Tag Archives: heads back to sea
Western Flyer sails again
The Western Flyer left for Seattle after seven years of intense restoration and rebuilding in Port Townsend, but she will make a detour on the way to her final destination for one last visit to the town that returned her to the ocean. The boat, known most famously as the vessel writer John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts chartered for a research trip to the Sea of Cortez in 1940, had been in Port Townsend undergoing restoration since 2015. On Wednesday, the Western Flyer embarked on stage two of its rehab when it was towed to Snow & Company boat builders in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. There, over the course of the next four or five months, it’ll get a new engine, rigging, hydraulics and mechanical systems. >click to read< 12:14
A piece of western Washington literary history heads back to sea
The boat John Steinbeck was on while writing The Log from the Sea of Cortez is embarking on a new chapter. The Western Flyer has been being refurbished in Port Townsend for the past nine years. Now, the 85-year-old boat is launching into Puget Sound once again. The painstaking voyage back to the sea begins with a bulldozer noisily hauling the 77-foot seiner out of drydock, inch by inch. It’s part of a journey Rom Welborn has been on since he first learned about the boat when writing a high school paper. “It changed my life and it still feels like it’s changing my life,” he said. >Video, click to read/watch< 11:27
