Posts Tagged ‘puget sound’
36 Foot Ketch on Puget Sound
36 Foot Ketch on Puget Sound
Before discussing the sailboat, worth identifying are the mountain peaks in the background. These peaks are the higher two peaks of the southern end of the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, a peninsula. First is Mount Ellinor, elevation 5,924 feet (1,805 meters), and to its right is a higher Mount Washington, elevation 6,259 feet (1,908 meters). I used these mountain peaks as an opportunity for a backdrop in order to achieve an enhanced composition for when a boat would pass by. I was rewarded when this beautiful twin-mast sailor with clipper-style hull indeed arrived! This boat, a beautiful sailing ketch, glided smoothly past on the sailing position known as a reach – with wind hitting its port beam. A number (“36”) clearly visible below the peak of the mainsail indicates the length the boat.
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Remembering the San Mateo Ferry
San Mateo Ferry in Seattle - 1987
Temporarily on the south end of Lake Union, in Seattle, Washington, the “San Mateo Ferry” awaited an uncertain fate. The year was 1987.
A Saturday in 1987 I had planned to attend a programming class to benefit my job at a computer firm. As I was near the location of the class, fog which had covered much of the city that morning was beginning to clear. The sun was beaming through holes in the fog and was lighting up the scene around me. I skipped the programming class to take pictures. This one of the San Mateo Ferry was a result of my effort that day.
Data: “San Mateo” is a steam-ship ferry. Official Number: 222386. Radio Call Letters: WG5465. Built: San Francisco, CA 1922. Length: 230′. Beam: 64′. Draft: 12′ Auto Deck Clearance: 11′ 6″ Speed: 13 knots. Horsepower: 1,400. Propulsion: triple expansion steam engine. Autos: 50 Passengers: 659. Gross Tonnage: 919.
Puget Sound History: In 1947 the San Mateo started on the Seattle-Suquamish route. In 1948 she was moved to the Kingston-Edmonds route for three months, then was placed on reserve. She saw regular service from late sping to early fall between 1952 and 1954 on the Fauntleroy-Vashon run. In 1955 she worked the Bremerton route from June until September. In 1956 she worked as an extra boat on the Kingston-Edmonds route, and then moved back to Fauntleroy-Vashon-Harper in 1957-58. In 1959 she moved back up to Edmonds as an “extra” where she remained until 1969, alternating between Edmonds and the Seattle-Winslow routes. The San Mateo made her final run from Edmonds to Kingston on Labor Day of 1969 and was packed to her limit.
During her time on the Sound the San Mateo Ferry was well-loved. People responded to the sound of her steam engines and whistle, the stained glass windows of her interior, the mahogany pew-like benches in her passenger cabin. Sadly, she now lists in shallow water on the bottom of the lower Frazer River in British Columbia and has decayed beyond reasonable recovery.
Information source: www.evergreenfleet.com/mateo.html
Lahar
Cascade Eruptions in the last 4000 years
Lahar Definition
A Lahar is a thick slurry flow formed when volcanic ash and debris mix with water, either in rivers or from rain or melting snow and ice on the flank of a volcano. More than 60 post-glacial period mudflows have been discerned to have occured around Mount Rainier. See: Lahar on Wise Geek
Osceola Mudflow
The Osceola Mudflow is the largest known Lahar event. It occurred about 5,600 years ago when up to one cubic mile of rock, ice, and debris slid down off Mount Rainier. Mount Rainier’s summit and northeast slope slipped away creating a mile-wide horseshoe-shaped crater open to the northeast. This crater has since been filled in by subsequent magma flows. The Osceola Mudflow traveled through the site of present-day Enumclaw, broadening and extending at least as far as the Seattle suburb of Kent, and extened into Commencement Bay, now the site of the Port of Tacoma. The communities of Orting, Buckley, Sumner, Puyallup, Enumclaw, and Auburn are also wholly or partly located on top of deposits of the Osceola Mudflow. Resulting sedimentation from the Osceola Mudflow pushed the shoreline into Puget Sound adding more than 200 square miles of new land surface.
