Seattle's Grand Opening Day of Boating

From "Lindsay's Photographic Blog: The World As I See", a new and exciting photo blog by my stepdaughter, reprinted with her permission. 

Opening Day ? ? ? ?

That was often the response I would get when telling someone I was heading down to Montlake for the Opening Day festivities.  The Opening Day of Boating Season took place today, the first Saturday of May.  It is a long standing tradition in this city.  According to the Seattle Yacht Club, the first Opening Day took place in May of 1913.  If you are a part of the boating or rowing community in Seattle, Opening Day is a big deal.

My family has been very much a part of the recreational (and commercial) boating world.  I moved on to a boat (a 47-foot classic wood vessel named the Lady Mick) with my mom and step-father beginning my freshman year of high school with our Siberian Husky, Annie, and our cat, Emil.  Opening Day was on the calendar every year.  So many boats would come to watch the festivites (often over a 1000), that my parents would bring the boat out a couple days early to get a good spot along the shoreline leading to Foster Island.  It became a tradition- I would spend the night with a high school friend, go to school the next day, and then take a Metro bus to the Montlake neighborhood.  The fun part was always wading through the extremely muddy trail leading to Foster Island, while looking for the familiar bow of the Lady Mick.  Once I found them I had to start yelling to get their attention.  They would then hop in the dinghy (small boat) with the dog and would make their way over to the shoreline to pick me up.

I have so many fond memories of those days- dancing on the back of our friend's boat, my friend and I climbing up to the top of the Lady Mick with a radio to listen to music and watch the crew races and boat parade, and socializing with family and friends who always joined in on the party.

Unfortunately, it is has been several years since we brought the Lady Mick to watch the spectacle that is Opening Day.  My parents have since moved off the boat and she has been moved from Lake Union to the Kitsap Penninsula.

While nothing beats hanging out on a boat for Opening Day, this year I thought I would head down to Montlake and watch the festivites from the shore.  It was a fun day....and the weather even decided to cooperate.

You can see more pictures of Opening Day at her blog, The World As I See It.


Lindsay is a nurse in the hematology/oncology unit of Seattle Children's Hospital. You can follow her blog, listed to the left of this post. And speaking of Children's, don't miss their amazing video which has just gone viral, "Stronger."

The Space Needle and the Century 21 Exhibition (a.k.a. The Seattle World's Fair)

So the iconic Space Needle is celebrating its 50th year. Happy Birthday to a Seattle landmark!


There's a lot of Space Needle stories going around right now, as it should be when something is being celebrated. Pictures of the foundation being built, reminiscings by many Seattleites, feature writers search for new approaches to an old story (and doing well at that!), a fresh galaxy-gold topnotch to the old gal.

When I arrived in Seattle from Korea aboard the USNS Marine Lynx (it may have been the Marine Phoenix; we went over in '53 on one, came back on the other in '55), one of the 900 or so members of Canada's Royal Highland regiment, the Black Watch, I luckily managed to start my debarkation leave right there in Seattle where my folks then lived, while the rest of my regiment headed for Vancouver BC and points east. At that time Dad was rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Roy Street, and the view from their home on Bigelow Avenue on the south slope of Queen Anne hill was, as I remember it, of the bus yards below, and area that years later would be the site of Century 21.

Years later, in December, 1961, I again visited Seattle, this time coming from Ottawa to help pave the way for Canada's participation in the Fair, in particular laying the ground work for Canada Week and the military tattoo to be performed in the Memorial Stadium. Plans called for a large Army commitment, primarily the Black Watch Highland Regiment and the Canadian Guards Regiment, plus the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Musical Ride, as well as the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force. It was an awesome task arranging accommodation, transportation, as well as a start at what would be the actual staging of the pageant.


