We recently spent a couple of hours wandering around Moss Landing Harbor. In the process of snapping pics of random boats at their moorings, we came upon this fine looking example:
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| The Western Flyer |
After writing The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck spent 6 weeks on the Western Flyer in 1940 on an expedition in the Sea of Cortez with marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Steinbeck's book The Log from the Sea of Cortez documents his time on the Western Flyer. The book is considered one of Steinbeck's most important works of non-fiction-- his interaction with Ricketts not only impacted his philosophy, it also provided inspiration for characters in his later works.
Following the Sea of Cortez voyage, the Western Flyer resumed it's job as a commercial fishing boat. After years of plying it's trade on the west coast it ended up in Washington and fell into disrepair. It was eventually purchased in 2015 and restored for use as a research and educational ship by the Western Flyer Foundation.
1 comment:
I love it when a story comes together.
I've never read that book.OK, I've never even heard of that book. But it sounds worth checking into.
Speaking of that bay, my dad and my uncle, for a couple of years, went out in my dad's aluminum fishing boat to participate in the annual shark derby. That event is probably politically and environmentally unpopular and inappropriate these days. They never really caught much of anything, but had a lot of fun anticipating how they might handle actually getting a frustrated and angry shark into that little boat.
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