From an outside perspective, the ship wreckage found on Swinomish Indian Reservation land in Washington state in 2015 was just that, wreckage. The paint was peeling off the old 76-foot workboat named Gemini and holes littered the hull. Most might have simply passed by the wreckage, but it caught John Gregg’s eye. No ordinary workboat, Gemini was Western Flyer, the boat that author John Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Rickets chartered in 1940 for a trip to the Gulf of California. The research from that expedition became the subject of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, which won Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gregg, a geologist, bought the Western Flyer for almost $1 million and has seen to her restoration over the past eight years. Currently, she is being set up as a research vessel and an educational platform for the waters off California. The restoration of a ship like this is not for the faint of heart. Gregg enlisted the help of the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-Op in June 2015, knowing that there is a higher level of craftsmanship required to restore such a traditional vessel. The ship was originally powered with a 160-hp Atlas engine. Now, it has a 425-hp John Deere that’s configured with a Transfluid unit, so operators can switch from diesel to electric propulsion.
Western Flyer launched last June. The great-grandson of the original builder, Martin Petrich, was there to rechristen the ship. The Petrich family is from Croatia, so Croatian lavender and fossilized shark teeth were thrown into the water around the vessel. “Ricketts and Steinbeck were always forward-thinking guys,” says Gregg. “They didn’t like dusty remembrances. They liked things that were looking forward. They wouldn’t have liked a boat that couldn’t earn its keep.” —Lidia Goldberg
This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.
