Steinbeck’s famous ‘Western Flyer’ sails back to Monterey after years of restoration

The original captain’s desk sits in the wheelhouse, where legendary author John Steinbeck may have jotted notes for his Log from the Sea of Cortez. A guy wire like the one he wrote would “sing under the wind,” stabilizes the mast. Nearby is the galley ventilator where “the odor of boiling coffee” soothed his senses.

Neglected, twice sunk and now painstakingly restored, the ‘Western Flyer’ — dubbed the world’s most famous fishing boat for bearing Steinbeck and his biologist friend Ed Ricketts on an ecological adventure — returns Saturday to Monterey for the first time in 75 years to begin a new life in science education.

Now docked at the Moss Landing harbor, the Western Flyer will be escorted to Monterey by a decorated boat parade, honoring an end-of-season fishing community celebration held the day before Steinbeck and Ricketts headed out on their journey. The event will include tours of the boat, activities and live music.

“We’re bringing it back for a big party,” said Sherry Flumerfelt, executive director of the Western Flyer Foundation, the nonprofit that owns and restored the boat, which it plans to use for science education programs for local students and marine research.

“The goal is just to continue what Steinbeck and Ricketts started, where we’re merging science and art,” Flumerfelt said. “You had this scientist who loved art and literature and this writer who loved science. These two were very interdisciplinary in their thinking.”

The wooden vessel, built in Tacoma, Wash. in 1937 for Monterey’s then-bountiful sardine fishery, became the setting for the 1941 Steinbeck and Ricketts collaboration Sea of Cortez, a journal about their specimen collecting trip to the Gulf of California. Steinbeck reworked the journal for his 1951 book, Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Marine science was in its infancy when Steinbeck and Ricketts — who inspired “Doc” in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a “fountain of philosophy and science and art” — set off March 11, 1940, on their trip. A newspaper article at the time said they advised Mexican authorities they were “to evaluate and consider the way marine invertebrate animals occur along shore — their interlocking associations or societies in their relations to each other and to the environmental factors.”

That the vessel survived at all is nothing short of a miracle.

Tony Berry, the Monterey fisherman who skippered the boat during Steinbeck’s voyage to Mexico, continued to captain the ship until Monterey’s sardine fishery crashed in the late 1940s. The Flyer ended up with Seattle fisherman Dan Luketa who plied the Pacific for sole, perch, halibut, cod and crab. Inspired by space exploration, he rechristened the ship “Gemini” before selling it in 1970 for a bigger ship.

The boat passed through a series of fishing companies before being sold at auction in 1986 to Ole Knudson, who’d hoped to restore it. Meanwhile, Bob Enea, nephew of original skipper Berry, had been searching for the Flyer, and traced the ship to Knudson by its WB4044 call sign.

But Enea and his Western Flyer Project were unable to meet Knudson’s price as the ship sat moored in the Swinomish Channel, under road bridges near Anacortes, north of Seattle, rust-streaked with blue plastic tarps covering the deck. In 2011, an ambitious Salinas developer bought the boat for $45,000 with plans to use it as a showpiece for a planned hotel lobby.

But the following year, a hull plank gave way and the Gemini sank in the channel. It was patched and refloated two weeks later, but sank again in 2013 and stayed fully submerged for six months.

In 2015, marine geologist John Gregg, the Western Flyer Foundation founder who was inspired by reading Log from the Sea of Cortez as a boy, bought the waterlogged boat for $1 million and began what would become a $6 million, eight-year restoration of the 77-foot, barnacle-encrusted, mud-caked hulk.