THE SEQUIM BAY Yacht Club will welcome its incoming bridge for 2011 on Wednesday, Dec. 8, at 7:30 p.m. at John Wayne Marina.
Jim Jones is the incoming commodore, who will be assisted by Phillip Walker as vice commodore and Judy Shanks as rear commodore.
Sandy Thomas is the new secretary. Missy Church-Smith will serve as assistant secretary.
Shirley Patterson will be installed as the treasurer, and the assistant treasurer will be Jim Fitzpatrick.
The current commodore, Jean Heessels-Petit, will serve as immediate past commodore. Trustees will be Larry Barnes, David Gittleman and George Brown.
In 1975, John Wayne, the iconic film actor, director and producer, donated acreage at Pitship Point on Sequim Bay to the Port of Port Angeles for the purpose of building a marina.
During his lifetime, the “Duke” owned two yachts, Norwester, a 76-foot vessel, and his more-famous Wild Goose, a 136-foot converted World War II minesweeper.
It was during his tenure as the owner of Wild Goose that he developed his fondness for the Pacific Northwest.
For years he spent the summer months cruising the local waters, visiting Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, and steaming up the Inside Passage to Alaska. When he was filming, Wayne made arrangements to fly in to meet up with the yacht on weekends.
His contribution of the marina property is the legacy of his love for the majesty of the Pacific Northwest.
Loading delay
Portland Bay, the 558-foot log ship that tied up to the Port of Port Angeles T-Pier on Nov. 15 to be loaded with 5 million board feet of logs, was able to leave port in time for her crew to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner on the high seas.
She was originally slated to get under way to South Korea and China last weekend, but the high winds and snow that plagued the area since her arrival backed up the timetable for the loading of cargo.
Northwest legacy
Throughout the years, thousands of vessels — from yawls to yachts, punts to powerboats, packets to purse seiners and trollers to trawlers as well as tugs and tank barges — have called the waters from Oregon to British Columbia and Alaska home.
For the most part, all that remains of this potpourri of waterborne craft are faded photographs and fuzzy memories.
However, some readers of this column might possess knowledge of older boats of historical significance.
And that knowledge might warrant inclusion in the Library of Congress.
Earlier this year, Sam Johnson, director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, spearheaded an initiative to catalog and document vessels of all types from the Northwest.
The documentation developed from this ambitious effort will be submitted to the Library of Congress for inclusion in the Historic American Engineering Record, or HAER.
HAER is administered by the National Park Service and maintained by the Library of Congress that documents, among other things, engineering achievements, buildings, ships and small-craft design in the United States and its territories.
HAER, and its counterparts, the Historic Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic Landscape Survey (HALS) are among the largest and most heavily used collections in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
These three archives alone include more than 556,900 measured drawings, large-format photographs and written histories for more than 38,600 historic structures, vessels and sites.
Numerous sites on the Olympic Peninsula have been documented on the HABS database.
The material in these extensive databases is free and available online at http://tinyurl.com/habshaer.
Measuring up
Pete Leenhouts, a board member of Port Townsend’s Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, and the school’s traditional small craft instructor, Jack Becker, recently spent time at Cama Beach State Park on Camano Island learning how to operate the non-invasive technology that is being utilized to document vessels.
Participants in the weeklong session, which included members of the Anacortes Marine Museum, the Ballard Nordic Heritage Museum, Gig Harbor BoatShop and staff at Cama Beach State Park, developed expertise in the use of computer-aided design, or CAD, systems to record a boat’s measurements.
The CAD systems used during the training allowed participants to see not only the vessel lines and details in three dimensions on a computer monitor, but to rotate and manipulate the data to gain a better understanding of the lines and, in turn, the shape of the vessel’s hull.
The next step in the process is to find vessels to document.
The aforementioned organizations have begun the hunt.
Some vessels were easy to find — they are in museums — but the bulk of the schooners, sloops, launches and skiffs that may be in our geographical reach have yet to be discovered.
And there is no telling where a historically important craft may reside.
In one instance, an old and rare small craft used for inshore fishing in Southeast Alaska was found in a garden on the Olympic Peninsula.
Anyone with information about older boats, barges, tugs or commercial fishing vessels are encouraged to contact Leenhouts or Becker at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding at 360-385-4948.
Or send them an e-mail through the school’s website at www.nwboatschool.org.
Bunkering up
On Monday — yes, THAT blustery Monday! — Tesoro Petroleum bunkered Alaskan Legend, a 905-foot crude oil tanker, in Port Angeles Harbor.
The tanker departed and was scheduled to arrive in Valdez, Alaska, at noon Saturday.
On Tuesday, Tesoro did not refuel any vessels — but I did see a note on the scheduling board made by one of the tankermen that he heard a noise in the attic but was too scared to look.
On Wednesday, Tesoro refueled Golden State, a 600-foot petroleum products tanker that then got under way for the refinery at Cherry Point.
On Saturday, Tesoro had its refueling barge alongside Alaskan Navigator, sister ship to the Alaskan Legend.
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David G. Sellars is a Port Angeles resident and former Navy boatswain’s mate who enjoys boats and strolling the waterfront.
Items involving boating, port activities and the North Olympic Peninsula waterfronts are always welcome.
E-mail dgsellars@hotmail.com or phone him at 360-417-3736.
His column, On the Waterfront, appears every Sunday.