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Schooner Harpooned by Whale
by Kathy Kyle
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The only ripples on the water of Still Harbor are made by our paddles as we kayak back to our schooner Merlin. We paddle through the gut separating the inner and outer bay. It is a misty, overcast day, but I can see the barrier rocks of the outer bay about a mile away. I expect to see the graceful lines of the 111-year-old, 73-foot boat at anchor just inside of the barrier rocks. But then it is probably more off to the left than I remember—I just can't see it yet. I clear the island completely, and still no Merlin in sight. My eyesight isn't the greatest—I'm never that good at spotting things at a distance. Still, it seems like I should be able to see it.
My companion, Ward Eldridge, Merlin's skipper, is way out in front of me now, paddling hard. Usually he would wait for me to catch up—maybe something really is wrong. I begin to paddle harder too. I see what looks like the top of Merlin's mast sticking up where she was anchored. But that's impossible. Maybe the boat dragged anchor and has somehow ended up on the outside of the rocks and all I can see is the mast sticking up from behind. Ward is far ahead of me now, paddling furiously. Later he tells me he went through the same feelings of disbelief, only sooner.
He is alongside the mast now, staring into the water as if he could bring the boat up from the bottom by sheer force of will. He throws his head back and howls, 'No!' When I finally reach him, the next thing he says is, 'What did I do wrong?.' He has always believed that if he was diligent enough and skillful enough, he wouldn't need insurance (which he couldn't afford on a 111-year-old wooden boat). The boat never leaked—he pumps it once a month and gets only a gallon of water. The boat is resting quietly, perfectly upright, exactly where we left it, well clear of any rocks. Nothing is floating on the surface, not even any oil. We spot only one buoy at some distance.
Boats don't just suddenly sink in a space of two or three hours. What could it be? Maybe a seacock failed. Usually he closes the seacocks when leaving the boat, but he didn't bother this time , we were only going to be gone a couple of hours. Maybe I didn't close the valve on the propane tank for the stove, another standard safety precaution. But we would have heard an explosion, and there would be debris. No, it must have been a through-hull fitting....
We are 35 miles south of our hometown of Sitka, Alaska, with a long stretch of open ocean between. There is not a boat in sight, although we do know there is one lone fishing boat at the head of the bay. Ward calls the Coast Guard on his handheld VHF to report the sinking. The fishing boat helps relay the call and invites us aboard. There will be a fish packer coming through in a few hours, he says, who will probably be able to carry us back to Sitka.
As we paddle slowly away from Merlin, disbelief changes to devastation. Almost everything Ward owns is on the boat. He has only the clothes on his back, his camera, handheld VHF, and .44 magnum handgun. Beyond that, losing Merlin is like losing his child.
He first saw the boat derelict in a Jacksonville, Florida, shipyard in 1979. She was not the sailboat he was looking for—she was too big, too old, too rotten. But she spoke to him; she wanted to go on. He learned that she had been built in Ft. Howard, Wisconsin in 1888, to a Nathaniel Herreshoff design. He purchased her and began to rebuild her from the keel up. He didn't know then that it would take him six years, and he didn't know that seldom, if ever, had a boat so old been successfully restored and completed a serious ocean passage. What he did know was he was a shipwright, and she cried out for one.
For the first three years he returned to Alaska to fish in the summers. Then the shipyard in Florida changed hands and he couldn't afford to keep her there any longer. He put the boat in the water, although the planking extended only two feet above the waterline. He motored to St. Augustine, and miraculously the boat leaked scarcely a drop. He anchored her south of the Bridge of Lions, where he spent the next three years finishing the planking, the decks, the cabin, the rigging, and outfitting her for a voyage back to Alaska.
Once in the water he couldn't leave her to go fishing in the summer. Merlin became his life. He survived on peanut butter and jelly and brewer's yeast sandwiches and slept in a tent on the bow. Finally she was finished. It took eleven and-a-half months to sail to the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, out to Hawaii, then to the Straits of Juan de Fuca and up Alaska's Inside Passage. Merlin arrived in Sitka when she was 100 years old.
