Landing in Kodiak / the Commander history and construction

There was snow on the ground in Kodiak.

  A small knot of people, bundled against the chilly wind milled around waiting to greet the passengers as we emerged from the tail end of the airplane directly onto the tarmac.  It was the only time I ever saw the stairway at the back of those planes used, couldn’t help but visualize D.B. Cooper standing on the threshold of fortune or doom as he stepped into history clutching the suitcase full of cash a year or so earlier.  My last step out of the jet liner wasn’t quite so far, just a few inches onto the thin layer of old crusted snow marked with countless foot and tire tracks, the mid morning sun chasing last night’s light dusting of fresh white powder into the shadows.  Phil or Tom hadn’t appeared in the crowd by the time the baggage carts came around from the far side of the plane for us to claim, so I tossed mine into the open back of a shuttle van and settled in for the short ride back to the town. 

The wide dark gray gravel road skirted open water on the right, hills rising sharply inland along a narrow strip of relatively flat land that connected the natural bowl in which the Navy base and air field were situated and the open area where the town was built, behind protective islands three or four miles further to the northwest.   Coming around a bend I suddenly caught a great view of the Commander lying at the face of a fish plant wharf, looking very beautiful mostly in shadow, a patch of bright sunlight gleaming off the white painted high bow with its unique row of port holes contrasting very black along the side half way between the water and the foredeck.  Most fishermen love to see their boats from different angles and perspectives.  A great view from a distance like this road can have a visceral reaction in the pit of the stomach not unlike the anticipation of seeing a new lover.  A guy I used to know showed up one day with his head bandaged and bloody, “You know how you always try to get a look at your boat from the Ballard bridge?”  We all did.   “Well, I was coming back from Blackwell’s yesterday with a couple hunks of iron wood laid over the back seats in my station wagon when the son of a bitch in front of me on the bridge hit his brakes.  By the time I got my car stopped the god damned boards skipped across the seats and smashed into my head.”

The view from the van was safer, and with a few seconds to watch her before the driver pulled off the road, down into the wide apron on the beach side of the plant I had a good relaxing look.  I decided that her profile wasn’t quite as graceful from this angle as the pictures in my mind suggested.   The bow came out of the water at a sharper line, without as much flair as I liked, giving her a bit of an awkward appearance.  Not that there weren’t lots of boats around that were much worse to be sure, but she didn’t quite have the same beauty as some of her newer generation cousins that were beginning to come on the scene during those years.   In a straight laced family, where many of us were raised as stubborn creationists the word evolutionary step may not be well received, but the profile of the Commander did represent a transitional step in the way west coast fishing hulls between seventy five and ninety feet in length were being designed during the middle years of the century.  Compared to the long history of wood boat construction the transition from sail power to internal combustion engines is a relatively recent event.  At first motors were installed in existing hulls, designed and built to be powered by sail, and the steam engine or gas put-put acted as an auxiliary power source to run deck winches and push the boat when there was little or no wind.  It wasn’t long before guys realized that they could build some kind of little deck house with windows across the front to see where they were going, and let the engine push the boat along while they stayed inside warm and dry, freed from the hassle of fucking around with heavy wet sales all the time.  I knew guys who were still working the fishing grounds, trolling for salmon well into the seventies and beyond, in sailing hulls that were fitted out with engines back in the twenties, masts cut off at the first step above the deck, brought around from the north east when changes in the business rendered them obsolete in their original home ports.  Beautiful to look at from a distance, these hulls also performed well in most conditions, but were not that good bucking directly into the sea.  The bow of a sailing hull is much lighter with a steep angle from waterline to the flat part of the keel.  This shape and weight distribution improves the way she handles under sail, but really sucks when the hull is being pushed directly into big waves under engine power.  Not enough bulk and reserve buoyancy to climb over the waves without diving through an occasional big one, washing the decks with tons of foaming sea water.   The next generation of hull design shared many characteristics with the older sailing boats, narrow in proportion to length, deep draft in the stern with smooth curves between waterline and keel.  The change was in the forefoot, front ten to twenty percent of the hull length under the waterline.