The Space Needle was still being built, now a very tall skeleton reaching way into the skies. (It was finished in April). I had met the fair's president, Joe Gandy, earlier, and at his gentle persistence overcame my instinctive fear of heights and rode up to the top of the Needle in a construction cage, nothing at all like the sleek, smooth elevators ascending the Needle today! It was something else. Early in my Army career I'd jumped out of airplanes, with no real worries. This time? A little higher than a training jump tower, but no parachute? No extra $30 a month jump pay? What one does to foster Canada-USA relations. My rate of foot clamminess was at least equal to our rate of ascent.  I'm told the view was spectacular!

Canada Week came later that year in September, and I would have loved to have been a continuing part of this. However, a regimental colleague, good friend and fellow officer, Ian Fraser, became the producer as I went the other direction, to the Belgium Congo with the United Nations. Ian did a simply masterful job, and staked out an ongoing reputation as a fine producer of fine tattoos and pageants for years after. It was the largest endeavor ever undertaken by the Canadian Armed Forces. The Mounties performed their famous Musical Ride (a secret: the horses know all the moves, the riders - - recruits from the RCMP depot in Regina, Manitoba are somewhat superfluous.) The pipers piped from the constructed fort-like facade at the end of the stadium, and the massed Armed Forces military bands and pipes and drums marched. You can see a full description of the pageant and what led up to the making of it at the Washington State Online History link. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called Canada Week "one of the biggest and brightest of all of the Seattle World's Fair weeks." Joe Gandy, writing to the troops involved, acclaimed, "The Canadian Tattoo has become and will ever remain in history the greatest and most thrilling spectacle of the Seattle's World Fair." I would love to have been there.


So Happy Birthday, Space Needle, and thank you for all that you symbolized then, and now. It was fun riding up to your top, I think.

RMS Titanic, April 15, 1912

On the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, two back stories published earlier this month in the Cape Breton Post, Nova Scotia

HALIFAX, April 2 — History shows that Atlantic Canadians have so often risen to the occasion at times of tragedy that their willingness to help others has become a threadbare cliché. But like all clichés, this one contains a hard kernel of truth based on centuries of having to deal with countless shipwrecks, major fires, coal mining accidents and all manner of natural disasters.

When the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 — killing 1,500 of the 2,200 aboard — the people of Halifax were already well versed in dealing with disaster. As a result, they worked tirelessly to recover the dead and comfort surviving relatives.

“The citizens of Halifax were so moved by it, and they came out in large numbers,” says Paul Butler of St. John’s, N.L., author of “Titanic’s Ashes,” a recently published fictional account of the aftermath of the ship’s demise. “Being at the mercy of the ocean ... is central to people who have a maritime connection.”

A total of 150 Titanic victims are buried in three Halifax graveyards, their bodies prepared by 40 embalmers from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Among the graves is the final resting place of the fourth victim pulled from the icy North Atlantic days after the luxury liner plunged to the ocean floor. Sidney Leslie Goodwin was only 19 months old when he died.

The English boy wasn’t the youngest Titanic passenger to perish, but his story serves as a poignant reminder that in the weeks after the sinking, crews aboard four ships — most of them from Halifax — volunteered to perform the grim task of recovering bodies left bobbing on the cold ocean.

Published accounts from the time say the job was physically and emotionally draining, particularly for those who found Goodwin, a fair-haired child whose entire family perished in the sinking.

It’s hard to imagine that anything good could come from taking part in such a gruesome task, but Bob Conrad thinks otherwise.

In September 1998, Conrad was among a group of Nova Scotia fishermen who joined the search for survivors after a Swissair passenger jet caught fire and crashed into St. Margarets Bay, west of Halifax.

At one point, he thought he spotted a child’s doll. But as he drew closer, he realized the small figure was that of a toddler’s naked body.

Conrad recalls how he gently lifted the boy from the water and wrapped him in a blanket.

The fisherman would later learn the boy’s name was Robert Martin Maillet. He was only 14 months old when he died along with his parents, Karen Domingue Maillet and Denis Maillet, both 37, of Baton Rouge, La. He was the youngest person on the plane.

