Strolling down the gangway of C-Dock at Boat Haven in Port Townsend, Washington, Isswat was impossible to miss. Fresh from an extensive refit, she looked like a million bucks and seemed raring to go places. The name, as documented by Lance Xʼunei Twitchell, an associate professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska, means Black Bear in Chinook Jargon.
“Not really,” laughs the boat’s current owner, Jeff Galey, when asked if he was looking for a big refit project when he went shopping for a boat. “I told myself I’d get one wooden boat and this one fell into my lap.”
As a co-owner of the Port Townsend Shipwright’s Co-Op, Galey worked with one of the boat’s previous proprietors and is intimately familiar with wooden-boat surgery. And that’s what Galey ended up doing to the 77-year old Isswat, after he acquired her in 2018, taking care to preserve her workboat character. At the time of this writing, he’d invested well north of 2,000 work hours on the vessel.
The job list was the length of a Tolstoy novel with the work running the gamut. It included everything from replacing planks, deck and deck beams, bulkheads and caprails, to sistering frames, gutting and remodeling the interior, and updating wiring and systems.
Isswat received new tanks and fuel system, a keel cooler, prop, shaft and more. Furthermore, Galey substituted the towing bit with a deck winch, added aluminum plate bulwarks and repowered the boat with a Perkins 165-hp T6354 6-cylinder diesel. He used Port Orford cedar for planks and deck beams, white oak for frames, purple heart for break beams and plywood for the new deck.
Originally built in 1948 by Lewis Johnson in Whiskey Cove on Pennock Island, across the water from today’s Coast Guard Station in Ketchikan, Alaska, the 34-foot long Isswat (or Issy for short) was just one of hundreds of stout and versatile workboats found in the extractive economies (fishing, logging, hunting) of southeast Alaska after WW II. Constructed from indigenous wood species like Douglas fir, oak and Alaskan Yellow Cedar and propelled by a 125-hp Chrysler gasoline engine, Isswat was built for tough work and rough weather. For safety’s sake, her hull was reinforced by a layer of iron bark to protect against ice or floating logs. Fancy she was not, but she received enough care to keep making money for her owners. Records are spotty, but the boat made headlines in 1964 after being discovered on a beach on Gedney Island, without the two men who took her out on a hunting expedition and had gone missing.
As fishing became more industrial, small wooden boats became an endangered species, making way for much bigger and faster vessels built from fiberglass, steel and aluminum. Having been sold down the coast to an owner in Seattle around 1970, Isswat escaped the wrecking ball and found work fishing and as a yard tug. She also spent the late 1980s on the Oregon coast as a crabbing vessel before returning to Washington State in need of work, which a string of conscientious owners performed to put her back in trim. One of them published a photo book that chronicles the boat’s colorful life of fishing, logging and hunting and her subsequent transformation into a party boat with a workboat reputation.
“I was married at the tow bit and used her for semi-legal towing jobs around Puget Sound,” remembers Jake Beattie, the boat’s master and caretaker between 2005 and 2010, while serving as deputy director of the Center of Wooden Boats in Seattle. The boat also did stints as a commuter vessel, race committee vessel and barbecue platform. “We’d lash a Weber to the tow bit and pile 15 people on, drive to Fisherman’s terminal to grill salmon from the fish market in front of the fine diners at Chinooks. Us in our stained Carhartts drinking Rainier, them with their $50 entrees. We were broke and loving it,” Beattie says.
On an overcast spring day Galey took Isswat back to Lockhaven Marina in Seattle, where he keeps her as his “city apartment” in a covered slip, noting that “it saved the boat’s life.” He says he’ll use her as his private boat, but also as a troller, which requires adding an aluminum rig and hydraulics for the winches. He wants to take her up the Inside Passage back to Ketchikan, which would be an epic adventure for this tough little boat. And it’ll be a homecoming as well, more than half a century after going south.
July 2025