Saturn, nearly identical profile to Commander

   To create the extra bulk and buoyancy needed for meeting the sea head on shipwrights extended the keel all the way forward in a straight line, raked upward just a bit so that the draft of the hull was only a foot or two shallower at the bow than in the stern.  The increased weight and volume up front improved the hulls ability to jump up over most of the oncoming seas when heading straight up into the wind under power.  The classic west coast halibut schooners that dominated the long-line fishing trade from around the turn of the nineteenth century until well into the sixties represented this transitional step in the evolution between sail and power.  Relatively narrow beam, fine line of curve in the sheer line from stern to bow, deep draft with a small deck house located on a slightly raised deck aft of mid-ship area.  They were as graceful to the eye as they were tough at sea.  Having the working deck located in front of the wheel house is very useful in a fishery like long lining, where the skipper needs to maneuver the boat to stay over the line as it is hauled up from the bottom.  In other kinds of fishing, where heavy nets have to be set and pulled from the stern of the boat the old schooner design is less efficient.  The next step, was to put the engine and wheel house in the front part of the boat, leaving the back area open for a working the nets, or fishing lines. 

The design of the Commander represented a second generation of this deck house forward plan.  The profile of the older boats had remained roughly the same as sailing hulls, a more or less unbroken curve, slightly flatter in the middle than at each end, turned up a bit more in the front third of the length than the back.  The deck house would be built onto the foredeck, beginning roughly in the middle of the boat, care taken to keep the lines consistent with the sheer, with just enough deck space on either side for access to the bow area in front of the house so that the crew could get around to access the anchor wench and tie up lines.  At some point along the way a heavy sawn timber extension to the hull was added above the deck level along the front section of the hull, called the bulwark.  This added strength to the bow and added two or three feet to the height of the bow improving her ability to work up wind.   Another improvement in larger vessels was to move the wheel house from the front of the deck house into a small top house, located on the roof of the main cabin.  With a bit more distance from the sea and the row of windows removed from the main house this design not only offered a better view from the wheel house while traveling, but added to the boats sea keeping characteristics especially bucking up into the wind.

By the time the Commander came along, probably built just before the war, her designers took things a couple steps further.  Originally built as a tuna seiner, requiring a large crew to handle the heavy net on and off the boat, the layout of hull and deck house were modified.    Without loosing the classic curved shape of a traditional sawn timber stern the aft section was more squared than previous generations of boats in that size range.  This not only increased the volume in the hull to improve packing capacity, but also added to the functional working area on the back deck.  The bulker aft section of the boat also added to her sea keeping characteristics when running in a following sea.  As the Old Man used to say, turning hat boat down wind was like shutting the storm off, suddenly everything went quiet and the old hull just rolled along under you as if she were idling across Lake Union.

The most striking change in design, at least in the way she looked from the outside, was the front half of the hull above the waterline.  The deck house was replaced with a step in the hull at about the middle, raising the sides of the boat up seven or eight feet to create a much larger enclosed space at the same level as the working deck extending all the way up to the bow.  This deck plan was common in larger ships, naval destroyers began to look like this by the late teens or twenties, and during the was wood mine sweepers that weren’t a whole lot bigger than the Commander were produced, but at least around our neck of the woods she and three other similar hulls I can think of were the oldest fishing boats to be built along these lines.  The galley and crew quarters in this area were quite a bit larger, comfortably housing more people than the older deck house plan.  Another advantage was a larger foredeck on which a good sized wheel house and chart room were built.  With more room than the little top houses in older boats this space was much better suited for the new electronics that began to be installed in these working boats after the war, which in the age of vacuum tube technology tended to be heavy and bulky, very difficult to fit into the tiny spaces previously available in these boats. 

The raised foredeck style, also called a whale back design proved to be a superior configuration for a lot of reasons, and after about the middle years of the century virtually all hulls over about sixty or seventy feet in length were built along these lines.  Probably the reason that the old Commander looked a bit clunky to my eye that morning, where she had been the very image of earthly beauty a few years before was the appearance of the newer generation of boats in her class into which marine architects had included a bit more flair in the bow and added grace to the flow of line and curve in the sheer.   

