Author: Jeffrey

We recently attended the Bellingham Bay Rendezvous which was a fun weekend event for unique charter boats like the David B. It was a blast to get to spend two days with the crews of charter boats from all over the Puget Sound. The Bellingham Bay Rendezvous is the topic of my latest blog post for Yachting Magazine. Hope you’ll take a moment to click on the link below to watch a video of the Bellingham Bay Schooner Race and see a few more pictures from the event.

Christine’s Yachting Magazine Post about the Rendezvous in Bellingham

This past week I spent some time with an old fisherman who stopped by the David B to celebrate his 87th birthday. He’s the topic of my blog post for Yachting Magazine this week. I hope you’ll take a moment to visit the link and enjoy the story and short video.

A Conversation with an Old Timer | Yachting Magazine

Be sure to stop by Yachting Magazine’s website once a week to check out Christine’s newest gig as a blogger for Yachting Magazine. Every week she will be posting something new about boats, boating, the David B, cruising, wildlife, running a charter boat business or whatever tickles her fancy.

Here’s a link to Yachting Magazine’s website. We hope you enjoy!

Yesterday we lost a good friend, Jim Langei. Some of you know him from the trips he crewed with us on the David B. As I think about the events that took the life of Jim and his wife Stirling, I’m remembering that it was only a year ago today that Jeffrey and I attended a memorial for a friend who’s life was cut short by an avalanche. Last year I just listened to the words of others that were spoken. I let their words heal me and help me to remember, but then a few months later a suicide reopened that wound of loss. This time it was Jeffrey’s words that began the healing, but again, healing wasn’t complete when another avalanche a few weeks ago unstitched the repair to my sickened heart.  Today I need my own words to describe yesterday and to mend this heartsickness I have over the loss of a wonderful person who has been a dear friend to us and to the David B.

***

Even though it was raining in the early morning yesterday, Jeffrey and I were outside enjoying our morning coffee in the hot tub at our house. It was Jeffrey that noted the unusually agitated flock of gulls flying overhead. We talked about it and came up with a few reasons for their behavior. Never, would we have dreamed of the horrible reason for their flight.

What the gulls knew, but we didn’t, was that there had just been an explosion in the harbor, and all the boats in a row of boathouses were consumed. The flock overhead eventually calmed and dispersed leaving Jeffrey and me to our thoughts of the upcoming day and what we planned to do with it.  Finishing our coffee, we soon went back inside forgetting about the birds. While we listened to the news on the radio and tidied up the house, Jeffrey heard a breaking story about a boat fire in Bellingham. He checked his phone. The Port had not called. The David B was safe. Soon we heard the arrival of a news helicopter.

“Hmmm, this might be bigger that we thought,” I said, sitting down at my computer.

With a little searching I found a live video stream coming from the helicopter that I could see and hear circling the neighborhood and harbor. In the tiny frame on my computer were flames and black smoke shooting through corrugated metal and up creosote soaked pilings. The whole dock was burning. Oh no I thought. My body shook knowing that our friend Jim and his wife Stirling lived on their boat where the flames were the biggest.

I looked up a Jeffrey who was watching over my shoulder.

“Jim’s boat’s in there.” I tired to control my voice with a whisper.

The phone rang while we stared at the video. I looked at the caller ID. It was Chris, another friend who lives on a boat. She asked me if I knew. I said I did. She said her husband Jeff had heard it. I told her about the video stream on the news, and that from the helicopter footage I could see her boat, 100 yards away from the fire. I could see the David B 150 yards away.

I watched helpless and not knowing if Jim and Stirling were safe. I sent an email to Jim’s work address, telling him how sorry I was for the loss of his boat and home. I wondered if he would respond. I refreshed my email. No auto-responder came back saying he was away. My heart sank.

“Jeffrey. Do you think they got out?”

“Don’t know,” he said staring out the kitchen sink window absentmindedly washing a coffee cup. I could see in his body that he didn’t think so.

With our morning chores done, Jeffrey and I sat back down at our computers and read the news flash. “Two missing in Bellingham Boat Fire.” We looked at each other and tears came. The missing two were our friends. We knew it had to be.

***

We drove to the harbor and prepared ourselves for the walk down the dock to the David B. We could see the smoldering creosote pilings, the firefighters, Coast Guard boats, Department of Ecology, and Port employees busy taking care of the situation. I tired to hold in the tears as we walked past the parade of people who had come to look at the dying fire and crumpled buildings. People I love lived there. Do these people here know that? My friends were missing and I tried not to think about them dying in the sunken, twisted jumble of hot corrugated metal and melted fiberglass not so far away. We walked on to the David B. I spent a moment on the back deck trying to take in the scene – trying to not believe that it was real.

The rest of morning I painted below decks. The busy work was a channel for my nervous energy, but the breeze flowing into the David B smelled of burnt plastic and tar. It brought more tears, emotions, and memories.

We met Jim in the fall of 2008 through a friend when we needed a loan for the business. Jim had been recommended to us as someone who understood the needs of a boating business. Through the process of getting the loan we learned that he was boater and was taking a class to get his 100 ton captain’s license. Not long after that we invited him to come north to Alaska with us to help out as a crew member and to show him the Inside Passage so he’d know some great places where he could someday take his own boat.

