Steve was a handyman. He was born with it… a natural comprehension of all things mechanical. That kind of stuff came easy for him so he capitalized on his interests and eventually got an engineering degree and became a vocational arts teacher. When I knew him, he was teaching electrical engineering in the industrial vocation department at Canby High School in Oregon. Because I had children in high school, I knew who he was and what he did but I had no clue that he was into sailing.
He grew up with an ambition for adventure and early in his marriage (late 60’s) he became interested in boating. One day while reading from the monthly periodical “Rudder,” a flattering review boasting the virtues and handling characteristics of the Privateer caught his eye. An intensive investigation revealed that the boat was still in production and was affordably available as a hull and deck “kit” to be finished by the owner. Numerous communications ensued, which even included correspondence with the boat’s designer, Thomas Gillmer. Eventually, a deal was struck, the money was paid, and the hull and deck was delivered to Steve’s home in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he was then living. This would have been in 1974 or 75.
He assembled the assortment of components and rough built some cabinetry and berths to the point that made the boat serviceable. He figured out, drew up schematics, and installed all the wiring then converted a 4 cylinder gasoline Datsun engine for marine use by building a custom designed water jacket for the exhaust header and an exhaust/water mixing elbow. He designed and built a water lift muffler and for a transmission, he designed a variable speed hydraulic pump and motor drive system. He built a rugged goose-neck style trailer to cradle the boat during construction and, before completing any of the finishing touches, began sailing on the various lakes of New Mexico.
And the Intrepid Turtle was born. Its name has a bit of a story. In that era, as old timers will remember, the America’s Cup winner (and namesake) was named Intrepid. If he ever found himself in a regatta, win or lose, Steve figured that the name of his boat would apply wherever he placed in the race.
A teaching position became available near Winchester Bay, Oregon and because of the ocean’s close proximity, making the decision to move came easily. They pulled the boat to Oregon and launched it in the bay. Then they returned to Albuquerque with the trailer and used it to move the remainder of their belongings. Although he and his family only lived near Winchester Bay for a short while, they enjoyed numerous opportunities to experience the movement of ocean swells and the maladies that motion brings as they ventured on short excursions up and down the coast.
Better pay and a more prestigious position motivated their next relocation and they moved north to Canby Oregon in the fall of 1981. This found them further inland but relatively close to the Columbia River where they would remain for the next 12 or so years. The school year was about to start and time was short. They choreographed this move similar to the first by off-loading the boat into the Columbia then using the trailer as a U-Haul.
After the move, the first order of business was to settle-in. There were many boxes to unpack, job-hunting for his wife, and finding his “place” in a new high school with new peers, unfamiliar students, and demanding responsibilities. The stresses of establishing a good reputation by demonstrating his conscientiousness monopolized all of his time and priorities during the first few months of school. Because of these distractions, the boat, safely tied in a secure moorage, slipped to the back of his conscious attentiveness. Besides, winter was on its way and most of the boating community in this area goes into hibernation until spring.
As fate would have it, winter that year came early and with a vengeance. Much school attendance was lost to snow-days and travel throughout the valley was difficult at best. Unusually heavy snowfall choked the traffic flow but the big news was freezing rain. After an unprecedented 12 to 14 inch accumulation of snow, it began to rain, which saturated the snow then instantly froze. The weighty buildup of water bloated snow brought down trees and power lines everywhere.
I remember being stuck at home for days, unable to open the garage door because of deep snow and ice. It was beautiful to look at but treacherous to navigate by car or even by foot. I remember watching the local news broadcasts reporting the number of power outages and tallying a death toll of senior citizens who, without power, were found frozen to death. I still incredulously wonder how, with so much technology and so many amenities available, someone in this day and age could possibly freeze to death in their own home. It must have really been cold that winter.
Streams, lakes, and rivers froze solid including the mighty Columbia. It froze over from shore to shore except for the strip of faster moving water down the center of the channel. This was a good thing because when it eventually began to thaw and break up, that strip gave the ice a place to go and to keep moving. I remember another winter near Idaho Falls, which froze the Snake River over solid. When it began to break up, there was no place for the ice to go so it piled up upon itself and created a dam, which caused massive flooding. I wonder if that could have been the same winter.