These pictures and a thousand other thoughts flooded through my mind in the moment it took to huck my bag over my shoulder in the parking lot of the fish plant as the van wheeled around and ground its way back up to the high way.  The first time I ever saw that boat, must have been a Friday after Thanksgiving in one of those late childhood years when that holiday was longer than an average month is now, and a year between the turkey table and Christmas tree. Uncle Simon had taken Jon and I with him down to Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle for the afternoon.  I am not sure where he went, or where my brother Justin was that day, but Jon and I were left alone to explore the boat with no one else around.  To this day, every time I open a can of Never Dull metal polish my mind jumps back to the moment when Jon slid the heavy galley door open and led me into the big dimly lit mess room, huge to our eyes in shadow of a single dull yellow light bulb.  Reminiscent of the scene in Cain Mutiny, when Willie and the other green ensign were ordered to explore the ship from bilge to mast, Jon and I scrambled through every space large enough for two boys to fit. Down the ladder into the engine room through an opening in the bulkhead into the cavernous fish hold and back through another open plug in the bulkhead, between heavy black oil tanks to the small steering gear room in the stern, where he showed me how a system of chains and pulleys connected the rudder with the wheel house and bridge above.  A few months before there had been an argument in the back seat of our car, when Jon allowed as how the engine in another family boat, the J.B. was as big as my dad’s ’56 Chev station wagon.  Justin and I were sure he was full of bull.  But no, here I was standing next to a six cylinder engine, the top of the heads as high as I could reach; if anything it was bigger than Jon had said it would be.  We climbed the ladder into the wheel house, large dark varnished steering wheel with compass in the middle. It was nearly dusk and we dared each other the climb the rigging up to the crow’s nest twenty feet above the top deck, a small platform at the top of the mast, open at a guys shoulder level, from which crews in an earlier life of the boat has watched for tuna fish off the coasts of California and Mexico.  That feature was no longer needed, and when Phil took over management of the boat from the older generation he had it removed, and had also replaced the old wire rope cable the rigging with a steel pipe tripod, increasing the overall strength of the mast and boom that had to lift very heavy loads during the fishing operation.

Simon had bought a thirty percent share of the Commander, probably around nineteen sixty one.  For years he had owned a smaller dragger named the Meldon, which was sold about the same time that the big old house on Brooklyn went to a parking lot company and they got out of the nursing home business.  Norma went to work as school nurse out in Shoreline, they began extensive remodeling on the little beach cabin, starting with dividing the garage into two bedrooms for Simone and Jon, and Simon got himself a little two pump gas station up on Ballanger way, half way between the lake and high way 99.  It was the classic filling station, probably dating from model T days, with a tiny office, two dingy restrooms behind and a single bay on the side with the hydraulic lift in the floor to raise cars for lube jobs and light repairs. 

No self serve in those days.  When a car pulled in a bell in the garage rang from an air filled black hose that lay across the pavement in front of the gas pumps and the attendant trotted out to take the order.  “Fill her with regular and check the tires.”  Sometimes Jon and Justin and I would walk up form the house and spend the afternoon waiting on cars, washing windshields and checking oil for a dollars worth of gas.  I remember one day when Tommy and Jon and I were there, with uncle Millard supervising.  He felt it was necessary to carefully explain to every driver, in his best mid west academic voice, why it was that three rowdy pre teen boys were running the gas station.    

If memory serves me, which it probably doesn’t but I will tell the story anyway, the day that Simon told us about buying into the Commander Jon and Justin and I had been on duty in the station for a few hours, probably twenty minutes in adult time, when Simon and my Dad showed up to close the station and take us home for dinner.  From the back seat the boas listened intently to the old man, not so old then I guess, talking about the boat, particularly recall him stumbling over the description of the high bow.  Years later, long after the incidents outlined in this story, he filled in another interesting bit of color about that business move.  Purchasing his share in the boat from his older brother Olaf, always called ‘Oley’.  As the signatures were completed on the papers, Oley took a totally hard ass tone, saying, “If you are even one day late on the payment at the end of the season, I will take it back in an instant."

Harsh maybe, but on the other hand, business within family can be problematic and it is not at all uncommon for people who would make the payment to the bank on time to put off cutting the check to a parent or sibling.  Business between the older brothers in that family had been thriving throughout many years, with shared ownership in a variety of boats and business ventures, and there is no doubt in my mind that Oley knew how to set boundaries that were beneficial for all concerned.  By the time I found myself crunching through the snow toward the boat there in Kodiak I think Phil and Jon may have been in the process of purchasing Simon’s share of the boat, possibly taking over complete ownership,  although that part of the business I have either forgotten, or more likely never really knew.  Suffice to say that by then Phil had taken over the primary management position, at least skipper of the boat during the fishing season, and he was utilizing it throughout a much longer period of the year than in the days when they did the five month research charter and left it laid up in Seattle over the winter most years.