Today, Conrad speaks in calm, even tones when describing what happened that moonless night and the impact the events had on him.

“There’s a tendency to think that it would be awful — and it is,” says Conrad, now 65.

“But, from my experience, when the need to help another is critical, the element of danger and personal threat seems to be gone; it’s not there. What would be horrid for your eyes to see, somehow is muted or blunted so that you can perform the task at hand. That was most amazing to me.”

Blair Beed, a Halifax author and well-known Titanic sites tour guide, says Atlantic Canadians are not unique in their ability to reach out to others.

“When we had the Halifax Explosion in 1917, the people of Boston came rallying to us because of that friendship across the border,” says Beed, author of “Titanic Victims in Halifax Graveyards.”

“But we certainly have a long history of helping others,” he says, noting that Halifax — founded in 1749 as a military base — has always been imbued by a sense of duty and loyalty.

For Conrad, who still lives in Fox Point, N.S., where he fishes for bluefin tuna and mackerel, the motivation to help others comes from a profound place.

“For me, there is this reality for every human being: each of us wants our life to count for something. ... It’s just that when you get in a disaster scenario, the opportunity to achieve that is thrust upon you,” he says.

“There’s something so meaningful in not living for yourself but living for others and in community.”

- 30 -

HALIFAX, April 4 - - Church bells tolled as cable ships steamed into Halifax harbour laden with grim cargo: the bodies of Titanic passengers whose voyages across the North Atlantic had ended in unthinkable tragedy.

As the simple wooden boxes began piling up along the waterfront, the disaster shifted to the seaside city and local officials found themselves trying to quell the public’s morbid curiosity.

“One of the things that was preached by the city fathers, requested by the White Star Line and even talked about in sermons in churches was, ’Please do not make this into a three-ring circus, you don’t need to go see the bodies coming off the ship,’ ” says Garry Shutlak, a senior archivist at the Nova Scotia Archives.

It was the days immediately following the sinking of the magnificent ship on April 15, 1912. The largest liner of its time had struck an iceberg on a calm, moonless night and slid to a watery grave south of the Grand Banks.

Cable ships were dispatched from Halifax in the aftermath to pluck bodies from the frigid waters when it became clear only those who made it into the lifeboats had survived.

The crew of the Minia and Mackay-Bennett knew how to navigate the unforgiving North Atlantic. The ships, too, were dolefully well-suited for the task: their storage holds were large enough to accommodate the dead.

Halifax was considered an ideal centre to receive the victims because of its connections to other cities by rail and sea, which facilitated the return of bodies to families who could afford it.

Alan Ruffman, a local Titanic researcher, says Halifax was also a wireless communications hub, meaning word of Titanic’s sinking reached the city within hours.

“We knew there had been a major disaster offshore,” says Ruffman, author of “Titanic Remembered: The Unsinkable Ship and Halifax.”

“The White Star Line knew it had a public relations problem on its hands because the same day of the sinking, the 15th of April, ships in the area reported seeing bodies floating in their life-jackets.”

By the time the cable ships returned to Halifax, the city was in mourning. Flags were flying at half-mast. Some windows were draped in black crepe.

Headlines in the local newspapers proclaimed Hilda Slayter of Halifax had survived the ordeal. Others asked what had become of George Wright, a well-heeled philanthropist who had booked a first-class ticket on Titanic, but whose body was never found.

The bodies of other victims were taken to Snow’s funeral home and the Mayflower Curling Club, which served a makeshift mortuary. Police officers and military personnel stood by to keep the prying eyes of the public at bay.

Over the coming weeks, families of descended on Halifax in hopes of finding their loved ones among the dead and claiming personal effects.

There was no single memorial to remember the victims, though Ruffman says there were a number of funeral services for individuals, including an unidentified toddler who was plucked from the icy waters by the crew of the Mackay-Bennett.

The youngster was buried at Fairview Lawn Cemetery under a headstone paid for by the ship’s crew and dedicated to an “unknown child.” He was later identified as 19-month-old Sidney Leslie Goodwin through painstaking genetic testing.