National Lahar
Somewhere between 2,200 and 500 years ago, a large chunk of the south flank of Mount Rainier calved off and a resulting lahar flowed down the Nisqually River. Other smaller flows evident during this time, one which temporarily filled the upper South Puyallup and Tahoma Creek valleys to a depth of at least 1,000 feet.
Electron Mudflow
The Electron Mudflow buried Orting about 500 years ago and it continued to flow a total distance of about 60 miles. This lahar occured without an apparent eruption from Mount Rainier. A trigger may have been an earthquake or simply that some of the rock near the surface of the mountain had become weak and fractured, calving off.
Summary
Mount Rainier has built up so high that it currently supports the largest system of glaciers in the lower contiguous United States. Scientists understand that Mount Rainier is still an active volcano. The reasons for this are; Mount Rainier stands atop the Cascadia Subduction zone, it has current geo-thermal activity, it has seismicity, and it has erupted in as late as the 19th century. Because Mount Rainier is an active volcano, it must be respected for its potential to cause destruction in what is now a highly populous area known as the Puget Sound region (including the major cities of Tacoma, Seattle, and Olympia).
Sources cited:
Cascades Volcano Observatory, USGS | GeoTimes | HistoryLink.org, A Short History of Mount Rainier, USGS
“Spirit of Columbia” – Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains
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| April 2009 | |
“Spirit of Columbia” off Shilshole, Seattle. Peaks of the Olympic Mountains in background.
Seattle
The Spirit of Columbia is a smaller cruise vessel operated by CruiseWest.com which cruises Prince William Sound’s (Alaska) back channels, bays and wilderness islands. She has a bow ramp, which, in combination with a shallow draft, allows the ship to disembark passengers onto shores in wild areas without ports.
Specifications: Built in 1979 and refurbished in 1995 for service with CruiseWest.com. She is 97 tons, her length is 143 feet. She features 37 cabins, 4 passenger decks, and is manned by 21 crew. Her cruising speed is 10 knots. She is able to perform bow landings.
See: pbase.com
When Did This Happen? 5 – There’s Something Happening Here
5 THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE
“Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down, should’a been done long ago.” There was something significant happening here I felt. It was in my first year of college when these lyrics of Buffalo Springfield echoed across the beautiful campus of evergreen trees which was only a few miles from my hometown.
My dad said I need to take on a trade or something. “You gotta do something,” echoed my dad’s voice, “you gotta start somewhere,” he continued. So I studied forestry, music, aviation, and political science, and photography. A foreign exchange girl from Czechoslovakia got a B in my english-literature class, and she had only been speaking English one year. I got a C, though I made up it later.
I had become caught up in the happenings and the changes that were taking place; the music of the time, the Viet Nam war which appeared to be hobby, and that blue smoke that wafted around nearly every corner of campus buildings. Good, bad, or indifferent, it cannot be denied the 1960’s and 1970’s were really the way they were. It was a very heady period of time.
In the Pacific Northwest the mentality of the late sixties extended well into the seventies. In Washington State, California’s sub-culture, known throughout the country, was delayed and synthesized by a couple of years; the surfing, the clothing, free love, drugs, music, and so on.
This area saw a strange blend of hippies, hunters, four-wheelers, and backpackers. Among these were mountain men who toted guns, carried their lunches in ammo boxes found in the Fort Lewis woods, and smoked pot.
West, about one hundred miles, lies are long sandy beaches making nearly half the Washington coastline. These beaches are a popular destination for graduating seniors from high school. They arrive in droves, driving their second-hand cars up and down the beach having parties in the dunes. I did this too.
In my third day into my time on the beach the afternoon had become dull. Remembering that some kids north of us had a nice camp, I fantasized that their camp would be a great party spot that night. I filled my car up with kids and we started a caravan up to see what was happening. Looking in my rear-view mirror, to my amazement, there were about a hundred cars following me. When we arrived only two kids were sitting there prodding a meager campfire. Mumbling “waste of time,” and other words, all my followers turned around and headed back south.
I worked at a camera store during this time. There I became exposed to the marvelous hobby of photography. It was technical, it was a form of art, it allowed creativity, and in the capacity that I was involved, it was related to business. All these things I enjoyed. I progressed to store manager while immersing myself in the hobby.
