The crew huffed and puffed, folding, shoving, rolling and pulling all corners of the 4,000-square-foot sail between the main gaff and the main beam of the schooner Zodiac. Some pushed from below while others stood atop, using the full force of their body weight to contain the basketball-court-sized piece of canvas.
“First one to get blood on the sail, I’ll buy a beer,” captain Calen Mehrer called out to the crew as they secured the new, stiff sail. Alongside experienced sailors, Mehrer spent the evening training the eager new crop of volunteers for another season in the Salish Sea while cruising Bellingham Bay in late April.
The crew spent the voyage with their eyes to the sky and to the sails, reading the wind and waves of the bay. Dark clouds brewed to the south, and the sun broke through to the west for a moment, long enough to reveal a rainbow stretching from Fairhaven — the home port of the vessel.
Gallery: Schooner Zodiac trains for new season
The Zodiac — a 160-foot, two-masted wooden schooner that turned 100 this year — is the largest working sailboat on the West Coast. Since the early 1990s, it has provided cruises and maritime education for tens of thousands of people.
In its 157 days at sea between April and October last year, 2,604 passengers hopped aboard. This year, the crew anticipates the same numbers for the usual variety of evening salmon dinner sails around Bellingham Bay and weekend trips through the San Juan Islands. Passengers experience the hard work of sailing a tall ship while enjoying meals and beautiful views.
Any ride on the Zodiac is a unique experience, one that transports passengers back to a different era of maritime travel. While the crew is now about half women and half men, and most don waterproof jackets, the actions, movements and methods of sailing a tall ship remain the same as for mariners of the past. Paper charts and protractors are used alongside modern GPS equipment. A motor assists the vessel in docking, but the crew still sweat bullets as they haul lines in unison to raise the sails.
Many vessels similar to the Zodiac have rotted away, were lost to history or have become museum pieces, only leaving the shore once a year.
“She’s meant to be sailed,” first mate Dana Raugi said. “Boats like that are not meant to sit at a dock.”
The act of keeping the vessel afloat is not a simple, nor a practical task. It is a labor of love — one that has inspired a vibrant community of mariners, young and old, dedicated to keeping a piece of history alive while relying on the winds and waves to travel far and wide.
A novelty since its construction
The behemoth of a wooden vessel was built in 1924 as a private yacht for the pleasures of the sons of Robert Johnson of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. The schooner was designed to replicate the schooners the fisherman of Gloucester, Massachusetts once sailed, sales director Bob Boroughs said.
The Johnson sons spent several years sailing it up and down the East Coast before racing against other vessels to Spain as part of the 1928 King’s Cup Race.
“The gallant nine or ten craft that will finish at Santander, expecting mishap are a glowing tribute to the hold that sail still has despite a motor-minded age,” the New York Times reported in an article about the race on July 7, 1928. “They will tell you that sailing ‘ain’t what she used to be,’ that the Gloucester fishermen go out these days under power, but nevertheless the starting signal sounds today there will be afloat nine or ten intrepid craft and crews.”
Even in 1928, the vessel was a novelty for its impracticality, its lack of a motor and its reliance on old technology. The large sails hanging from masts reaching 12 stories were a sight to see, a portal to the past, as they continue to be today.
Canadian businessman Arthur Nesbitt took ownership from 1929 to 1931, renaming it schooner Airdeane before donating it to the Grenfell Mission, which provided medical and educational support to communities that roads did not reach.
In the 1930s, the San Francisco Bar Pilots acquired the vessel. They renamed it again to schooner California, removed its masts and added an engine. Crews of pilots lived on the boat for weeks, ready to hop aboard other vessels and help them navigate the complex waters into San Francisco Bay.
The bar pilots sold the vessel in 1972. Three years later, it fell into the capable hands of Karl and Tim Mehrer and a host of others who’d sailed with them for years prior. It marked the start of the second half of the vessel’s life and the return to its roots as the schooner Zodiac, a vessel meant to explore.
Schooner repair is a family affair
Tim refers to himself as a “schooner nut.” It’s a passion that he cannot explain, but one that was instilled in him by his late father Karl, who raised Tim onboard the schooner Adventuress. Karl and his family oversaw the restoration of the 1913 schooner which was bought in 1959 by the non-profit Youth Adventure to provide maritime education to youth.
Just 16 years later, they decided to repeat the process and purchased the Zodiac for $32,000 with support from investors. With the help of the 30-or-so crew and volunteers they knew from the Adventuress, they got to work replacing deck beams, reinstalling the two masts and returning it to its 1920s glory.