A century later, other memories of Titanic linger in parts of the city, though they are harder to find.

Millionaire George Wright’s home still makes an impressive statement in the city’s south end, while a downtown building continues to bear his family name.

The Mayflower Curling Club was destroyed in the Halifax explosion in 1917, but exists today in another location under the same name. Snow’s funeral home was located inside what is now the Five Fishermen Restaurant and Grill.

And St. George’s Round Church, where mourners gathered to pay tribute to the unknown child, still holds services on Brunswick Street.

“In many respects, it is our story,” says Ruffman. “While they built it in Belfast, sank it in the Atlantic, we buried it here in Halifax."

- 30 -

Remembrance Day 2011

Although now a few days after November 11th, this powerful piece by Steve Garnaas-Homes, a United Methodist pastor serving in Massachusetts, still deserves thoughtful reading. Used with permission.

       He was wounded for our transgressions.

                  —Isaiah 53.5

Today, on Veterans Day, we honor those who have served in our military. Today we will romanticize them. Tomorrow we will forget them. The next day we will deny them medical care, housing and mental health benefits. The day after that we will ignore them while they suffer the wounds of war, the ravaging effects of doing and witnessing brutal violence, the mixed feelings of having served their country by killing people. We will debate the finer legal points of torture, while they bear the deep psychic scars of having participated in inhuman, soul-destroying duty. (It appears that the psychic damage of torture is as great on the perpetrators as on the victims.) They will wrestle with the reality that 90% of our war dead are innocent civilians, and we will tell them they are not guilty, because it's the price of freedom. They will do their best to believe that. They will bear the scars, the wounds and disfigurement, the nightmares, disorientation and loneliness of having borne their nation's insanity into the world. They will suffer the highest suicide rates in the nation. Of course many combat veterans adapt well and find ways to make their peace with what they've been asked to do. But not without psychic cost. We will thank them, because we don't want that blood on our hands.

But it is. Combat veterans are the victims of our practice of child sacrifice. We offer up their bodies as a sacrifice for our sin, an offering in our religion of war, the illusion that violence is necessary, effective and redemptive, the evil lie that our lives are made better by someone else's suffering. They are the victims of our belief that violence changes anything. As a nation we project our fear of suffering and powerlessness into the evil of war, and they—and all whom they engage in violence—bear the wounds. They are the children whom we have sent to kill some other mother's children. We honor them, but we do not stop sacrificing them.

Today I pray for all who are touched by the violence and inhumanity of war. To all who have given their lives I offer my thanks for their bravery, and their devotion to their country. God grant them rest, and honor their memory. To all who have chosen to serve, and to all who have suffered without choosing, I pray that God will grant mercy, healing and blessing. And in their honor, in the name of the Prince of Peace, who gave his life in nonviolent love, I devote myself to the end of our blood sacrifices, and to the mending of the world.

Boatlifters: The Unknown Story of 9/11

Earlier this month, along with many, many other bloggers commenting on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I posted "A Different View: Reflections on 9/11" Following that post,  friend, author, recent widow of a wonderful fellow boating comrade, forwarded this a new story, at least to me and probably to many of you, from that fateful day.


This is a story of how New York's maritime community were also responders. Katharine Herrup, of Reuters, tells it this way.

Much has been written and said about September 11, 2001, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, but one story much less known is the one about the band of boats that came together to rescue nearly 500,000 New Yorkers from the World Trade Center site on the day the towers collapsed.

It was the largest boatlift ever to have happened – greater than the one at Dunkirk during World War II. Yet somehow a story of such large scale became lost in all the rubble. But a new 10-minute documentary called Boatlift by Eddie Rosenstein captures the boat evacuations that happened on 9/11. The film is part of four new short documentaries that were created for the 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C.

