Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan were dating in the early 1980s when they first stepped aboard the 64-foot Mirene. The vessel had originally launched in 1912 in Oregon, bound for the canneries in Alaska, but since about 1975, it had been falling apart in California’s Sausalito Bay. Scavengers had picked Mirene clean. “The rudder was gone. The steering wheel was gone,” Brand says. “The whole engine room and the engine were gone.”
Still, the couple saw promise. Brand was paying for his own place to live at the time. Phelan was, too. They wanted to live together, and they weren’t the type to shy away from a challenge. In the 1960s, Brand had created the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture and product magazine that featured, among other things, a slew of DIY tools. Mirene seemed like it might be a livable spot—even after they saw her condition from the inside.
“She was floating, but everything else was bad news,” Brand recalls. “You’d put your hand on a bulwark and it came away. The decks were leaking. People had been living in it for years, but the way they dealt with leaks in the overhead and decks was to tack up Ziploc bags. The bags would turn yellow. It looked like there were bags of piss hanging from the ceiling.”
The bones, though, were strong. Planking was solid. Frames were good. The hull was sound. The lovely pocket windows that slip into the wall instead of swinging out were still there, and mostly in working order. Mirene’s owners were asking $8,000—the equivalent of about $27,000 today. And, Brand and Phelan knew a lot of people who knew a lot about fixing up boats.
“We’d been denizens of the waterfront community for quite a while,” Brand told Soundings. “In Sausalito, maritime skills are everywhere. Wooden-boat building, concrete barges; there was no end of skillful people who we already knew. Some of them became our best friends. Over the years, probably 60 or 80 artisans have worked on Mirene in some form or another.”
The couple did try to do some things themselves, like oiling the wooden walls after they got the paint off. “Well, oil turned out to be a sticky, messy mistake,” he says. “It’s all varnished now. We got experienced, skilled people to do that.”
Over time, they refitted the boat as a floating home. When asked about the number of staterooms and heads, Brand laughs: “Oh my God—staterooms. The living room is 450 square feet. That’s all the living spaces, the galley, the salon, the bedroom and bathroom, all of it.”
Mirene is a tugboat. Her primary quality is deck space. That’s not something they intended to change even as the renovations continued throughout the years. “The thing we kept in our minds when we started living on it was that this thing could be brought back to life. It could be repowered,” he says. “We never did anything to obstruct that.”
And eventually, they did give Mirene an engine—a 500-hp diesel they bought used in 1996 for $500 from the Sea Scouts. “It just felt like screw it, let’s do it. Let’s go all the way,” he says. “I had sailboats one after another for years until then, and so the prospect of being able to go out in any wind under power was pretty interesting. That big of an engine makes a wonderful, thunderous sound. When it fires up, it’s a big event. The boat shudders. It moves. You can feel it starting to muscle up to go somewhere.”
He still recalls the first time they took Mirene out. To their delight, everything worked. They got a nice bow wave at 8 or 9 knots. “It’s wonderful when you’ve been living in a place where you look out the window and see the same thing, and then you go out and look out the window, and it’s Angel Island scrolling by,” Brand says. “That never gets old. I can see why people get into endless cruising. The process of keeping going has a lot going for it.”
When they cruise around the bay, guests tend to congregate on the flybridge, he says. The views from up there are terrific. “We’ve explored a lot of the various deltas, things like that,” he says. “We went down and watched the ball games in San Francisco. We’ll go out through the Golden Gate Bridge and toot the horn.”
Their eco-friendly mindset led them to try biodiesel, but it made the engine hard to start, and it was tough to obtain. Brand says he doesn’t worry about fuel burn; he and Phelan both drive Teslas, and the amount of diesel they use is irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. Instead, he sees living on board as a way to escape some of the worst parts of climate change.
“What I liked about the tugboat was that we weren’t going to care about sea level rise or earthquakes, and we weren’t going to care about fire, which was the major event in the bay area and in the West, generally,” he says. “Those three issues went away, just by moving onto a boat.”
Today, Brand is 85 and Phelan is 72, and they’re looking for Mirene’s next owner. They don’t cruise so much anymore, and they’re busy with work. He’s writing a book, and she’s working on wildlife conservation. “Frankly,” he says, “we’re getting a little old for it.”
He’s not sure what Mirene’s asking price will be, since it’s hard to find equivalent vessels for sale. He figures they’ve put at least a few hundred thousand dollars into the boat over the years. “I think it will end up being whatever feels right to us and to the buyer,” Brand says. Ideally, they’re hoping to find a buyer with boating experience. Wooden-boat knowledge would be a plus. “What’s essential is that they’re not surprised by the maintenance,” he says, adding that the money they spent to bring Mirene back was “worth every penny as far as having an absolutely marvelous place to live and go have adventures.”
“One of the guys on the waterfront who saw what we were doing said, ‘Some boats have all the luck,’ because a sister vessel named the Owl went downhill and eventually was burned for the insurance,” he says. “Ours had all the luck, and now somebody else needs to be the luck.”
This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue.
