Adventuress

The 1913 Rice Brothers schooner has pivoted many times now: from Arctic exploration to pilotage to sail training. Was there really any chance that COVID could stop her?

Marlinspike chatted with Sound Experience Executive Director Catherine Collins in November, at the conclusion of Adventuress’ successful 2022 sailing season.

Marlinspike: I know Adventuress was built for an Arctic expedition, but she doesn’t really give you that rugged feel that Bowdoin or Ernestina do. She is a beautiful vessel — but maybe a bit yachty for the high latitudes?

Catherine Collins: She is a beautiful vessel! She was indeed built by a man named John Borden, who wanted to go to the Arctic to hunt with his friends, and the Museum of Natural History in New York City got word of it. They reached out to Borden and asked, “Can we send along our naturalist, Roy Chapman Andrews?”

Andrews went on to discover the first dinosaur eggs, in Mongolia, so he’s a really interesting character. He was responsible for the whale exhibits at the museum. And they needed one more whale, a bowhead whale. So Roy Chapman Andrews joined up with Borden and headed to the Arctic.

But luckily for Adventuress, they were late [laughs]. The pack ice came in and she didn’t get there. Other vessels that were on time got frozen in and had a terrible time. And they didn’t get the bowhead whale specimen. Still, Andrews did some seminal research. They dropped him off on the Pribiloff Islands and he did seal research, which actually ended up being pretty important.

You are entirely right. Adventuress was a terrible vessel for Arctic exploration. She was built as a yacht. Our Ship Committee chair, David Jackson, who’s also a marine surveyor, he and I went to the Peabody Essex Museum and there’s a file and books with photos on Adventuress and her building. We got to see designer B.B.

Crowninshield’s communications with the yard that built her, Rice Brothers, in East Boothbay, Maine.

She was sold the next year to the San Francisco Bar Pilots, where she was the Belle of the Ball. They bought her for her gas engine, which actually ended up being a problem when she caught fire in the summer of 1915. They had to scuttle her and that’s where she lost her gaff rig and ended up getting cut down. Still, she was very functional. The pilots always believed there was something special about her, even when they sold her in 1952 to Doc Freeman, who owned a chandlery and brought her to Seattle to sell her. She came up to Seattle that winter and started her life here both as a private vessel and then a youth training vessel.

MS: There’s a great sepia-tone photo on your Facebook page of Adventuress rigged as a staysail schooner with “CGR672” on her bow and “PILOT” on this big house that they built. Do you know what she was being used for during the war?

CC: Every vessel that the Navy could commandeer was used to patrol the West Coast during the war, and she was one of them. We don't have a lot of information about that.

MS: You said that in 1952 she moved on from the San Francisco Bar Pilots. Tell us a little bit about how the schooner got launched into sail training as a vocation.

CC: Doc Freeman owned a chandlery here; he was from a well-known tugboat-operating family. He purchased her and brought her up here in 1952. It was an epic voyage. The sails blew out and the engine almost didn’t make it. Anyway, she limped her way through the shipping canal into Lake Union, and she was pretty rough-looking. Freeman fixed her up a little bit and sold her and then she had a couple private owners.

Then in 1963 woman by the name of Ernestine Bennett started using Adventuress for Girl Scouts programs. That was the first documented time where kids came on and learned how to sail. There may have been earlier times that, but we don’t have the stories on that. Ernestine Bennett ended up becoming the Godmother of Restoration for this ship. She and her husband, Stan, with his resources and her commitment, transformed Adventuress back into her spectacular gaff-rigged 1913 glory. And she’s credited with pushing our state and federal historic preservation entities to make Adventuress a National Historic Landmark.

Adventuress is one of only two National Historic Landmark sailing vessels that is still an active USCG-licensed commercial vessel on the West Coast. The other one is the Alma in San Francisco.

That designation is the gift that Ernestine Bennett left me when it came to fully restoring the ship over the past 12 or 13 years, because you get a lot of attention as an NHL. When you go to the federal government for a Save America’s Treasures grant, the fact that you’re an NHL gives you a leg up. We got some match funding, then got Save America’s Treasures funding for the match, and then on top of that it was matched by state funding. So it became this process whereby you start with your incredibly generous private donors, then you go to whatever federal or state grants are available, and then you bring those things as matches — each gift leverages the next, or each grant leverages the next.

But it was Ernestine Bennett who made the commitment to get Adventuress named a National Historic Landmark. That was not easy. I have since served a couple terms on the Governor’s Advisory Council for Historic Preservation here in Washington State. I’ve seen the files and the letters that she wrote to make that happen. Those preservationist folks save everything [laughs].