“Boats, usually an afterthought in most New Yorkers minds, were, for the first time in over a century, the only way in or out of lower Manhattan,” says Tom Hanks, the narrator of the film.

New Yorkers don’t really think of Manhattan as an island since everything from the basics to beyond your wildest imagination is so accessible — not typically a feature associated with island life. But on September 11, 2001, those trapped below the World Trade Center site who could not escape without swimming or being rescued by a boat were acutely reminded of that fact.

“We wanted to tell a story that reminds Americans that this is a country that bounces back from adversity,” the President of the Center for National Policy Stephen Flynn, who had been a U.S. Coast Guard officer, told me. “Our national DNA is resilience. The key for us is to move forward with some key lessons and one of the lessons missing is the strength of civil society and how it responded when 9/11 happened.”

“People were actually jumping into the river and swimming  out of Manhattan. Boats were very nearly running them over,” says NY Waterway Captain Rick Thornton in the film.

The captains and crew of the fleet of boats who rescued so many on 9/11 came together with no idea what they would be getting into and no idea whether Manhattan would be attacked again let alone their very own boats. All they knew were that desperate people were in need of help and they couldn’t turn their backs on them, even if that meant putting their own lives at risk.

“If it floated, and it could get there, it got there,” engineer of the Mary Gellatly Robin Jones recalls.

“I never want to say the word ‘I should have’,” says Vincent Ardolino, captain of the Amberjack V. “I tell my children the same thing, never go through life saying you should have. If you want to do something, you do it.”

The New York Waterway, the Coast Guard, ferries, tug boats, private boats, party boats, small professional diving boats, and more ferried hundreds of thousands of people to Staten Island, Brooklyn, upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens in less than nine hours. Their crews are typical (in every best sense of the word) New Yorkers and ordinary civilians who came together after a distress call came in from the U.S. Coast Guard in New York.

“I’ve never seen so many tug boats all at once,” captain of the Staten Island Ferry James Parese says. “I worked on the water for 28 years, I’ve never seen that many boats come together at one time that fast. One radio call and they just all came together,” Jones said.

Perhaps one of the most amazing aspects of this mass-scale operation was that were no evacuation plans for such a rescue. “You couldn’t have planned nothing to happen that fast that quick,” Jones said.

It was the ethic code of the seas that made the boat rescues such a success. If a boat needed refueling, another one would pull up alongside it and give it 10,000 gallons of fuel with no questions asked or no one asking for payment. If a woman in a wheelchair needed to be lifted over the fence on the water’s edge to get into one of the boats, there were more than enough hands to help lift her. If people were stranded on a ledge by the water, they would get picked up by a boat. No one was left behind.

One of the arresting images in the film was of a massive throng of people pressed up against and even hanging over the rails along the water waving their hands, hoping someone would come to their rescue. They were at land’s end in downtown Manhattan, no easy place to conduct any sort of boat rescue since there aren’t many docking places or spots to put a boat ramp.

It was a day that lots of local, ordinary people become heroes. It was a day that was supposed to tear America apart, but instead brought Americans together. It was a day that brought out the best in many people.

 .

And many thanks, Cheryl Harlick, for passing this on for us.

A Different View: Reflections on 9/11

We were returning from the Canadian Gulf Islands were we had been cruising for a couple of weeks. On the last day of vacation we were docked at LaConner, sitting out on the aft deck of the Lady Mick, enjoying a cup of coffee. The cell phone rang and there was my stepdaughter:

"Are you listening to the news?"

"No"

"You better. The world is falling apart!"

It was Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. Everything was falling apart. And we joined with the whole world as the horror unfolded. As we cast off and eventually entered the Sound, in the near distance an  ominous grey shape appeared as a USN vessel steamed south, almost at flank speed, going where? The Locks were deserted but open; the lock crew wondering and waiting to hear if the locks would be closed. Everything, everywhere, had a pall of frightened uncertainty.