The work took close to two decades. In 1982, the vessel was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In the early ’90s, the U.S. Coast Guard certified it for safe sailing and thus began its life as a charter vessel, homeported in Bellingham due to its proximity to the San Juan Islands.
A 1998 Seattle Times article about Tim, Karl and their schooners referred to the duo as the “single biggest reason Seattle has become home to the finest fleet of vintage sailing schooners on the West Coast.”
The statement still holds true as their two major projects continue to sail through Puget Sound. The legacy continues with Tim’s son, Calen, who now captains about half of the vessel’s journeys each year.
“I kind of feel like I may have set him up,” said Tim, 69. “I hope he likes doing this. He says he does, but it is quite a commitment.”
“I’m as spoiled as they get,” Calen, 31, said. “I had the coolest childhood.”
Calen, a captain since age 19, said his fondest memories aboard the ship were days spent sailing with his father and grandfather.
“I’d always get myself all flustered and [my grandpa] would always stay calm. That guy was able to handle all the stresses that I can even fathom,” Calen said. “It was really cool to see how he would react or how he would give advice in what I thought were difficult moments.”
Karl died in 2018 and his photo hangs in the ship, next to portraits of other men instrumental to the vessel’s legacy.
Maintenance is never-ending
The Mehrers and company have replaced just about every rotten beam and rusted bit of hardware while returning the ship to historical accuracy. The only bits that have lasted the full 100 years are the ship’s bell — still rung at dinner — and the quarter bitts placed next to the helm to hold lines.
Everything else has been replaced and will likely be replaced again at some point.
“It’s vegetable matter. Any wood boat starts to rot the second it’s launched,” Tim said. “I’m to the point now where I’m starting to replace stuff that I put in 40 years ago.”
Each year, the boat is harbored in Seattle, and a greenhouse-like structure cover is erected to protect workers from the elements. Work parties commence every Saturday, when volunteers help prepare the vessel for another summer at sea.
Every year, the ship is deep-cleaned. Seven layers of varnish are applied to the wood to protect it from caustic salt water. All the rigging and spars are removed and cleaned. Every five years, the masts are removed with a crane for the U.S. Coast Guard to inspect.
As years go by, Tim said they increasingly struggle to find the right materials to replace pieces that fail or age out.
“All the stuff is drying up. You can’t get great wood anymore,” he said. “Fittings we’ve had to cast ourselves because you can’t go to Ace Hardware and get our kind of fittings.”
Tim and the rest of the crew are always looking into the future, questioning what the vessel will need five or 10 years from now. For example, Tim has selected a tree to cut down which will cure (dry out) for at least 10 years — 1 inch per year — to serve as a new stem in the future.
Zodiac cultivates ‘esprit de corps’
While each one of the approximately 100 crew members has a different reason for climbing aboard the Zodiac, most have stayed because of the community. Some have found spouses while varnishing decks on rainy evenings, and others have made lifelong friends short-tacking through narrow passages.
Each person comes from a different walk of life and level of knowledge.
“The thing that I love about Zodiac is that you can come in at any age, knowing absolutely nothing about sailing or wooden boats and find community,” Raugi said.
Raugi knew nothing about sailing when she took a three-day trip around the San Juan Islands. She said she was “morose” as the trip ended. She quickly signed on to volunteer, and 15 years later, she’s working as a first mate with some of her closest friends.
Overall, the shared mission of keeping a piece of history alive and sailing brings the crew together. They’re bound by an ethos of spending significant time, money and energy on an old vessel, rather than something shiny and new.
“In this day and age, everything has planned opulence — something bigger and better is always coming along,” Boroughs said. “This is something you can’t replicate.”
On the training sail, a host of the new crew got to try a turn, spinning the glossy, 10-spoked helm to dictate the direction of the Zodiac. It’s an experience most only witness on a movie screen or through old photos.
With wind whipping his face, new volunteer Dakota Hughes said the mission of working on the ship is daunting “because it needs to last another hundred years.” An understanding exists among the crew, new and old — nothing can replace the schooner Zodiac.
The schooner Zodiac’s 100th birthday will be celebrated with a free open house on Sunday, May 19 at the Bellingham Cruise Terminal from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event will include tours of the boat docked outside and a Q&A with captains Tim and Calen Mehrer and sea shanties sung by the Mighty Men of Menace inside in the rotunda room. The schooner is currently booking cruises through Sept. 29, with prices starting at $65 for day sails and $745 for multi-day sails.
A previous version of this story misidentified the ownership of the schooner Adventuress. The story was updated to reflect this change on Thursday, May 16 at 8:20 a.m. Cascadia Daily News regrets the error.
Hailey Hoffman is a CDN visual journalist; reach her at haileyhoffman@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 103.
