EP# 15 - Living with Summer Wind

In this episode of Beyond the Boat, I sit down with Dave Schoeggl, longtime owner and steward of Summer Wind, formerly E. Lester Jones, a 1940 wooden vessel built by Astoria Marine Construction for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

Dave grew up around wooden boats on Lake Washington and has spent a lifetime on the water. For more than three decades, he and his wife, Tami, have cared for Summer Wind, transforming a rugged government survey vessel into a family home, cruising boat, and enduring part of their lives.

Our conversation explores the remarkable history of the vessel, from her original service in the Aleutians to her evolution as a private yacht. Along the way, Dave reflects on growing up with boats, raising a family aboard, long-distance cruising, major restoration projects, and the unique rewards and responsibilities that come with caring for a wooden boat over many decades. 

More than a story about a boat, this is a conversation about stewardship, craftsmanship, family, and the lasting relationship that can develop between people and the vessels they choose to care for.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello, and welcome back to Beyond the Boat. I'm your host, Leroy Lewis. Thanks for coming along as we navigate the stories that seem to travel with wooden boats. Each episode is a chance to slow down and enjoy what makes wooden boat life special. The history, the backstories, the care, the voyages, the community, and the people you meet along the way. Before we get underway, I'd like to thank those listeners who helped support Beyond the Boat. Your support helps preserve and share these stories. My sincere thanks to Jim and Margie Payton, Charlie Seaberg, Peter McGraw, and Todd Powell for supporting Beyond the Boat. If you'd like to learn more about supporting the show, you'll find information in the episode notes. So let's step aboard and get into our next episode. What happens when a vessel built for government survey work becomes not only a family home, but a lifelong companion? This is a story of a boat built for the Aleutians, shaped by war, survey work, handcraftsmanship, family life, long voyages, and decades of care. But more than that, it's a story of what happens when people choose to live with a boat, raise children aboard her, improve her, maintain her, and eventually begin thinking about who will carry her forward decks. Today on Beyond the Boat, I'm talking with Dave Shagel, owner and lifetime steward of Summer Wind, formerly E Lester Jones, a nineteen forty wooden power vessel built by Astorio Marine Construction for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Dave grew up around wooden boats on Lake Washington, has been involved with boats all his life, and has owned Summer Wind with his wife Tammy for more than three decades. Together, they lived aboard her, raised their children aboard her, cruised extensively, and continued the long work of transforming a government vessel into a family boat while preserving her history and character. Dave, welcome to Beyond the Boat. Thank you. It's great to be here. Dave, before we get into summer wind, I'd love to start with where boats entered into your life.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Well, they've sort of always been part of my life. My father, when he was young, was a mechanic at the crisscraft dealer in Seattle down on Lake Union. And he loved old crisscrafts. At the time they weren't old, they were new. I think when I was two years old, they bought their first crisscraft runabout. So to me, growing up around wooden boats was uh just the norm. My parents bought us our own boat when I was about 12 years old. So we were always around boats. And my parents also bought uh I think their first cruising boat was a Owens that they from the 50s that they bought in probably 1972. And uh we started cruising up into Canada and Desolation Sound in the summers then.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Well that's really interesting. Just a uh side note, I worked for one of the Owens brothers for one summer.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Oh, did you?

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Yeah, they actually had two Owenses. They had a 28-foot and a 35-foot. And the 35 foot they did a lot of work on, they repowered it, put a fly bridge on it, and all kinds of things. Well, my dad did. But to me, wooden boats weren't a novelty. That's what boats most boats were made out of back then. I can remember people being suspicious of fiberglass about whether it would really last. My father was always a great devotee of wooden boats. He thought that they had a better ride and that they were smoother and quieter.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

You and Tammy have owned Summerwind for some 33 years now. How did you first find her and what made you believe this was the boat for your family?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

I first spotted her actually when I was a teenager. And when I was in high school, my friend Mark and I, our typical summer Saturday morning was we'd go water skiing in our boat, and then we'd go to one of the local parks and see if we could pick up girls, which never succeeded. And then after that, we'd just cruise around Lake Union. And on one of those cruises, uh I noticed this beautiful old fantail yacht called the Summer Wind. And we would always go by there, and eventually we developed a little bit of a friendship with the owner. And a couple of times he gave us a tour. I think he once even started up the engines for us. And I just thought it was such a beautiful boat with amazing lines. I didn't think I'd ever be able to own it, but I just thought it was the prettiest boat on the lake.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Did Tammy see the same potential right away?