That evening, secured at Thunderbird Marina in Lake Union, watching TV I saw for the first time the horrible sight of someone jumping from one of the towers. I chokingly pointed this out to to my step-daughter, who replied "And some of them were holding hands." (USA Today reported as many as 200 jumped that day.) Horrific!

The next days and weeks were filled with unimaginable images, with uncontrollable feelings and emotions, with confusion, and at the same time, like a drowning man, the struggle to try to make sense out of this non-sense. I found that I simply could not go to church (a somewhat normal practice in times of stress or need) for the rest of that week. I found myself quite withdrawn as I sifted and sorted what I was trying to fathom. I caught glimpses of prayer services taking place around the country, including Seattle. I watched the service at National Cathedral in Washington.

I did get to St. Mark's Cathedral that Sunday. It was good to have been there. As I looked around I saw many familiar faces (comforting). I also saw many new faces, young faces, many not church folk. The mood was one of need, of hoping, of a desire to find some sort of meaning in the midst of non-meaning. We were simply a collection of refugees.

Following the service I discovered an old friend visiting Seattle. Bob is a retired priest. He is also a retired USAF officer having flown with the Strategic Air Command before going to seminary. Bob told me that he had somehow managed to get through to his congressman, asking him if he had the guts to vote against the pending legislation empowering the president to use all military force necessary in response to the terrorist attack. He had responded that he simply could not vote that way at this time. (Only one congresswoman, from Oakland, CA, so voted against that sweeping legislation.) Bob went on suggesting to his congressman that only real response we could make was - - to forgive.

Today, 2011, sifting and sorting through a plethora of editorials, blogs, where are we, really, a decade and a day later? Even Sunday's comics, from Baby Blues, Sally Forth, Blondie, to Doonesbury make their own comment. Where are we?

Jon Talon, in yesterday's Seattle Times, wrote, "In attacking the U.S. . . . one of Osama bin Laden's major goals was to provoke a hysterical American overreaction that would begin bleeding the nation into economic ruin. Mission accomplished?"

Tony Karon, NY Times, helps with some perspective, describing a murderous crime scene in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania becoming a spiritual staging ground for an international war against "a tiny network of transnational extremists, founded on the remnants of the Arab volunteers who'd fought in the U.S. backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union."

And the cost? Let alone the trillion dollars spent, more critically the immoral cost of lives, with almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive disability payments, with more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, with veteran suicides topping 18 per day in recent years, and family breakups, are simply too incalculable to understand. 

For many other Americans the decade has been one of growing prejudice as Muslims have been cruelly subjected to Islamophobia, reminiscent, if perhaps not surpassing, that experienced by the Japanese-Americans during WWII.

Jim Wallis writes in Sojourners, "For a moment the world's last remaining superpower was vulnerable, and we all felt it. . . . in our sudden sense of vulnerability we were now, and perhaps for the first time, like most of the world, where vulnerability is an accepted part of being human. And in those first days, following 9/11, America, not the terrorists, had the high ground. The world did not identify with those who cruelly and murderously decided to take innocent lives in response to their grievances - - both real and imagined. Instead the world identified with a suffering America - -  even the front of the French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline, 'We are all America'."

Is this still the case today?

Tonight, on our local ABC affiliate, a young woman interviewed said we need to move, we need to remember, we need to forgive. One can only hope. The toll on us, let alone this whole world, this last decade has been unprecedented. To heal is perhaps the new mission to be accomplished.

Eric Darton, author of Divided We Stand: A Biography on New York City's World Trade Center, was being interviewed by NPR's Robert Seigel on "All Things Considered" just three days after the attack. Towards the end of the interview, Darton recounted that the night after the towers were destroyed, his 9-year old daughter climbed up on the kitchen ladder to look out of their Manhattan apartment window at the scene of the destruction. Night was falling, and she said to her father: "I think I'm beginning to see the new view."

We need to recall 9/11/2001, not as just the horrific event it truly was, but now as a means, a hope, a deep sense of resolve to heal - - in all areas of our national and interrelated world's life. For we are, and we can perhaps again be, a people that can "see the new view."

