“It’s the water,” I explained. “It draws me.”
When a child is born in a port city, the sounds and smells of the ocean environment permeate the existence of the tiny human, perhaps even before birth itself. The sound of waves lapping the shoreline pushing the mix of salt, iodine, and magnesium into the ever-lifting oceanic air become a staple of existence, branding the consciousness with a marker it can never escape. And like juvenile salmon, once marked, the voyage into the world will have a nagging gravity drawing the fry back to its origin, back to its beginning.
At least that’s how it was for me. After being born in Port Angeles mere blocks from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I spent my first six weeks breathing the marine air of Port Angeles, Washington while being cared for by a kind nurse who acted as a foster parent. My parents decided they weren’t ready to be parents again.
They were probably right. My mother was 17 and had already relinquished a child for adoption, so when my father announced his refusal to start a second family with his second fiancée, the choice seemed obvious. Lynn’s first wife had chased him out of the house with a knife suspecting he was fooling around with the waitress at the Officer’s Club at the Coast Guard base. She may have been right, too, but that didn’t make her right to commit a felony assault and separate him from their two kids for the rest of their childhood.
Either way, Lynn and Kathy did indeed get together, soon resulting in the all-too-familiar teenage pregnancy in post-Hippie Port Angeles. The adoption industry was a well-oiled machine on the Olympic Peninsula, making it relatively simple to give a child away to hundreds of families hoping to have one they could call their own.
The wedding was beautiful, with four generations of women standing around the barely pregnant bride and a groom donning the US Navy’s Class A uniform. Kathy quietly dropped out of school like the other 40% of Port Angeles youth. On the last day of the school year, while other high school seniors were donning their gowns and celebrating their graduation, Kathy donned her hospital gown to give up her silent hope of becoming a mother. Before she knew my sex, I was whisked away by a nursing staff who believed it was best to prevent any touching or bonding between the parent and the relinquished child.
I’m not sure it was best. Like most teenage girls in her generation, Kathy didn’t feel she had a choice in the matter. Her new husband and her own mother were in agreement for how it must be. Kathy’s mother drafted the necessary paperwork as early as the couple’s wedding, forging Kathy to be 18 years old on the marriage certificate—months before her 18th birthday.
The adoption agency reached the family of choice at their vacation spot in Sun Lakes, Washington. “We have a baby for you. Can you make it to Seattle tomorrow?”
“We’ll be there,” my mom replied. My adopted mom, that is. Shirley. Hardwick, at the time.
Gene and Shirley lived in Everett, a coastal lumber and fishing town in north Puget Sound. It wasn’t the outer coast, but it still had the elements of marine life and was similar to Port Angeles on most counts. It would even have its own military base in the years ahead.
My six weeks in foster care was up. Like fry in a pen, I was marked by the marine environment in those early days. My new home in Everett kept up the infusion of saltwater air for the next seven years. The universe made sure I would never escape the drive to be close to the water.
Kathy and Lynn split up around the same time my adopted family split up in 1971. Their parallel existence was never known to anyone until all but my birth mother had passed away. When I found her in 2015, she lived in the coastal town of Sequim, just 15 miles from Port Angeles.
Like Lynn, Kathy had a strong connection to the water, an imprint of her own. When she learned Lynn had passed away in 2006 in the port city of Hilo, Hawaii, she said it made sense. “He always said he was gonna build a boat and sail it to Hawaii someday. Sounds like he did.”
Solo.
For nearly three weeks, Lynn sailed Ragtime across the Pacific Ocean with only rudimentary navigation tools. His engine and refrigerator both quit half way across, leaving him relying on peanut butter, oatmeal, a set of slide rules, and the unpredictable marine wind for the better part of the journey. He barely survived being knocked into the water by a wayward boom when an errant freighter nearly mowed him down miles outside the shipping lane.
On June 24, 1988, Lynn spotted land and soon arrived in Hilo Bay.
At approximately the same time, Lynn’s spirit of adventure drifted mysteriously into my own consciousness in Moscow, Idaho where I had taken a summer job fixing price tags onto sneakers, trying to make enough money to pay for my next semester of university education. Bored out of my mind, I convinced my girlfriend that I could probably make more money in six weeks delivering pizza in Alaska than I could doing mindless work in a stock room. A phone call to Domino’s Pizza in Anchorage confirmed my hunch, and a few days later I set a course north for my own solo adventure, driving across Canada’s Yukon in a borrowed 1983 Toyota Celica with nothing more than $260 cash and a tank of gas.