SPEAKER_01 5:17

I wouldn't say right away, but I showed her the boat and she liked it. And at the time we had another boat, uh 55-foot Alaskan, and we had just gotten married. We were living on the 55-foot Alaskan down in Lake Union, which was a lifestyle we loved, and we were just starting to think about moving on shore and buying a house when the summer wind came up for sale, because I had asked several people I knew on the waterfront to tell me if it was ever seriously for sale. And when it was, which unfortunately was because the prior owner developed brain cancer and his family didn't want the boat. So we started thinking about living aboard it, and she was willing to give it a go. It needed a lot of renovations, but I think she was less excited about it than I was. What she said though is if if we're going to live aboard there with a family, there were two things that she insisted on. One was a bathtub and one was a fireplace. So part of the renovation plans were both a bathtub and a propane fireplace.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Well, that's neat. Sounds like the boat's been on your mind for quite a while.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Well, it has. I didn't ever think I'd be able to own it, but I always thought, wouldn't it be cool to do that? And from time to time I would look at other fantails, and I realized this was the boat for us because of the way that it was built, built very heavily out of extremely high quality old growth fur, and I knew that the the hull was solid and it wouldn't need any significant woodwork, which it hasn't really in it's 85 years, just minor things here and there. Well, you probably wouldn't call them minor, but not complete rebuilding, let's just say. I think it was all three. One of the factors that I didn't mention is we love to spend as much time as we can on the boat in the summers, which was restricted by having a young family and working, but we love to go up to Desolation Sound, and I always thought taking a boat like the summer wind up there would be just amazing. So that was always in my mind. We love to water ski, and she was big enough to hoist a boat up on the roof that would be substantial enough that we could water ski, so that was of interest as well. Every year, other than one COVID year since we've owned her, we have taken her up to Desolation Sound in the summer because we love it so much up there.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Well, that's really great. Summer Wim began her life as a working survey vessel, but you and Tammy turned her into a family boat and eventually into a home. What did that transformation involve?

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Well, luckily for us, the prior owner, who was a well-known scoundrel around Lake Union named Dave Updike, had kept her in very good structural shape and had kept the exterior fairly well painted and varnished, but he had done nothing to the interior. And other than one area which we call the officers' quarters, it was very utilitary and very ugly, frankly. They had, for example, in the middle of what's now the salon, there was a fuel vent pipe. So they just built this ugly formica covered wet bar around the pipe. So that stood solo right in the middle of the salon. So so we had a lot of work to do. We started with the forward cabins, which we turned into a bedroom for us and also a room where we could put our new baby's crib. And the initial renovations I thought would take a year after we bought the boat, and they ended up taking two years. But after two years we moved aboard, and I did a lot to try to make the boat comfortable. I put some additional insulation in. Having lived on two other wooden boats, I sort of knew what it was to take to make it comfortable and put in more robust water systems and variety of things to try to make it as comfortable as I could.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Was there anything that simply was just necessary to make her livable?

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Well, she wasn't really livable when we bought her. The galley had a big electric six-burner stove, but a little tiny refrigerator that you could just put a few drinks in. And the sole of the galley, oddly enough, was poured concrete. And they had poured the concrete level, and of course the cabin top was angled, so at one end you couldn't even stand up straight. So I had to actually rent a jackhammer and jackhammer out the concrete, which I think most people would say one of the few times you actually use a jackhammer on a wooden boat, but but that's what I had to do. There was also a large walk-in refrigerator freezer that was about eight feet long and maybe four feet wide that intruded into the cabin space and and it had thick, heavy insulation and big refrigerator doors, and it was lined with sheet monell. So we had to hack all of that out. So we had some big projects to make it livable.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Wow. That's quite a bit of work there.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Yes. It didn't have really a modern generator. It had one that was had been basically homemade out of a welding generator and a small four-cylinder engine, and the other was an old World War II era GMC 271, which they're known as screaming Jimmies. And if you start one up, you'll you'll understand what the reason for that was. And the boiler was rusted out, so we also had to change the boiler and put in a new generator.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Were there any major appliances or other features that you picked specifically to keep with the style of the boat?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Not really. I think we've always taken a practical approach in the sense of we'd like to maintain the 1930s style as much as we can, but we in our view we don't go overboard doing that where we have to compromise for convenience or cost. We do. At that time, it was very difficult to buy appliances that would fit. They were either house size appliances or very inexpensive, you know, US-made apartment size appliances or European appliances or marine appliances, which were typically too small for us. So what we generally did is we bought the European ones, which were relatively smaller than the American ones at fairly well made.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What was the life like aboard with the young children?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

