magic wand.
Dennis’ partner, Martijn Stiphout, made a surfboard out of some of the wood, and later spoke about it at the Steinbeck Festival, attended by John Gregg, who was there speaking there about the Flyer. Dennis introduced himself and the surfboard and asked about old wood from the Flyer. Gregg and Chris Chase agreed to donate the first load of Flyer wood in 2016. Serendipity!
Stiphout has a special connection to the Flyer in that he kayaked a good portion of the Cortez voyage with his father in 2010. Ultimately perhaps 500 pounds of white oak and Douglas fir arrived from the Flyer. And Martijn Stiphout went to work. Using Flyer wood and other upcycled wood from Ventana partners, Stiphout shaped many striking hollow-body surfboards and other items from the bounty.
“Some of our boards have a lot of Flyer wood, some have less” says Dennis. “We have created handplanes for bodysurfing entirely out of Flyer wood, and we’ve also done some artist collaborations where we made two portholes for a stainedglass artist from the hull wood. Another highlight for us was building a wooden hawksbill turtle from hull planks that has now been inlaid into the deck of the Western Flyer,” he says. “Many of our customers have a special connection to the book or to Steinbeck.”
Not much of the reclaimed woods go to waste at Ventana. Stiphout has also made many Flyersourced bookmarks, whistles and bottle openers. He’s currently working on building two handcrafted dories to sail the entire distance with his brother after their completion—and some Flyer wood will be floating those boats. “Having this all come full circle with wood from the Western Flyer incorporated into our surfboards and other products has been the highlight of our work over the last several years. Using that wood along with other meaningful materials that have connections to the Monterey Bay gives our customers something truly special, and diverting those materials from the landfill makes it even more meaningful for us,” says Dennis.
Ventana believes that what goes around, comes around: they donate money back to the Western Flyer Foundation from their sales. Regarding things coming and going, it’s clear the Flyer in its various incarnations will be going for long years to come.
and educational vessel, designed to inform and captivate young minds with the drive and curiosity of her famous former pilots.
“Everything we do is about getting students and adults alike curious about oceans, marine life and the natural world in a way that is holistic and interdisciplinary—living into that legend of Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their friendship,” says Flumerfelt. “We don’t want to create some structured, cookie-cutter curriculum that all students must follow. We want to create settings that invite curiosity, and we want students to be able to follow their own curiosity, wherever it might take them.”
That curiosity will also be seeded with copious data from multiple collectors, courtesy of a grant from the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, in conjunction with help from Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School and Stanford University. The Flyer is now being tricked out with instruments galore for its shipboard oceanography program: measurements from a CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth) device will include salinity, temperature, pressure, oxygen, fluorescence and pH. “We can get a vertical profile through the water column from the surface to whatever depth we deploy it, which tells us how those parameters are changing with depth,” says Dr. Katie Thomas, science program manager for the WFF.
The device will be set up to relay live information on changing conditions at various depths to on-deck monitors, as well as record the dynamic information to a hard drive. “We’re going to have a flow-through system on board that continuously pumps in surface water from the ocean through a bunch of those sensors on board the ship,” says Thomas. “We also have a scientific echo sounder that is tuned for telling you, for example, that if there’s a huge school of anchovies under the boat, you can see the distribution and size and locations of different animals within a beam under the boat.”
Thomas says the instrumentation (which also includes a sophisticated meteorological sensor array to measure atmospheric gases, wind speed and much more) and frequent sampling can provide knowledge of how different masses of water are moving around during the year and how that might affect fisheries and other animals. Testing across years might show climate change effects, with linked pieces of data giving stronger pictures