Specializing in scenic shots, prompted by my photography hobby, I went more and more into the surrounding wilderness areas. I thought nothing of driving a hundred miles to get an image, climb into a sleeping bag for a night on some un-patrolled land, and then getting back the next morning to work in the shop.
Photography impelled me in a way that I was beginning to see the world differently, through the eye of the lens. I took great pains to eliminate all man-influenced realities from my images; the exception were boats, most which I consider as beautiful; sail, steam, gas, diesel, or man-powered; and surfboards too.
Without the resources to travel to more exotic places, I was limited to roaming the local geographical area in search of shots. Not to complain much, the Pacific Northwest is resplendent in majestic mountains and rugged coastline. But access to excellent shots hard to find. The area is heavily treed and thick with underbrush.
Much of the northern coastline is wilderness. There are few roads that penetrate the rainforest’s thick trees and underbrush. When finally there, it is gray, wet, and the atmosphere is drizzly even in summer. If luck has it, getting to the coast when the sun is out is like seeing a great gem buffed off and realizing its’ grand beauty.
When Did This Happen? 7 – Photography and Sailing
PHOTOGRAPHY AND SAILING
During my tenure as a manager of camera stores, the popular cameras of the day had shifted from European to Japanese cameras. Initially the stores were overstocked with brand-names such as Leica, Contax and Rollei and were being transitioned and replaced with names like Pentax, Minolta, Canon and Miranda. My shop had a European camera, Hasselblad, a precision high-end box-like camera which had three Zeiss-Tessar lenses to compliment it. The complete system was several thousand dollars. I took it out and shot images of the Seattle Space Needle. I wanted to have the experience of shooting what was one of the photographers’ cameras of choice. Hasselblad’s were selected for NASA’s Apollo missions because of their precision and ability to hold up under adverse conditions and I wanted an experience with what has been determined to be the world’s best camera and optics.
A dapper young self-employed photographer was interested in our Hasselblad. He came in a couple of times scrutinizing the system, and examined how the three lenses looked through the camera’s prism viewfinder. I asked him if he was really interested in the camera and he assured me he was. He indicated that once he sold his sailboat he would by the system. Having sailed a couple of times I was interested in sailing so I tentatively asked him about his boat. It was a small sloop named Clipper. Early one Saturday morning as we neared the end of summer, according to our plan, we rendezvoused at the shop. We groggily discussed logistics of cars and timing and finally made it down to Seola Beach just south of Seattle on Puget Sound where “Clipper” was moored.
It was a lot of effort and many miles of driving that early morning. The weather was dull and I was tired. I worked many hours at the camera shop and spent as much time as I could on getting out on photo shooting exhibitions. It seemed such an inconvenience when I found the little sloop moored nearly a quarter mile offshore in shallow water off the beach. We clamored into a little pram, a small dinghy, and oared the distance out to the Clipper, and crawled up onto her as she bobbed in the waves. She was a white fiberglass boat that was a little weather beaten, but she felt very solid and at peace bobbing in the short chop that was spread over the surface of the sound.
Her owner, Mike, placed the rudder into place, lowered the keel, and raised the mainsail and replaced the pram behind on the small buoy where she was connected and the wind carried Clipper away. Mike raised the foresail. We healed at a slight angle and I could feel the increase in speed when my body moved back a little. “We’re sailing” he commented. I was pleased. I was very pleased. The feeling was great. There was no engine sound. There was only the creaking and chiming of various parts on the sailboat. I knew I was hooked on sailing that moment.
Back at the shore I wrote him a check after a brief negotiation on price, and papers were signed. Clipper was mine!
The following Monday Mike came into the camera store and wrote me a check for the Hasselblad camera system. Being a careful businessman, I inquired into the validity of the check. “Is this good” I asked? To which he responded, “It’s only as good as yours.” And, in that way I made a sale and got my sailboat.
My Clipper sailboat became a great platform for many of my photographs. My lifestyle really then changed into that of a sailor-photographer. I added scuba diving to the mix and for the next two summers I immersed myself into life on and in the water.
