Couple work to keep century-old schooner afloat

PORT TOWNSEND — Puget Sound is home to roughly a quarter-million boats. Families here are almost as likely to have some sort of vessel as a licensed dog.

But among those multitudes is an extremely small subset of people who nurture the region's largest and most storied craft. Let's call them schooner people. Their boats may not strictly be schooners but other large-sailed, many-masted vessels like the Hawaiian Chieftain, a square-topsail ketch, or the Lady Washington, a brig. But they have in common a set of core values like cooperation, self-reliance and working for a greater good, values that seem to live in traditional sailing hulls.

"They recognize the importance of keeping that art and culture alive," said Robert d'Arcy. "It's beyond the monetary issues of life."

Robert and Holly Kays d'Arcy are the chief stewards of the schooner Martha, the oldest working sailboat in the state at an even 100 years of age. That's more than one lifetime in boat years, spanning some 20 owners who include John Hanify, the San Francisco lumberman who had the boat built, actor James Cagney and aluminum magnate Edgar Kaiser, who gave the boat to Camp Four Winds on Orcas Island in 1976.

That same year, all of Martha's 68 feet and 96,000 pounds fell off a lift on Lake Union, staving in the port side and nearly turning the boat into varnished firewood. A crew led by longshoreman Del Edgbert of Olympia brought Martha back from the dead, sailed her nearly 20 years, and donated the boat to the Northwest Schooner Society, which persuaded d'Arcy to take on Martha's care.

The son of a Rhode Island boatwright, d'Arcy and a fellow crew member from the schooner Zodiac created the Schooner Martha Foundation to restore and maintain the boat as a youth sail-training vessel. Between May and September, the boat takes groups of up to six as far as Canada's Gulf Islands and Desolation Sound, learning all aspects of sail voyaging and then some.

A lot of lessons fit into the hull of a big boat. There are manual skills, science, navigation and piloting, but the d'Arcys also see other lessons that are often lost on a modern world distracted, as Robert said, "by flashy cars and space shots." For starters, the crew of a sailboat is a self-contained social unit.

"You can't get off," said Holly. In other words, everyone has to get along.

In modern life, rules have an abstract quality that can make it easy to question authority. On a boat, everyone is effectively serving the ship, and rules are aimed at doing so efficiently and consistently. Lines need to be coiled just so, so anyone can undo them quickly or in the dark.

"It makes sense the first time you try to bring down the sails," said Robert, "and the whole coil goes up in the rig like spaghetti."

The Martha effort has been sustained so far by a grass-roots network of volunteers. The annual budget is less than $70,000, with extra help coming in the form of dozens of donations from the likes of Fisheries Supply and Pettit Paint. But for all the business model's simplicity, said Holly, "It's not sustainable."

The d'Arcys can't do this forever, and the foundation should be able to pay to hire both skippers and shipwrights.

Toward that end, the centennial celebration is halfway toward a capital campaign goal of $90,000 to replace keel bolts and planking below the waterline. This would free the boat up to be under way longer, bringing in more operations money that could in turn help fund another captain.

For now, the d'Arcys work for free, making ends meet through Robert's work as a shipwright and Holly's work as a sailmaker. They live on board in the summer with their 4-year-old daughter, then move back in the offseason to a modest house Holly bought a few years ago when Port Townsend homes were more affordable.

That's schooner living: challenging, and for a greater good.

"Every time we rethink it and look at our budget," said Holly, "it always comes back that what we're doing is so important and we have to keep doing it."

Eric Sorensen, a Kenmore-based freelance writer, sails his Yankee Dolphin 24 out of the Port of Edmonds. Contact him through his Web site: ericsorensen.net