My trip only took 3 days. For the next six weeks, I delivered the morning newspaper on a bicycle and the evening pizza in the Celica to fishermen in the southern end of town. When I had free time, I found myself at the port looking at boats and admiring the knots in the sailors rigging and deck lines. I wondered how difficult it would be to navigate the Inside Passage from Vancouver to Alaska. I watched families sort their daily catch on their front lawn, as if laying out a few dozen 40-pound king salmon on the grass wasn’t a big deal.
College ran its course and somehow I wound up in Boise feeling like a fish out of water. Sure, the rivers and lakes there are nice, but it wasn’t home. It would take another 10 years before I returned to Puget Sound, landing for good in the port town of Edmonds, Washington.
When I found Kathy more than 25 years later, she wasn’t at all surprised at my draw to the water. “Your father loved the water,” she told me. “He was a farm boy from Iowa, but for some reason he could never get away from the water.” By that time, my wife and I had purchased a 30-foot Tollycraft with twin 350 V-8 gas engines. The gadgetry of sailing attracted me, but twin engines gave me the sense of security I needed to make the 90-mile cruise to Port Angeles. I never took boating lessons; my adopted father had taught me how to operate a row boat on a river and how to attach a 5-horse Johnson outboard on it to navigate the bay near Port Susan, so figuring out the Tolly was a breeze. We re-named the boat Paper Mate from its original name Prince of Tides despite the warnings of several superstitious mariners.
In 2021, I had an unrelenting drive to find the boat that carried my dad from California to Hawaii. Lynn had sold it years before he died in 2006. The thought of finding the Ragtime was like one of those ideas that nags away at the mind until you finally give in. Maybe I thought finding the boat would help me find out more about the man my father had been. Or maybe it was just another mountain to climb.
I had to find it. We booked our annual vacation to Hawaii the following Spring, but instead of our usual jaunt to the Garden Island of Kauai, we opted for the Big Island, the last known location of the Ragtime. I hoped whomever ended up with Ragtime had not made the same decision about boat names.
Hilo has only one viable public marina, a tiny set of slips bordering an inlet on the south side of Hilo Bay next to the Suisan Fish Market. It’s walking distance from Lynn’s condominium where he lived in 2006, as well as his favorite Loco Moco spot, the Café 100.
At the café, I met with a former co-worker from the California Institute of Technology who worked with Lynn at the Mauna Kea Observatory. Diana was a gem of a person and a wealth of information about my father. When she first saw me, she nearly broke down. “I can’t believe it. You have his eyes!”
Words I’d never heard.
The café owner remembered Lynn well. “He came every day. He loved the Loco Moco,” she said proudly. Café 100 was the birthplace of the famous Hawaiian dish of rice, hamburger, and brown gravy, topped with an egg. But neither she nor the oldest of toothless natives I talked with hanging out in the area knew anything of the Ragtime. It wasn’t there.
Having recently acquired some advanced tools through my private investigation agency, I located a registry of boat information across the United States. I ran a search for the boat name and found only one. The boat was registered to a 71 year-old electrical supply businessman in Honolulu. Ragtime was listed as a 34.7’ tri-hull sailboat. The manufacturer: Lynn C. Holt.
I found the current owner in a small town outside of Honolulu and called a phone number listed to him. “I always wanted to meet the man who built this boat,” Manfred Mueller said. “Whoever could build a boat of this magnitude and sail it by himself across the Pacific Ocean deserves a whole lot of respect.”
Mueller told me he had purchased the boat from a man in Maui in 2010. “I’m pretty sure that guy owned it for about ten years as well,” he said. “He added some railing that I could tell was not part of the original design.” Mueller explained he was a fan of Jim Brown’s designs in the 1960s when racing across the Pacific was comparable with the Iditarod dog races in Alaska.
Mueller repaired the Ragtime three times from severe damage, ultimately changing the design of the boat’s logo but not the name itself. “She’s one hell of a boat,” he said.
“You’re welcome to come see it, if you like. She’s moored to a buoy about a mile due East of Hee’ia Harbor in Kaneohe Bay. I have two trimarands tied there; you can see them both on the Google.
Sure enough, Ragtime and her cousin were there. 
I had found the boat, and would soon put my hands on it, touching the master work of the father I never knew. Maybe that’s what was drawing me all along.
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