Winter came and I continued to sail. I took two friends with me on a four-day sail exploring the southern Puget Sound past Tacoma and through the Narrows. In February, we were thickly dressed. Also, we were minimalists as it came to just about everything, including food. We ran short and resorted to eating rice and fried bananas the last day.
From Clipper’s log:
“ . . . and the small hatch popped open and a hot steaming plate was passed up through the opening without comment. Hmm. This was to my surprise since I had no idea they were cooking. Furthermore, I was under the impression we were out of provisions. I dug into what appeared to be a bed of rice and something fried. It was fried bananas. Fried Bananas and Rice! ”
The following summer I quit my job at the camera store which I managed nearly a year. Located in one of the two busiest malls in the northwest, it was exhaustingly active most all the time. The owner of the chain kept me under such a thin budget for personnel that I was stuck in the shop for 12-hour days nearly every day with only one or two other employees. I had no time for sailing and photography. Though I had no plan for income, except my wife’s meager retail clerk’s paycheck, I imagined that I would find money somehow. I tried earning money with my photography, but I limited myself because I refused to shoot weddings and take portraits which is where the money was for non-recognized photo-artists such as I envisioned myself as becoming.
Some people take summers off for snow skiing, others for surfing. I took a summer off to be a sailing bum. In early June I took off for a long cruise beginning from Gig Harbor, a beautiful little harbor with a stunning view of Mount Rainier, to north through the San Juan Islands near the Canadian border. Various legs of the trip were planned. The first one, just myself, from Gig Harbor to Seattle. By car, an hour and a half drive. By sailboat, a day’s trip.
After an uncoordinated departure from the dock which resulted in assistance from one of the other boaters, I sailed into the Narrows, then up Colvos Passage on the inside of Vashon Island to where the water opens up to become Elliot Bay, across from Seattle. It was mildly windy and the sky was gray. For sport, I got into the Sport-Yak dinghy, a bright orange plastic boat popularly used as a tender for sailboats in our region. The Sport-Yak, in tow of the Clipper with me in it fishtailed as I attempted to remotely steer the mother craft with a telescoping extension from the tiller connected to her rudder. I laughed in chaos of the wind and waves as the larger pilotless craft towed me forward in brisk wind, thus risking my life to be sure.
Disco was just becoming to be the big thing. I sailed into the Seattle waterfront and caught a taxi and met my wife in a nightclub. She had come up to meet me in Seattle to start her leg of the journey intended to take us through the San Juans. We discoed and crawled into the Clipper late that night and departed northward the next morning under cloudy skies and drizzle. Later that day we encountered some really rough water as thunder crashed over the shoreline in the distance. The weather remained like that for another day then the sun came out. We were in the San Juan Islands finally.
We spent the next week in the San Juans eating crab, salmon, oysters, clams, and mussels. We danced at two of the resorts. It was absolutely the most adventurous thing we had ever done in our lives to that point. Our time up there was filled with many mini-adventures, such as negotiating how to get a live crab into a pot of boiling hot water, how to cross channels churning with tidal currents, how to anchor in rocky harbors and so on. We hiked on the little islands and shopped in the gift shops that populated the little harbor towns. Tourism in these Islands was subdued in the period we were there, not catching on until several years later. It was really an idyllic time for us, and a discovery of our personalities. My wife, my high school sweetheart, and I separated at the end of that summer after little more than two years of being married.
I stayed committed to sailing. I bought another sailboat that was a little larger than the Clipper. Both were moored in Kirkland, on Lake Washington. I moved from my home town to Bellevue which was a shocking change for me. I went from my first world of weekend hippies, hikers, hunters, factory and post office workers to a world where money was plenty. Bellevue was the high-end bedroom community for Seattle. There were more Mercedes, BMW’s, and Porches than I had ever seen on any road anywhere.
In Bellevue I took a job in a photo lab next to an upscale mall. There I printed everything from absurd posters for drug-store promotions and portfolios for models. I made barely enough income to maintain my sailboat and pay for an expensive apartment in town.