It was a couple minutes after noon, when I came around the corner onto the face of the fish plant dock.  The processing plant crew had disappeared for lunch break and the area that was usually a buzz of activity was deserted.   Normally there would be a boat or two lying under unloading hoists, a couple hundred feet further along the face of the dock.  Aluminum buckets looking a bit like outsized steins of beer, frothing with a mix of soiled flake ice and shrimp, shuttling from the holds of the boats into open totes, three or four hundred pounds at a time. The hum and grind of machinery, sound of spraying water mixing with shouts and laughter from the crew in the din of light beyond large open doors hung with heavy strips of translucent plastic.  Forklifts buzzing to and fro, shuttling the totes of fresh fish from the hoists to the bowls of the processing plant.   At the end closest to me, where the Commander lay an eighteen inch plastic hose connected to machinery in a loft ten feet overhead, which fed flaked ice from a freezer room into the boat’s fish hold for the next trip out.  The ice, when mixed with the shrimp a few minutes after they were caught kept them fresh until delivery into the plant.

On this particular afternoon, the Commander was the only boat around, and from the interior of the building the humming and clanking of processing were quiet, apparently there had been no deliveries that morning.  Under the ever present gulls calling to one another the drone and splash from the boat’s small auxiliary engine echoed between pilings and water under the wharf, sending a lower hum throughout the wood hull as it nudged the tar and barnacle crusted pilings, waiting her turn to be filled with ice for tomorrows trip out to the grounds.  The low familiar roar of the galley range caught my ear at the same time, soot blackened spinner at the top of a dull grey galvanized stove pipe, secured to the pipe rail at the back of the whale back deck, and again to a lower cross bar in the rigging ten feet above, hell for stout against the sea that occasionally washed over the bow and swept anything not tightly bolted down away in a flash. 

At that time of the tide most of the boat lay below the level of the dock.  She looked beautiful, all eighty five feet of her spread before my eyes.  Standing on the twelve by twelve timber on the edge of the dock I was about four feet above the upper deck, eye level with the top of the deck house.  Looking in through the row of rectangular windows that fronted the house I could see the big compass in its binnacle in front of the large shiny wood steering with turned spokes and handles all around, and the narrow varnished door leading into the stateroom behind.  Looking further back the whole setup of the boat looked trim and stout.  The drag gear hunkered down on the stern area, large steel doors lashed to heavily built stanchions on each side of the reel with the heavy net neatly wound and ready for action.  She was a thing of beauty to my eye, actually much more attractive from this angle than she had been from the road where I had been watching from the van window. 

Built with wood planks over a framework of bent oak ribs, it was just about the last generation of a five thousand year lineage carvel-built boats.   There were some large mine sweepers built with plank on frame during the World War Two era, but fiberglass and steel became much more common construction materials for boats of her size by the late fifties or before.  As the old growth forests disappeared, replaced with quick grown second crops of trees, the quality of wood necessary for boat building became increasingly scarce and expensive.  Then too, the precise measuring, cutting and fitting required to make a wooden boat hull is very labor intensive, and the cost of wood hulls went through the roof.  At the same time welding techniques greatly improved, and for a tough work boat, with nets and rigging banging around in thrashing seas, steel was a better choice anyway.

For a guy like me, who is much more into the esthetic of the experience than the cold realities of business, there is something about the old wooden boats that has been lost in steel construction.  Fiberglass and steel are flexible like the wood hull, but there is another dimension to wood that these newer materials lack.  Even in the work boat, where there is no room or time to install sound baffling materials around the machinery spaces, wood softens the roar of diesel engines and generators.  The sounds of the sea slapping against the boat as she works her way through rough water has a warmer quality in a wood hull, and the ride is better as well.  By ride, I mean the way the boat moves in the sea.  A wood hull with similar line and the same displacement (volume of water displaced by the interior of the hull) as a fiberglass or steel hull has the weight distributed more evenly throughout the hull and will have a softer motion as she jumps and rolls over the waves, even when running light at the beginning of a trip.

Walking a little way along the twelve by twelve, toward the middle of the boat where she nudged the pilings, moving slightly in the faint harbor surge, upper deck just two or three feet beyond the edge of the dock, I tossed my heavy duffel bag down to the deck and stepped across.  Planting one foot on the top pipe of the railing, slowing the momentum of the short jump with a hand on the eve of the deck house, the crape soles of Western Chief slippers lightly landing on black tar encrusted planks.  A since of mild elation went through my heart, first moment on board the storied old vessel as a crew member, not just an annoying kid under foot back at the terminal in town.  It felt damn good.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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