We loved it, and the kids loved it. Of course, they didn't know anything different. Our oldest son was one when we moved aboard, and our youngest son was born while we lived aboard. So to them it was just natural that that was their home. But we thought it was wonderful. At the time we were living at the south end of Lake Union, and even though it was a industrial area with a lot of traffic, close to a big city, the minute you walked out on the dock, everything got quiet, and you know, the most you noise you heard were duck wings flapping and things like that. So well, we felt like it was this peaceful, quiet oasis in the middle of the city. And both my wife and I worked in downtown Seattle and we were able to walk to work most of the time, which was wonderful. And uh yeah, the children just just loved it. They grew up learning to be careful around the boat. We took a lot of precautions to keep them from falling overboard, of course, but they also just learned a certain amount of care and responsibility, I think, early on. And they loved we would often go out in the evenings on Lake Union and just float around as a lot of people did, and the kids could swim when they got a little older. We just had a very nice time, and then we had our trips to Desolation Sound, and then we'd also do some weekend trips here and there.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Are there family stories from that time that still get repeated today? Probably.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

The first year that we went, the boat really was not ready to go. I was in the process of building a new DC power panel, but the old power panel was literally these giant-sized bus fuses and wires that were basically just twisted together and held together with tape. So many of those things didn't work, so I we were holding wires together and hoping they didn't spark too much and trying to make everything operate, and I was still learning how to run the engines. And at the time we had removed all the coverings on the cabin soles so they were wood, and some of the wood was in poor shape. It would have pieces sticking up and pieces that were broken, and so I just got some old surplus carpet and covered it, and we had no stove. This was our first trip to Canada. We had no stove, so I bought a little portable barbecue. We had the refrigerator, but we hadn't installed it, so it was basically sitting in the in the main salon. So it was like camping on the boat, but we had a great time. People still talk about this. Our oldest son, who at the time was about three, had one of those little chairs that's on a spring, so he would sit and bounce, and when we had to dock the boat, we would put him on that and he'd be sitting there bouncing up and down, and we'd be coming into the dock or into an anchorage, and that was all people saw was the little kid on the back bouncing up and down. We've known a number of people who took on big projects like this and just spent all their time working on the boat. They never used it. And by the time the boat was in good enough shape to actually be used, they were so tired of working on it that they sold it. And we were determined not to let that happen. We were determined to use it whenever we could, even if it wasn't really ready to be used. So consistent with safety, we we did as much of that as we could. Were there any challenges raising the children on the boat? Well, as I mentioned, we had to be very careful, put children's gates up. We had we were always worried about them falling overboard. We had a couple of instances where we couldn't find them, and we got quite quite worried. I was at one point we were out and I was about to dive in the water and start looking, and then then the kid popped up and said, hide and seek or something. He thought it was quite funny he was hiding from us. So those were challenges. And as the kids got older, they were two boys and they just needed more room to run around, so we would take them to parks pretty regularly. But my wife and I never really felt constricted with the space, but I think the kids did as they got older. You could only have them run around the decks so many times before they wanted to go somewhere else to throw balls and wrestle and all of that. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Well, before she became Summer Wind, she was the E. Lester Jones built for Coast and Geodesic Survey. What do you know about her original purpose and working life?