Now, here it is, 11 years later, and Merlin on the bottom—50 feet down. He can't bear the thought of leaving her there, but he doesn't have the money to raise her, let alone the money, time, and energy to restore her once up.
We arrived back in Sitka still in a daze. The first person we ran into was Ed Laity, a pilot and diver, who immediately offered to take Ward down to Still Harbor the next day in his Boston Whaler to dive on the boat, plug the vents on the fuel tanks to prevent an oil spill, and recover what he could from the sunken boat. They went, despite a forecast of 35 knot winds. It was a wild trip, with the Boston Whaler flying off the crests of waves, seeming to spend as much time in the air as in the water. But the vents were plugged so that no oil ever escaped from the sunken boat, and they recovered some of Ward's guns, tools, and clothing as well. For the next couple of months, my home would become a salvage zone, the yard strewn with drying clothes and equipment, charts hung on the bannisters, electric tools on 'Warm' in the oven. It was amazing what later proved functional.
Ed was the first of many to volunteer their help. Another diver, Spence Severson, offered his expertise to help raise the boat, but apologized profusely that he really had to take his honeymoon first. Fisherman offered support vessels. Thad Poulson, the local newspaper editor, offered $1000 toward the effort, just because he liked seeing the boat in the harbor. It appeared that Sitkans were determined to see her raised.
Then a friend fishing out of Dutch Harbor heard about it and offered not only money, but an idea. Why not turn the boat into a working museum, a monument to Sitka's maritime history? We immediately saw the possibilities. Ward was ready to donate the boat. On the dock he ran into Bobi Rinehart, a talented young woman who had launched the Sitka Tribe's composting project. He said jokingly, 'Hey, how would you like to be executive director of the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society'. An hour later he found a message from her on his recorder : 'I'm jazzed! I want to do it.
True to her word, she dove in head first, and another young woman, Tiffany Allison, joined her. Three $1000 contributions had been made unsolicited, and they raised another $4000 in cash. Ward' s phone was ringing off the hook with offers of assistance.
Still, the days wore into weeks. Spence was on his honeymoon. Fishermen were out fishing until the coho closure in early August. We wondered if it would really be possible to put together a volunteer effort to raise a 73-foot boat with an iron keel weighing 25,000 pounds from 50 feet down. An expert from California said that two out of three efforts fail. Throughout it all, one question still gnawed at us, 'Why had the boat sunk?'
Then a diver reported that there was a 5-foot diameter hole in the bottom of the boat. He swam partly through the hole and saw the glass jars in the galley still neatly lined up on their shelf. The hole was nearly round, with the planks pushed inward and broken off cleanly at the edges. A large piece was recovered intact; the bottom paint was not even abraded. It was then that Ward ventured a theory. Something large, but soft, moving very fast, had to have made the hole. What could that be but a whale? He remembered a book called Survive the Savage Sea, about a sailboat sunk by orca whales. Nothing else fit.
Naively he began to tell everyone his theory. Reactions varied from mild skepticism to outright disbelief Those who enjoy believing the worst circulated rumors that he had sunk the boat for the insurance (although, of course, there was none). Ward was distraught. He had lost his boat and everything he owned. As a matter of personal pride, and for the sake of his business, he couldn't bear to lose his reputation too. He wished he had never told anyone that a whale sank his boat—people would think he was nuts, or a liar, for the rest of his life.
Support from friends and community, however, far outbalanced negative reactions. August came, and time for action. Bobi and Tiffany had done a great job of fund-raising, but they knew nothing about the technical side of raising a boat. Legal advice said that the Maritime Heritage Society should not take possession of the boat until it was raised. It was on Ward to put together all the pieces to get the boat raised, even though it would no longer be his afterwards. A tense meeting was held on Tuesday night. Saturday morning would be it.
Early on Saturday morning we set out for Still Harbor. The Tana, Sacha Botbol's packer converted to troller, carried prefabricated plywood patches, six lift bags capable of lifting 6,000 pounds each, and all the other materials and equipment. John Maher's new schooner Mycia carried most of the people involved in the effort and provided comfortable quarters for cooking, eating, and sleeping. Spence brought his dive boat Snorkel, the primary platform for the dive operations. Two other divers would come later in their own boats.
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