The Tangled Journey of the Western Flyer: The Boat and Its Fisheries

Introduction

In 1940 the Western Flyer carried John Steinbeck and his comrade Ed Ricketts on a remarkable 6-week voyage to the Sea of Cortez. After they wrote a book (Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, 1941) about their adventure, the Western Flyer became an icon in American literature. Some say that it is, perhaps, the best-known fishing vessel in history. Ever since the Western Flyer arrived in Port Townsend for renovation work in 2012, a constant stream of visitors has paid homage to the boat. One of them pinned a picture of John Steinbeck to its hull as if the vessel was the casket at his wake.

For many readers of John Steinbeck and followers of Ed Ricketts, the Western Flyer represents a deeply personal symbol—adventure, freedom, camaraderie, or perhaps even refuge. Steinbeck’s prose planted a vision of the Western Flyer in his readers’ minds and the seed took root, establishing a place there—like something Steinbeck called a “sea-memory” (Steinbeck 1951).

And now the wind grew stronger and the windows of houses along the shore flashed in the declining sun. The forward guy-wire of our mast began to sing under the wind, a deep and yet penetrating tone like the lowest string of an incredible bull-fiddle. We rose on each swell and skidded on it until it passed and dropped us in the trough. And from the galley ventilator came the odor of boiling coffee, a smell that never left the boat again while we were on it.

(Steinbeck and Ricketts 1941)

Captain Tony Berry (left) and John Steinbeck (right) on the flying bridge of the Western Flyer, 1940.

With permission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San José State University.

However, the fame of the Western Flyer didn’t come to pass overnight. At first, Sea of Cortez wasn’t a best-selling book. Word of the book spread from person to person among those who’d been touched by the story and resonated with it. It’s not a book that people forget easily. As time has passed, the collective memory of the book has grown, along with the legend of the boat.

We know a lot about the Steinbeck-Ricketts voyage to the Sea of Cortez on the Western Flyer from their writings and those of many others. But what do we know of the boat’s beginnings and of its 83-year history outside of the famous voyage with the author and scientist? Our intent in this narrative is to describe some of the boat’s history before and after the Western Flyer’s keystone journey.¹

BUilding the Boat

The Western Flyer was built in 1937 in Tacoma, Washington, as a state-of-the-art purse seiner to fish for sardines out of Monterey. The builder was Martin Petrich Sr., owner of the Western Boat Building Company. Petrich would co-own the boat with fisherman Frank Berry (aka Bertapeli) and his son Tony, who was to become the boat’s skipper. The Petrichs and the Berrys were Croatians from the island of Hvar with a strong fishing tradition.

In 1937, the world was reeling in the depths of the Great Depression. Many refugees had moved to California in search of employment and better times, but some migrated to Oregon and Washington. Near Petrich’s boatyard in Tacoma there was a camp called “Hollywood on the Flats,” on the east side of the Puyallup River, that held about 2,000 hobos. The residents lived in shacks made of wood scraps. For a while, even work in Petrich’s boatyard came to a standstill. But it was to pick up again because the sardine fishery in California was thriving and the fishermen needed more boats. Historian Arthur McEvoy called Monterey, the center of the fishery, “a local island of prosperity in a sea of depression” (McEvoy 1995).

Martin Petrich was a tall man with broad shoulders...