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Well, we've pieced together a fair amount of history based on research that we've done and the owner of our sister ship who's done even more research. And what we found out is that she was built before World War II to create nautical charts up in the Aleutian Islands. So the specifications were that the boat had to be big enough and hefty enough to handle six months out in the Aleutian Islands, which is some of the roughest water and worst weather anywhere, and also small enough to get into the small remote bays that dot the islands around there. So that's why they were designed the way they were. And we understand that shortly after our boat was launched in February of 1940, and not long after that, I went into the military service. And we don't know much about what happened to her during the war because records of the war in the Aleutians were for the most part destroyed. But we do know, for example, there was an act of Congress that gave the crewmen on our boat military pensions because although they weren't formally part of any military service, Congress found that they had been doing work that helped the war effort, so they got military pensions. So we know from that that they were definitely up in the illusions during the war. We know a bit more about her service after the war. All the way through the 70s, our boat and the sister ship would go up to Alaska every summer and work on marine surveys and nautical charts. They'd maintain tide stations, and they'd do a little bit of search and rescue, but I think it was mostly the charting work that kept them busy. And then in the winter, they would be tied up at the Noah Pier on Lake Union, but also would do surveys. For example, I know in the early 1960s there was what's called a wire drag survey of Elliott Bay, where they actually took a long cable, strung it between the two boats, and just moved it along to see if the cable hit anything, because that was the only reliable way to know if there were underwater obstructions. Did you know much about her history before you bought her? Not much, really. And I knew that she'd been a government boat, and I knew what she had done since the mid-70s, since I'd been watching her, which was basically sit at the dock. The prior owner took her out maybe twice a year, but usually only once a year. So she'd sat at the dock for a long time, and I really didn't know much about the history, but after we bought her, I was on a business trip to Washington, DC, and I went to the National Archives and looked up some records. And so we started learning more and more. I was a bit of an amateur historian, so it was interesting. Uh, we found a really good book about uh the war in the Aleutian Islands that uh it's one of the few books written that's a really detailed account of it that didn't mention our boat specifically, but it talked about survey boats in general, so we assume that ours was one of the ones that was being discussed.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Have you ever met uh former crew members or people that remembered her in Alaska?

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Yes. We've met a number of former crewmen. They've contacted us or they've just wandered by the boat at boat shows, and they're always pretty delighted to see the boat, and they've talked about their adventures. We met one guy who was the electrician on the boat, and as quasi military boats did in the 1940s, it it they still had surprisingly large masts. So our boat has two 32-foot masts that stand 40 feet above the water for no particular good reason, but the forward mast at the time had a big radar on the top, and he told us that the only time the radar ever quit, he thought, was at night in a driving rainstorm, so he would then have to climb up the mast and be working on the radar. So we we heard stories like that, and we found when we were actually doing demolition in the forward cabins, I found this whole what I think was a clandestine lighting system because we were told that it was lights out for the crew when they turned off the generator at 9 or 10 p.m. But they had apparently secretly run wires all around and they had this big old, it looked like a flashlight battery or something, so that the crewmen could have secret lights after they weren't supposed to. And they were all hidden behind panels with little tiny holes where you could push the wires in and pull them out. So so they must have had quite a bit of fun.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Does knowing her working purpose affect how you care for her at all?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Well, it does in the sense that I do think it's a piece of history, not a giant piece, but a small but interesting piece. And we've always felt like we have an obligation to the boat to just not let it deteriorate and rot away, as happens to so many old wooden boats. And as long as it's feasible, my wife often says this our goal is to have her be in as good or better shape when we are finished with her as she was when we we got her. And uh I think we're gonna succeed in that.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

That's great. You've mentioned in the past that the engine was special. What's this engine story?

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Well, it's got the original 1940 engines. They're called Cooper Bessemers, which is a type of industrial engine that's quite rare. They were used in locomotives and power plants, but not very often in boats. Usually, if they were in boats, it was military boats. And they were they were sort of a middle technology, I would say, between the very old, slow-turning, extremely heavy, all manual engines of the 1920s and the more modern engines that were developed during World War II. So they're slow turning. We cruise at about 400 RPM, and they're they're quite heavy. The engines weigh about 20,000 pounds apiece. The uh pistons are eight inches in diameter. Everything is like a six-cylinder engine except four times as big. And the beauty of them is that uh they're extremely quiet. The sound is almost pleasing, and they have virtually no vibration. So when we're running, most of the places on the boat you can't even hear the engines running. All you hear is the water swishing by. And I like all equipment so it's always been fun for me to maintain the engines and learn how to operate them and even now I'm still learning things about the engines that make me a better steward and I think they run better now than they did when we bought the boat. Well I know they did because when we bought the boat the engines hadn't been run in two years and no one would no one knew if they would actually start or not. So we were able to get them started and they've been getting better ever since.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Very interesting. What did that experience teach you about the boat?