Soon I was working in an upscale department store, which was promoted to be a “catalog showroom” for the Jaffe family from Seattle – Jafco was the name of the chain. I started off part-time in their camera department in Bellevue just before Christmas season hit. Disco was really big and I was lonely. Though I went out dancing weekend nights, I was very lonely. I drove what was becoming an older classic 1966 Mustang and I didn’t exude much stability or wealth so lasting female commitments were hard to obtain. But there was fun. I leveraged myself through knowing a guitar player in a popular band that was a friend in high school, and taking girls to dance with the band.
I became aware that most of all the people working at the department stores were in this “temporary” position of passing time until more profitable careers or partners came along. There was a kind of temporary hold ambiance around “so we might as well have fun” feeling. There were soon-to-be models, inheritors, and schemers alike. I became friends with some interesting people plus some very cold and indifferent ones as well. I met a lot of people and dated exhaustedly.
We did inventory counts at the large stores and afterwards go sailing until the sun came up, then go back to work having no real sleep. I had several people out on my boats. Some became pretty good friends, a couple of whom lived on the waterfront. We had barbeques and parties ashore and sailed quite a bit. Some girls took me water skiing. It was a good time, but I was still lonely.
Meanwhile, I still maintained contact with some of my old sailing partners from the old life and went salmon fishing with them. Salmon fishing was more salmon “wishing” as the Sound was pretty well fished out. Development in the area was directly responsible for the reduced the salmon runs. For every salmon caught, if caught at all, ten or more sharks would hook up. These “dogfish” as we called them were disliked because it was felt that they were eating all the salmon’s source of food, herring. These were silver large finger-sized fish and both salmon and sharks loved them. When a dogfish was caught, it was common practice among the fishermen to kill them.
The Clipper was still in Gig Harbor even though I had moved up to the Seattle area. I loaned Clipper out and when I saw the boat after their fishing expedition turned bloodbath for the sharks, the hull of the boat where the sharks were hauled in was covered in dirty brown dried blood. They didn’t clean up the boat, and I never lent it to them again. Things on the Clipper were broken, the boat was trashed. I guess it was this, the habitually stale poker nights, and a general shift in interest that caused me to divorce myself, not only from my first wife, but from my hometown as well. I had to do cut loose. I seldom visited my family for quite some time, which was all as well. They were quite despondent over my divorce. I had a new life.
I shared houses with some guys from the warehouse at work and taught them how to sail. Some of the trips were for fishing, some for scuba diving, and some for the sheer joy of sailing, winter or spring, the season did not matter. I would work retail most of the time and what time was left was used on sailing. But, I began to realize that the boats I owned were really quite small and I was wanted a larger, more adventurous boat. The job I held produced too little income for anything more. I began to realize that retailing was not going to be productive in the long run, not as an employee anyway. I was increasingly aware of economic limitations. Settling down was not a consideration, being in my twenties, I felt there was plenty of time, but a gnawing concern began during this time.
I dated quite a bit and often used the Clipper as a platform for diversion. A guy and a sailboat were an anomaly for them and, sadly, the novelty didn’t seem have any lasting effect. This was still during the disco era. Dancing and sailing were fun things to do, but there was a droning emptiness. I missed my former wife, and reconciliation was probably never going to happen. I had a lot of acquaintances but I really felt lonely.
I was in a rut driving an aging car, a Ford Mustang, a classic that needed constant repairs. My love was sailing. I had no home. I had little contact with family and old friends. I felt another change was necessary to break out. What will it be?
Soon I forgot my troubles. I was dating fairly exhaustively, and for the wrong reasons was taking out some fairly young ladies. Intellectual stimulation was lacking. There was no history to talk about. I was in what Jimmy Buffet called ‘bimbo limbo’. Some were pretty nice girls, but just as I realized that needed to class up my act, I met a very attractive lady.
My bachelorhood was in full swing. I was about to plunge into a relationship and was frightened about this prospect. Yogi Berra said ‘when you come to a fork in a road, take it’. I had to either turn right or left but instead I stood agape and frozen before the fork. I was about to quit my job in retail, sell the boats, go back to school and wrap up the college credits I had into a package that would enable me obtain a bachelors degree in business. I was thinking about computers, or accounting, or something along those lines. The lady I had just met wanted to go back to school also.
More later . . | Photos
Pacific Northwest | J R Hudson 