the wheel house

Wheel house just out of the picture on the left - Max & Joel on the beach

On the southeastern side of Noyes Island, eighteen miles from Craig, is a quiet little spot called Kelly Cove. Except for a rare summer northeaster, the cove remains tranquil throughout the salmon season.  Just inside Cone Pass and the open ocean to the south, as well as protected fishing drags to the north, it has been a favorite refuge for trollers as long as the occupation has been in existence. Fed by a reliable fresh water source, a fish buying scow has been stationed there for just about as long. 

  

Almost perfectly rectangular, crowded by forest, two features used to mark the steep crescent of gravel at the head of the cove.  On the western side, where the gravel beach gives way to solid rock outcroppings, rests the memorial marker to an old timer from these parts, Tonto Bill. Ran the buying scow in the cove for many years. To the left, two thirds of the way around the hundred yards or so of open beach, a wooden wheelhouse from an old style troller could be seen peeking through the grass a few feet beyond the head of the beach.    

Story I heard went something like this.  One of the regular cove fishermen wasn’t feeling well one day, but decided to go out fishing anyway.  No one knows what happened, whether it was a heart attack, or he fell overboard, but he never returned.  Some time later, the dismembered wheelhouse of the lost fisherman’s boat came drifting with the tide back into the cove, came to rest against the float at the exact place where the old fisherman always put the boat at the end of the day.

In memorial to their lost friend, several of the guys drug the mysteriously returned wheelhouse up the beach and leveled it out where it remained for gosh only knows how many years.  It was not necessarily treated like a shrine, racks for smoking salmon had been fitted into when we got there, probably the folks who ran the scow before me. 

The last season I went out there, late nineties, we were disappointed to find the old wheel house had disappeared.  Except for one bit of painted wood in the area where it had been, there was not a trace of the legend anywhere.  Did an unusually high tide sweep it back out to sea, in search of its long lost boat and skipper?  Or did someone take it away?

As southeast Alaska rapidly becomes the same as any other part of the country, preservation of this kind of legend and artifact should be a priority.  If it still exists somewhere, one would hope that it could be saved as an example of life from a bygone era.

Photos from Kelly Cove buying scow in the 90s:

Angie coming around the corner from town

Joel pulled king salmon off the float

boys had bonfires up this beach, north side of the cove

first year we were there the boys pulled a few halibut from under the barge

NP-65 in Lake Union my summer home in the nineties