SPEAKER_01 22:28

The experience of the engines, you mean?

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Well I had to decide early on when we owned her what we would do as far as modernization. And we had initially actually thought we would have to take the engines out and put modern engines in. And the experience with the engines where we got them running and we thought oh these are quite nice. And incidentally they're also fuel efficient. This boat goes faster on less fuel than my previous boat, the 55 foot Alaskan even though it weighs four times as much. So that's partly due to the hull design but partly due to the efficiency of the engines. And we I learned from that that I shouldn't just tear out the old equipment. I should see if I could get it working and if it made sense to keep it I would keep it and if it didn't either due to too much maintenance or just didn't do the do the job or parts were too hard to get then I'd replace it with something more it turns out that never came. Not for the main engines, no I hope they'll be there the life of the boat because I think they're really the the heart of the boat. We recently replaced all of the exhaust and put new mufflers in and now they're even quieter than they were before. It's just it's just really everyone who goes on the boat is just amazed how fun it is to hear the engines chugging along quietly and they burn very cleanly when they're warm, put out any fumes or exhaust really well they put out exhaust obviously but no smoke or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

Aaron Ross Powell When you look at the way Summer Wind was built, what do you notice about the craftsmanship and the people who built her?

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Well I know a little bit about this other than just looking at the boat because uh a friend of mine is his father was the yard foreman of the shipyard, the builder which was the Astoria shipyard. This was the biggest boat they'd ever built and as far as I could tell they took an incredible amount of care in doing it. I'm told that they they actually cut all of the structural lumber one year before they started construction and they let it dry and season for a year and then they started lofting the boat and and building it and everything is very heavy because of the design. I wouldn't say it's beautiful like fine furniture I would say it's more beautiful in that everything fits and is very solid. The knees on the boat for example are at the top they're about two feet long at least and eight inches wide and most of the ceiling beams are eight by eights although some of them are eight by sixteen. So they're just massive pieces of wood and they're they're carefully beveled and I believe although I don't know this for sure that there weren't any power tools used other than large saws and things all of the bolts holes and all of the woodwork is done by hand with chisels and hand augers.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

You mentioned the last time we talked that they use Monell fasteners what does that say about the build quality?

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Well that was the best that you could get at the time in this era most or nearly all boats were fastened with steel or galvanized screws. These boats were fastened with Monell spikes and at the time Monell was extremely expensive. I don't think any private person could afford Monell but of course the government could I think they wanted to have the very best and I've always said it was the boat was built with the very best materials and technology that were available in 1940 and some of it has lasted to this day obviously some of it has had to be replaced but the fasteners for example when we have to replace a plank we carefully save the fasteners and use them again because they look like they're brand new.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Do you feel working on the boat connects you to the original builders?

SPEAKER_01 26:05

I think it does it I see the little things that they've done and I and I appreciate it. I hope that whatever work I do can match what they did. There are some areas where I think I've improved for example they didn't worry much about looks so when they wanted to run a cable or when they needed a wire on the other side of the cabin they would just take this big heavy steel sheath it was it's called bomb proof cable that the military used and they would just run it right across the middle of the ceiling. They didn't really care about hiding it behind anything. So so I think to that sense we've made it look less utilitarian.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

You and Tammy have taken Summer Wind to Desolation Sound almost every year since you've owned her what does that place and the annual return mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Well it's very special we we absolutely love Desolation Sound it's it's the only place I know of where you get the combination of just beautiful scenery desolation there's no roads there for the most part and although some people say it's overrun with boats I think on a square per square mile basis it's still pretty empty and if you know where to go you can almost always be by yourself and we're often in places where there's no other person or structure in sight anywhere. And that's special and then you're you're surrounded by these beautiful snow capped mountains. And on top of all of that in the summer the water is warm enough to swim. The water is warmer than anywhere north of about San Diego. So that combination just makes it really special for us.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Do you still carry any dreams of a longer voyage?

