I enjoyed a sit-down chat last week with Judson “Jud” Linnabary, president of Platypus Marine Inc, the full-service shipyard on Marine Drive in Port Angeles.
The company offers a full range of repair and refurbishing services for small pleasure craft to luxury yachts as well as commercial fishing vessels.
Additionally, the company was awarded a 5-year Navy contract late last year to provide maintenance service on vessels that are stationed at Bremerton and at the torpedo-repair facility in Keyport.
And now Platypus is going to start building steel boats.
Since early March, carpenters, electricians and cement finishers have been working on a concrete slab that is 85 feet wide and 160 feet long between the west side of the turquoise blue Commander Building and the eastern perimeter of Westport Shipyard’s facility.
Particular care was taken to ensure that the finished slab is absolutely level because it is the platform on which the boats will be constructed.
Long pieces of grounded steel channel are imbedded into the slab and are integral to the construction of the boat, because as she begins to rise above the level of the work surface, she will be welded to these pieces of channel.
Jud said once the concrete is completely set — an additional three weeks or so — the company’s Rubb Building will be moved onto it.
The Rubb is a versatile steel hoop structure that is covered with a heavy canvas fabric.
It is moveable, and although the width is fixed, the building’s length can be adjusted by sliding the forward section — telescope fashion — into and out of the rear section.
The boat to be built, a 58-foot-limit seiner with a 25-foot beam, was designed by Hal Hockema of Seattle.
Jud explained that a Seattle company will cut all the steel for the project on a computer numerical control, or CNC, machine.
When the steel arrives at Platypus Marine, all of the pieces of the boat will be coated with a steel-abraded primer and numbered.
Then assembly of the boat will be much like a paint-by-number set: Piece No. 1 goes next to piece No. 2, which sits next to No. 3 and so on until the boat is completed.
According to Jud, most of the construction crew will be local, although there will be a few individuals who will come from out of the area.
The plan is to have a crew assemble and fit the pieces together during the day, and a crew of welders working at night to weld the pieces together.
A local fabricator will construct the aluminum wheelhouse, and an Alaskan firm will install the refrigeration.
The final woodworking, electrical installations and painting will be done by current Platypus Marine employees.
Jud said there are competing theories within the commercial fishing industry about building a new boat versus refurbishing and re-equipping older boats when they begin to approach the end of their useful life — which is typically about 25 years.
Although Jud was asked by a longtime client to build the boat, he sees an opportunity in the future to fill the needs of experienced fisherman who would rather build a new working platform than refurbish or deal with the inevitable, untimely and costly breakdowns that come with operating older equipment.
Week’s highlight
The big waterfront news of the week occurred Wednesday morning: Great fun was had by a whole slew of folks welcoming the arrival of the Holland America Line cruise ship, ms Oosterdam, at the Port of Port Angeles’ Terminal 1 North.
She was in port for about 11 hours, and hundreds of her passengers and crew took the opportunity to enjoy Port Angeles’ hospitality.
Busloads of visitors were transported to a number of different venues, while some visited downtown businesses and yet others just wanted to stretch their legs while dodging raindrops as best they could.
Mike Nimmo, terminal facilities manager for the Port of Port Angeles, was the voice on the ground that communicated by radio with the Puget Sound pilot who brought the ship to the dock.
Mike had told me earlier that the pilot aboard the Oosterdam had visited the port Tuesday and they discussed the exact placement of the ship.
It was impressive to watch her come alongside the dock without any assistance from a tug and nary a bump to be felt when the ship settled against the pier’s fenders.
Eight longshoremen were on hand for the line-handling duties, and Arrow Launch had one of its launches at the bow to secure the head-line to the dolphin.
Once all of the lines were secured and the ship was moored, Mike Boogaard used the boom truck that belongs to his employer, Straits Marine & Industrial Inc., to position the gangway — and the port call was officially under way!
The Oosterdam left Port Angeles and headed to Vancouver, B.C., where she was moored for 18 hours before getting under way for Lahaina, Hawaii.
She is due there Wednesday for a 12-hour stopover, after which she will head back to the West Coast and be in Seattle for her first trip of the season to Alaska on May 6.
New name, new life
Shortly after the Oosterdam got under way from Terminal 1 North, the Astoria Bay moored to Terminal 3.
She is a 610-foot cargo ship that is in port until about Wednesday taking on a load of logs destined for China that were harvested off Merrill & Ring’s private land holdings.
She was recently acquired by her current owners and renamed Astoria Bay.
She was formerly known as Dry Beam, a vessel not unfamiliar to many readers of this column and I suspect to more than a handful of MV Coho patrons who saw her moored at Victoria’s Ogden Point in early February.
In late January, Dry Beam was hit by a rogue wave about 300 miles northwest of Vancouver Island.
The wave, thought to be nearly 50 feet high, struck the ship on the port side, causing a shift of the deck cargo toward the starboard side which overloaded the stanchions that restrain the topside load.
The stanchions gave way under the additional weight of the shifted load, and a number of logs fell overboard while simultaneously destroying many of the stanchions.
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy and the Canadian Coast Guard cutter J.P. Tully responded to the ship’s mayday call and escorted her to Ogden Point.
Barge cranes offloaded the remaining deck cargo and stowed it on the dock, and when the vessel was deemed seaworthy, she got under way for Kashima, Japan, where her remaining cargo was offloaded and repairs undertaken.
The logs that were moved off Dry Beam’s deck were subsequently moved to another location at Ogden Point and ground into chips for use as garden mulch.
The public was offered the opportunity to purchase the mulch for a donation to the Mustard Seed Food Bank in downtown Victoria.
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David G. Sellars is a Port Angeles resident and former Navy boatswain’s mate who enjoys boats and strolling the waterfronts.
Items involving boating, port activities and the North Olympic Peninsula waterfronts are always welcome. Email dgsellars@
hotmail.com or phone him at 360-808-3202.
His column, On the Waterfront, appears every Sunday.