While trapped at home trying to cope with the seriousness of the weather, I remember watching an evening news late development. The heavy snowfall was wreaking havoc on the waterfront. The weight of the snow was causing gas explosions and electrical fires in the floating home communities. Because of their remoteness and the terrible weather conditions, land based fire trucks couldn’t get to them. They usually depended on fire boats for fire protection but, because of the ice dangers in the river, the boats couldn’t come either so all that the homeowners could do was evacuate then stand on shore and watch their homes burn to the ground… well, to the waterline. When one caught fire, because they were so close to each other, their neighbor would begin to burn… and so on it went until the whole neighborhood was gone. Who would think, surrounded by all that water, that it would be a lack of water that would cause them to lose everything?
I feel another story coming on so I’ll interrupt myself briefly and share it before I lose it.
After the storm had passed and spring approached and the weather began to improve, a friend of mine (another Steve… we’ll call him number 2) contacted me to see if I was interested in joining him for a floating adventure. He owned a 24 foot sloop that he kept on the Willamette River above the falls near Oregon City. He needed to sell the boat and since I was not in a financial position to buy it (as badly as I wanted to) he wondered if I would enjoy accompanying him to take the boat to a broker. Since he had no trailer, this trip would entail floating through the locks around the falls then through the downtown Portland area (raising railroads, street bridges, and impatient driver’s blood pressure) and finally heading upstream in the Columbia. It would be an all day voyage covering some 35 miles.
The day was disappointingly calm (no wind) and we motored most of the way. This was probably good because it was colder than an Eskimo’s toilet seat that day and, had the wind been blowing, it would have felt even colder. There was a short period when we thought that we detected a whisper of wind action so we raised sails but it quickly dwindled away making it hardly worth the effort.
In the late afternoon as we approached the area where Steve thought the brokerage was located, we headed in off the river into a large mooring basin. We discovered that it was still tightly locked in with ice and appeared frozen solid.
He knew the broker was expecting him and felt an obligation to make every effort to deliver the boat as agreed upon. I expressed my lack of understanding as to why a broker would expect us to deliver a boat to an inaccessible dock. My impression of Steve had always been that he was a logistic conservative; a cautious and wise decision maker. So you can imagine my surprise when, upon seeing all that ice, I looked at him… he looked at me… then with a slight smile and a shrug of his shoulders, he decided to keep going in!
The outer ice posed no resistance because it was melted and thin but as we continued to advance and the ice got thicker, we began to feel the boat rise ever so slightly then settle, rise, then settle. The closer we got to shore, the longer the space became between the rise and the settle! You’re probably already guessing how this story is going to end.
However…
My apprehensions about what was going on caused me to cross my fingers, utter a silent prayer, and keep a sharp eye on the shore (which was still a ways off) while mentally making an on-going recalculation of our odds against successfully making it to the dock. Each time I felt the boat begin to rise, the odds rose too!
While straining my attentions on the safety of shore, I noticed a Good Samaritan on the dock frantically jumping up and down and waving his arms to get our attention. When I saw him step off the dock and begin to walk quickly across the ice toward us, I pointed it out to Steve and suggested that maybe we needed to “hang-on” for a second. He throttled down, we felt the boat slide to a crunching stop followed by a cracking sound then it slowly settled one more time. The man stopped about half the distance between shore and the boat and began to yell at us.
The conversation went something like this: (I’ll courteously substitute the adjectives out of respect for the young and the otherwise more refined and higher educated adult readers!)
Man, at the top of his lungs: “What the
phooey do you think you’re doin?”
Steve, meekly and calmly: “Is this where the {Such-n-Such} Brokerage is located?”
Highly irritated man, again at the top of his lungs: “What the
heck is the matter with you? Are you
freakin nuts?
He went on to insult our family origins and our mental competence and pointedly hollered that the {Such-n-Such} Brokerage was clear on the other side of the island. He then discourteously demanded that we “get the
heck outta here” and agitatedly (and clearly to the point) explained how he was not in the mood to organize a rescue party for brain deficient and otherwise undeserving victims.
With a calm voice, Steve asked me ever so politely if I wouldn’t mind going forward to add a bit more ballasted assistance to the boat’s ice-breaking duties… then added, “I wonder what his problem is!?”