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yes in fact at some point after we'd owned the boat for 10 or 12 years we hatched a plan to take her down the west coast through the Panama Canal through the Caribbean and to Europe through the Mediterranean and we were going to take a year sabbatical and various realities stopped us from doing that. So Tammy and I promised ourselves that as a substitute take some long trips on the boat after we retired. And we've now just recently retired. So this fall our plan is to go down to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and spend the winter there. And we had planned on taking her up to Alaska but I just recently had a leg injury that is going to shelve that plan. But hopefully we'll get back up to Alaska. We we were able to take a couple of long trips when I had sabbaticals at work when our kids were young, circumnavigated Vancouver Island so we went to all the sounds on the west side of Vancouver Island one year and then we went to southeast Alaska the other year. And I'd love to go back to Southeast Alaska because I recently learned that our boat did the first modern survey of Glacier Bay National Park. Wow. So we've got some old draft charts and things and we have some pictures of the boat in tied up in Elfin Bay when there's nothing there. Wow well the David B just went up there a few weeks ago and took 96 hours so yeah they're up there every year and uh we would have loved to join them this year but maybe next year.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

Your wife Tammy has brought a wonderful way of describing wooden boat ownership sometimes the boat is winning and sometimes you're winning. After 33 years how do you think about responsibility of caring for summer wind?

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Well we we do feel that is a big responsibility and I think in the last couple of years in particular when I was trying to wind down my career so I had more time I decided to devote my spare time to really doing improvements on the boat. I think a lot of the time when we we were busy with young family and work and all of that, we only had time to fix the things that were broken and to keep a modicum of paint on the wood so that it wouldn't deteriorate. But now we've had time to actually do improvements including repairing some things that we know we knew for 30 years needed repair but were big jobs and uh we just didn't get to it. For example we replaced the the entire stack and all the exhaust pipes last spring and then in the fall we we renovated two new cabins in the in the aft area which is something we'd always want to do to to make the boat a little bit more livable for our guests.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

So what does the boat winning look like and what does it look like when you're winning?

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Well I often liken it to I I read this story once about the man or the men who painted the Golden Gate Bridge and how they felt on the day when they got all the way done with one end and they were told to go back and start again because they'd been painting for three years or whatever and the part that they'd painted at the beginning needed it again. And I often think about that if I'm going down one side of the boat or something and painting something and I get to the end and I have this great sense of accomplishment and then I realize it's only half. I've got to do the other half now. So I would say there are times when the paint and the finishes are deteriorating faster than we can renovate them. Because the wood is so good and solid and tight grained it it actually holds paint very well. There are portions of the boat that we've never painted. So the paint is at least 30 years old and it's still in good shape. That's amazing but there are other portions especially the ones that are exposed to weather and so forth and a few areas where I think they didn't use quite the best quality wood where more frequent painting is required. And so there are definitely times when level of spin and polish is not very high and we've never aspired to make the boat look perfect at all times because we can't and that just detracts from enjoying it I think but we've tried to keep her in generally good shape and sometimes we're closer to that goal and sometimes we're further away from that goal. But one thing we've never compromised on is is either structure or safety. If we see something that's part of the structure of the boat that needs fixing then How does the boat speak to you? I was thinking about that because you you asked me that the other day and I and I thought about it as I was down on the boat even as as recently as this morning and I'm not a particularly sentimental person so I don't hear you know ghosts of people past or anything. But I I do think that when I get on the boat there's this calmness it's just quiet. It's very rarely visibly rocks around to the point you can feel it because it's you know it's a both it weighs 200 tons. It's quite heavy it's got an eight and a half foot draft. But it has a slight amount of movement all the time which is peaceful and soothing and when you go inside it's you know warm in the winter and it's cool in the summer and it has a distinctive smell which I love and it just makes me feel at at peace I guess. And Tammy and I always remark to each other when we go on a trip, there's always a last minute frenzy of packing and getting ready and everything. And as soon as we cast off the lines and start the engines and and we're going, it's just this great feeling of peacefulness. We know we can't go faster than about eight and a half knots and the scenery's going to go by and uh and we say oh we just love it. I wish we'd be I wish we're able to do more of this.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