End of Puget Sound News & Weather

Puget Sound News and Weather, the communications vehicle for the not-for-profit-but extremely-important  People for Puget Sound, made its final appearance with today's blog. As its editor Mike Sato expressed earlier this month, PPS is "a people’s campaign for the good of the Sound, a campaign conducted by people, with the hearts and minds of people at its core: To hold ourselves and others accountable to do everything possible to ensure the health of our land and waters.” 


The ending of  Puget Sound News and Weather apparently is due to budget considerations.


As one who has cruised around the edges, and sometimes in the world of public relations and the media, it is always sad when an organization which relies so heavily on public awareness and people mobilization, as does People for Puget Sound, eliminates its most crucial tool. For me, the genius of PPS, in addition to its interaction with government, has been informing, inspiring, coordinating and making know to all of us what is happening and what is needed on the Sound, and giving us ways to respond. After all, we're the stewards of these waters and we need to constantly know where and how to be good stewards. Puget Sound News and Weather has done that for us, big time!


To eliminate this can be folly.


Mike Sato has been their communications director for 20 years, a person with a strong passion for this mission. Mike plans to continue at least providing the news clippings ("as a community service and because I'm a news junky"). This service will be a private undertaking, bearing no relationship to People For Puget Sound. To continue receiving his postings go now to "Salish Sea News & Weather" and subscribe. I certainly plan to, and I love the new name for Mike's blog!


Thanks, Mike, for what you've done these past two decades, and here's to your new cruising on the Salish Sea. Best of luck and may there be good seas ahead.

Serenading Whales?

It was nine years ago that we ventured up to San Juan Island for a most unusual event, one that peaked the imagination. Of course, much of the San Juan's can do that, but this was somehow beyond the islands' normal uniquenesses.


Have you ever serenaded a whale,  an Orca?


Well, that's what folk do once every year, gathering on the rocks at Lime Kiln Park on the West side of the Island. It all started eleven years ago with the City Cantabile Choir, Fred West maestro. Special speakers are lowered into the waters around this famous scratching site, at least famous to the Orca who scratch there on the rocky bottom, then the singing begins. Some times instrumental, some times by the choir, some times by everybody.

As the sun set over Vancouver Island on that clear, warm evening we joined with the choir . Some folk simply sat and gazed a cross the strait, the Salish Sea, others sketched and painted, and our sound echoed through the waters.

As  the evening grew cool, our enthusiasm started to fade with the sun. It was dusk, and despite our best choral efforts, the Orca were nowhere in sight. We had just clambered down from our rocky perch to head down the road to our car. Then a shout, "Here they come! They're coming! They're coming down, heading south!" And, lo, there they were, some way off the shoreline to be sure, but there. The music started up, the whales stopped their swim. They seemed to be listening. One spy hopped (to see who this strange group of sound making creatures were?). Then, after a few minutes milling around, again on their way South, perhaps to Cattle Point.

It was truly a magical moment for us, and perhaps for the Orca, who knows. Species singing to species. Awing. So cool.


We drove back to our island motel almost in silence, savoring the moment.


The 11th annual Orca Sing concert will be held this Sunday, June 19th, starting at 7:00 PM. Bring a flashlight and a $5 donation. Parking will be tight, so consider grabbing a bus from the ferry.

This year's concert will be dedicated to the wildlife and people of the Gulf of Mexico who suffered the devastation of the BP oil disaster.Orca Sing is sponsored by People For Puget Sound, Friends of the San Juans, The Whale Museum, American Cetacean Society--Puget Sound Chapter, The Whale Trail, Orca Network and the City Cantabile Choir. 

Hey, why not make this a whole weekend of activity while you're on the Island? Check out the Whale Museum, the book stores, and don't overlook the ice cream joint by the ferry dock!

You will never regret experiencing this. And who knows, the Orca may come again, and this time, perhaps, join you in the chorus?