It wasn’t easy but we managed to make a slow, wide, U-turn and began moving back toward liquid water again. I clung to the bow pulpit with white knuckles and exerted all of my energies in mentally willing the ice to keep breaking beneath us. I was exhausted when we finally emerged from the ice into clear water again and I returned to the cockpit and collapsed.
Whistling as though nothing had happened and to ease the tension, Steve confidently steered us around to the other (ice free) side of the island and within 30 minutes we were safely tied to the obvious brokers dock. I say “obvious” because of the huge letters on the huge sign loudly proclaiming, {Such-n-Such} Brokerage!
But, I digress!! Now, where was I? Oh yeah… watching a late breaking news report about tragedy on the waterfront.
It turns out that Steve (number 1) must have been watching the same news report that I was watching. He sat with intense empathy as the camera panned across the burning carnage of floating dreams and expensive comfort going up in smoke. Then, he began to recognize some prominent landmarks in the area. He pointed them out to his wife and shared the startling revelation that the collection of burning homes was immediately adjacent to the moorage where his boat was tied. As the camera continued to move across the scene, his empathy evolved to serious concern then rose to panic as his slip came into view and his boat was not there. At first he thought that he surely must have been mistaken due to the amount of snow and ice piled on top of the neighboring boats making them difficult to identify. The TV story segued from home tragedies to boat tragedies and the camera zoomed in and his panic turned to terror. His fears were confirmed. His boat was there after all. The close-up angle showed that the only thing visible above water was the stern section. There was no mistaking the font and the painted graphics. The Intrepid Turtle of Albuquerque, New Mexico was, for the most part, sunk! The only thing keeping her that much afloat was the stern dock-line that had not yet broken.
(Hmm… Why do my stories always seem to involve boats that sink?)
It took a week before the roads were clear enough for him to get to the moorage and begin organizing the salvage. There was a witness, probably the moorage owner, who said that the boat was so top-heavy with ice that it began to roll until the scuppers got below water level and started to flood. With that much weight, it didn’t take long for her to sink. By that time, there wasn’t anything that anybody could do.
The Turtle wasn’t the only boat to sink in that storm. Within about a month, the many boats that had gone down and their locations were identified, a floating crane was volunteered, and a big salvage/rescue operation commenced. It took a couple more weeks until they got to the Turtle. They strung slings under her and lifted her enough until pumps could empty her out without the boat taking on more water. Floating again, Steve ordered a tow to the boat ramp where he loaded her on the trailer to take her home. It wasn’t until he pulled the boat and trailer up the boat ramp that he realized that the crane operators had placed the slings badly. They had gotten the aft sling under the rudder, which broke it and bent the propeller shaft. The only other damage beyond scratched paint was to the bowsprit pulpit. It was slightly bent and popped out of its mounting bracket, which probably happened when the boat rolled against the dock. Fortunately, none of the spars, sails, or rigging was in place at the time. Steve had left them at home during the move and had never taken the time to reinstall them onboard.
He parked the boat near his barn and, in an effort to save the engine, he opened the oil pan drain plug and emptied all of the oil, water, and muck from the engine. He then filled the engine with diesel through the oil fill neck using the logic that the diesel oil would displace any remaining traces of moisture and save it from rusting. This turned out to be quite effective. When I eventually opened the engine up, I found the bottom half pristine and as shiny as brand new. What he failed to do was remove the spark plugs and fill the upper parts of the engine as well. When I pulled the head, because of the inch thick layer of rust, I couldn’t tell where the cylinder walls stopped and the piston head started. It had a 12 year accumulation of decomposition and was rusted solid.
As far as I know, his effort to save the engine was the last act of compassion that he offered to the boat. It appeared that he never touched her, boarded her, nor gave her another thought for the next 12 years save to move her out of his way so he could mow the blackberries that would inevitably begin to grow over her. Maybe he had gotten seasick at Winchester Bay too many times and lost interest. I don’t really know why she let him neglect her for so long. I like to believe that it was because she was patiently waiting for my destiny path to finally join hers. I didn’t realize it at the time but that news report was our first meeting, albeit a less-than-favorable introduction!
The table continues to move toward its stowed position.