I'm curious what's it like to take a nap on on your boat when it's moving or any wood boat that you've been on. Well it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 33:45

I think wood boats are are more comfortable to sleep on. They're quieter. I've certainly been on fiberglass and steel boats and you hear the slap slap of every wave and we don't hear that and wood's a wonderful insulator so if you heat up the cabins they stay heated up and I actually put some insulation in the ceiling when we remodeled our cabins but I've concluded that that really wasn't even necessary because the uh deck planking is two and a half to three inches thick and it's pretty good insulation on its own. So it's warm, quiet. We sleep better on the boat than we do ashore, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

Aaron Ross P you mentioned that your father helped you with work aboard Summer Wind and that sometimes you come across something the two of you did together. How has the boat become a keeper of family memories?

SPEAKER_01 34:36

Well as I mentioned my father was a former boat mechanic and he he was the kind of person who would tackle any project regardless of the size. He was never he never turned away from anything because he thought it was just too difficult or too daunting and and I'd like to think that he taught me a certain amount of that which gave me the courage to take on a boat that was four times the size of any other boat I'd ever operated with direct reversing engines, which we should talk about. And after we got the boat at various times he spent a lot of time helping me uh on a lot of the construction work and the mechanical work. I really enjoyed that time with him. He's passed away now almost five years ago so sometimes I'll see things that he and I did together and it will bring back fond memories of of working with him.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

When you've been working on the boat have you come across any objects that seem that were hidden?

SPEAKER_01 35:37

Oh yes these days it's mostly objects that I put there years ago and then forgot where they were I recently found an entire drawer of first generation Nintendo video games which uh turn out to be they've gotten to the point where everyone threw them away and now they're valuable again and I had them sitting in a drawer forgotten for decades. But I definitely still find things I I have a whole drawer of specialized tools that prior owners had made I'm sure that the government had made and I don't know what most of them do but I keep hoping that if I have to change something or replace something that's really hard to do, I'll think of one of those tools and I and I'll think oh I've got exactly the tool for that. When we first bought the boat we had a quite unusual discovery. It was actually our surveyor who called and told us that he had found an urn with human remains on the boat back behind one of the drawers. So apparently one of the prior owner's relatives had wanted his ashes scattered and they never got around to it so he'd been riding around there for for a long time. But but I do still find little cubby holes that I'd never never seen before. They're sometimes interesting objects. As a matter of fact just last winter I found a pair of what look like homemade wooden sandals. They're almost like clogs with that someone has carved the shape of a foot and then put canvas over them and I'm sure it was one of the crew back in the 30s or 50s made himself some shoes and stuck them in this hole and then uh then we found them. I've also found navy issue long underwear.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

So I think we're pretty much through all of our pre-ownership items now but who knows there might be more Dave I'm really curious about your engine and um I think you mentioned to me that in order to go to in reverse you have to stop the engine. Could you tell me more about that?

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Sure it's a system called direct reversing engines and when when we first bought the boat and I learned that that was the system aboard well I first noticed that there were no gearboxes and I asked the uh there was an engineer who was who was helping the seller sell it. I said where are the gearboxes and he explained to me well they don't have gearboxes they're direct reversing which means that if you want to go in reverse you have to shut the engine down and start it up running backwards. And the engines both have systems where you can shift the camshafts from forward running to reverse running and prior to the time that we owned it that was done by an engineer standing down in the engine room responding to telegraph signals. We still have the old marine telegraph but by the time we bought the boat pneumatic controls had been added so you could do all of that from the pilot house. But it's still difficult to get used to that if you're heading to a dock and you want to go backwards, what you have to do is shut the engines down. And I'll I will say the the quiet that you hear when you're heading right to the dock wanting to reverse but knowing you have to wait a few seconds is about the quietest longest period ever. And I was very nervous about this when I first bought the boat and then I found out that essentially all tugboats for 50 years had the same system and large ships including freighters still have this system. So the freighters we see coming into Puget Sound are direct reversing as well. So I thought if they can do it I can do it. It took some practice but I've learned to maneuver the boat one of the things that I learned is you don't have to always have the engine in gear forward or backwards. Coasting is a good thing. So when I come into the dock 80% of the time I've got the engines off and I'm just coasting along and I have had a few people yell to me start your engines start your engines not realizing that this was part of the plan. But it was pretty intimidating at first until I got used to it.