While I painted, I thought about his first trip with us and how professional he was with our passengers, and then how much fun, Jeffrey, Jim, and I had bar hopping in Ketchikan after the passengers had left.  I thought about how much he liked to read, and how many of the books he brought with him have become part of the David B’s library. I remember him wanting to read late into the night at the galley table and offering  take my one a.m. watch so I could have an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

I remembered watching Jim help Jeffrey navigate through the ice in Endicott Arm. I loved watching him at the helm following Jeffrey’s hand signals from the bow. They worked in tandem slowly and carefully dodging icebergs. What was special about Jim was how he was always thinking of new ways to help us promote our business. It was Jim who first suggested that we should dedicate our trips between Bellingham and Ketchikan to boat owners who wanted to learn how to cruise the Inside Passage. Those trips are sold out this year, and I never had a chance to thank him for the idea. I eventually thought about my last email from Jim. It was one asking if he could post some of our trips in the coffee shop that Stirling ran at the top of Gate 3 in Squalicum Harbor. Throughout the day I remembered a friend who was always there to help.

At the end of the day, I cleaned up my painting project and walked out onto the back deck of the David B. Jim and Stirling were still listed as missing. I suspected that they would be for a long time. I watched the smoldering pilings that even Mother Nature couldn’t put out with the downpour she had started an hour or so earlier. As I stared at the destruction, two seals surfaced near the the David B. They looked around the changed harbor and slipped back under water. Watching the seals caused my lower lip to quiver and with a deep breath, I let the sadness sink in a little more. I resigned myself to the reality of their fate. I mourned my missing friends.

Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics “Slow down you move to fast, you’ve got to make the moment last..” has been playing over and over in my head the last few days. I often get this song bomb when I’m feeling rushed or panicked for time. I like those words since they help me to remember to take a breath, pause, and soak up the world around me.

This time of year I spend a lot of time, maybe even too much time, obsessing about how to get people to choose to take their vacations on the David B. I pay attention to what potential passengers are saying, and what ads from other types of tour providers show. The thing I see the most is speed: the drive to maximize the time you have away from work — to fill every moment with heart pounding adrenaline — to see it all in just a few days.

How can anyone ever relax, refresh, or renew themselves at this pace? I don’t know. What I do know is that the types of tours Jeffrey and I provide on the David B are the essence of slowing down and making the moment last. The David B is a slow boat. We have a top cruising speed of 6.5 knots or about 7.5 miles per hour. (That’s compared to the 17-22 knots of a cruise ship.) When we are underway and motoring through the narrow tree-lined channels of the Inside Passage at slow speed, we have more time to observe. We often spot bears on beaches, or eagles sitting high up in trees. When evening comes, we pull in to a new anchorage, drop the hook, and turn off the engine. It’s silent with the exception of the trickle of streams, and songs or calls of birds.

When someone signs up for one of our cruises I put myself into their shoes and try to come up with the perfect plan. I think about what I’ve learned about them from emails and conversations, and how I can help them slow down and enjoy the moment. When was the last time my guests took a vacation to relax? How do our passengers gear their time away from work? Do they maximize every moment so they don’t miss a thing? What’s it like for them when Jeffrey and I take care of all the details — the meals, the anchorages, the activities?

I think about these things a lot. While I love the speed of technology and I sometimes like to be somewhere in a hurry. I don’t like to see people rush through their valuable time off. When I think of travel, I envision going to a place to explore, to see, to learn, to slow down, to enjoy the feeling of being in the now.  Slow travel is what we offer. It’s the pause between the breath. It’s the chance to inhale the earthy scent of the muskeg, or the brininess of the sea. When I hear of people wanting to see Alaska in a few days or think that they are experiencing the Inside Passage when they book a cruise on one of the big cruise ships that steams through the night, I wonder if they know what they are missing.

I know the David B’s not for everyone. Our trips are for people who want more than to simply check a place off of their list of Must-Sees. The David B is for people who don’t want a vacation full of bright lights, public address systems, crowded dining rooms, and dance clubs. It’s for people who want nature and conversation over a good meal. It’s for people who want to make their moments last.

Last year we chose an anchorage in Johnstone Strait not too far from Seymour Narrows. Slack water was going to to take place at Seymour near sunset. The narrows are a place where boats need to time their passage because of fast currents.  For most of the day, we had been listening to traffic and knew where the cruise ships where and what times they were planning to be at Seymour. While they were spending the day steaming to be on time, we spent the day cruising. Twice we stopped to watch orca whales, and once we had pacific white-sided dolphins surf our bow before stopping for the night.

That evening I served dinner while the sky turned pink. Our little anchorage was quiet as we talked with our guests about the whales we had seen and what our plan for the next day would include. While we ate, the first cruise ship passed by. They were making their way for Seattle and would be there the next day. We still had four more days to make it to Bellingham. As the ship sped past, we stopped our conversation and watched. We paused and took in the moment, and were awed by the ship (it’s hard not to be).  As the sounds of the ship’s engines and public address system faded, someone voiced how lucky we were to be on the slow boat to Bellingham.