SPEAKER_00 39:40

So neutral is a stopped engine.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

Yes exactly so doing things like going into the locks at three or four knots and making no noise definitely makes people nervous.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

Yeah is there any chance that the telegraph does that for you or is it now just a piece of memorabilia? It's just a piece of memorabilia.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Tammy made it very clear to me that she would not be the one down in the engine room responding to the telegraph controls. But we've always had full control from the pilot house. And the telegraph was actually off the boat when we bought it but we just thought it looked cool it's a big brass telegraph and so we reinstalled it and I actually reinstalled all the wires so the bells still work. Neat kids who come aboard love to ring the bells and you know see how this how the system worked way back.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

That's really neat after thirty years with summer wind raising children aboard her working on her cruising with her discovering her history and now thinking of future voyages and future custodians what do you think the boat has given back to you and Tammy?

SPEAKER_01 40:48

She's given us back a tremendous amount she gave us a unique comfortable home for many years and she's given us a lot of memorable trips. She's taken us places that would be very difficult or impossible to go otherwise and in great comfort we we could sit in the most remote anchorage and have our morning latte in comfort and that's a wonderful thing. And I think she's given us a sense of having something that's worth keeping and maintaining. People feel that way about their houses and things but it's very rare you have a something as unique as this in some ways it's a it's it's like a giant piece of you know furniture you might have inherited from your grandmother or something. And it's I think given us a a sense of responsibility. Personally it gave me an endless opportunity to exercise different parts of my brain than I exercised in my job, which was essentially a desk job. And I always really enjoyed that. I loved going down to the engine room on the weekends or at nights trying to figure out some plumbing problem because it was so different than the work that I did during the day. So it's it's given us an awful lot and that's in part why I think we feel a responsibility towards the boat. And we're now starting to think about who the next steward is going to be and and what that's going to look like. We're not done with her yet but we can see that on the horizon. So that's a difficult conversation and a difficult thought because she's been so much part of our lives for so long.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

Have you ever thought of her as a member of the family?

SPEAKER_01 42:33

Well yeah I think I think we definitely did. Our kids when we moved off the boat they both cried and cried they were so sad that uh and we had to bribe them with a dog because we said if we move off the boat then you can have a dog and they were a little bit mollified by that, but they still love coming back and going out on the boat, as do we.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

That's great. What would you want people to understand about wooden boats that they might not see from the dock?

SPEAKER_01 43:02

Well first I would say the maintenance as it relates to the wooden part of the boat is is not as daunting as you might think. If you get a good quality boat that's made out of good solid wood and has been well maintained, I'm not sure that the amount of time you spend on maintenance is that much more than a modern fiberglass boat. Wooden boats had their designs refined over thousands of years to work well in the sea because they have a little bit of movement and flexibility rather than being rigid and uh that allows them to last longer and to give you a more comfortable ride. And I would say we're lucky because we live near areas like the Porthounds and shipyard that's have craftsmen that can work on them. And so even the significant replacement projects like we had to replace about a quarter of our foredeck last winter unexpectedly turn out to be very doable tasks. So I would tell people the extra maintenance does not outweigh the benefits of quietness and comfort and just the peace, the extra peace that you get on a wooden boat.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

Well Dave, I really want to thank you for your time you spent with me and sharing your stories.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Well thank you it's been a pleasure and uh I've really enjoyed talking about it and hope I haven't turned people off from old wooden boats.

SPEAKER_00 44:26

Oh I don't think you have thanks again. You're welcome thanks for listening to Beyond the Boat. If you enjoyed this episode follow the show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and share it with a friend so they can come aboard too. If you believe these voices matter and you want to help keep the show afloat you can support an episode or set up a small monthly contribution via the Buy Me Coffee link in the episode description. If something in this episode resonated with you I'd love to hear from you. These stories grow stronger when they're shared. Send your comments and feedback to BT Boat podcast at gmail dot com that's btboatpodcast at gmail dot com I'm Leroy Lewis see you next time