MS: Tell us how Adventuress went from Ernestine Bennett to Sound Experience.

CC: I’m not the foremost expert on that transition, but… Youth Adventure was Ernestine’s organization: sail training for kids. As Ernestine got older, she was looking to hand Adventuress off to the next organization that would care for her. I’m sure it was emotionally difficult for her to do this, but it was time. And a couple of folks from the Seattle area, Morley Horder and his then-wife Barbara Wyatt… Morley was a former captain of Clearwater and he wanted to bring that mission, to inspire stewards of our marine environment here in the Puget Sound area, just as they have done with Clearwater on the Hudson River.

He started Sound Experience as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) education organization, and started chartering Adventuress for programs. And that’s how Ernestine got to know them

and become more comfortable with the idea that perhaps they could take on the vessel. So there was a transition over to Sound Experience, which took sail training but then added environmental education in this stewardship.

What I like about that is it shows the evolution of her mission, still dedicated to youth and the development of young people, but also transitioning to what’s needed at the time. That’s still needed today as we align our curriculum with next-generation science standards and support schools to bring these concepts to life for kids, inspiring kids to look into science careers. And there’s also such a need to inspire kids to consider maritime careers.

MS: What’s the COI you’re working with these days? How many kids can you take out? What are your manning requirements?

CC: We sail with about 11 paid crew members, we call them professional crew and educators: captain, mate, second mate, galley coordinator, deck educators, engineer.

MS: That’s a lot of folks. Is that required by your COI, or is that the way you run the boat?

CC: It’s not required, it’s the crew complement system we are comfortable with, that allows us to do this work with excellence. It is an expensive model, but it’s needed if you’re considering the safety of the kids and all aboard. It’s also a heavy lift with regard to financial sustainability and operating model. There’s no question about that.

It ends up being a fundraising game. The importance of operational fundraising becomes much more prominent, to be able to staff the schooner at this level. But to us, that’s what quality looks like.

MS: Before we began rolling tape, we talked about the hiring crunch that everybody in our industry is experiencing. Where are your deckhands and officers coming from? Are you able to advance people through your organization?

CC: It’s changing a bit, but both our captains started on Adventuress and went to other places for a while and are back. And they’re amazing! They’re our next generation of captains. That’s the ideal, both for cultural understanding of the organization and how things work here and what we’re all going for collectively. They’re the leadership on board; they, with the mate, are really leading everything that we do. Once they push off from the dock, it’s all them. So it’s great that they come often from within.

We also have crew members who have never been aboard, and then come and join us. One thing that happened during COVID… normally people fly across the country to work here. But during COVID, because we were doing what we call consecutive day programs, people weren’t living on the boat for that first year. Our crew members were mostly local. What is exciting is that during COVID, we started focusing more on building partnerships which have resulted in us working more deeply in our local communities, with kids whose communities really want them to have this experience. And now we’re starting to move some of these kids into internship roles, which diversifies our staffing even more. We know there’s an issue with diversity and with equity that we’re working to resolve, as are all of our fellow tall-ship friends. Our programs are meeting the need of populations and communities that really want to belong on the water and want to come together on the water and wanna sail together. An example of that, and this is where some of our crew are coming from or coming for, is our commitment to LGBTQ and trans and gender non-binary youth programming, working in partnership with the Pride Foundation and other organizations like Trans Families and Olympic Pride, where we bring young people together who need a safe place to be with people they can connect to, and shipmates that they have things in common with. And so it becomes a safe place, a place where these young people want to come back as crew members and learn even more.

We’re also working with Seattle Public Schools and with skill centers and we’re starting to see some of these kids who are graduating high school come back and work for us. This is really cool as well. So they’ve come out on a week long

program where they get credit for career and technical education programming, and then a couple here or there want to come back. They’ve experienced what it feels like to be a crew member and they love it and they’re like, “I want more of that. I want more skills development. I want to learn and I want to teach.”

It’s really heartening to see. There was one kid recently who brought her dad on a member sail and she’s like, “I’m applying next year. I want to work for you guys. I want to come do more of this.”

MS: The people who are sailing your boat and providing programming, are they the same people who are maintaining your boat?

CC: Yes. We do a lot of maintenance during the sailing season, in addition to the winter months, November through February.

MS: You touched on all the restoration work that you did pre-COVID. What kind of shape is the schooner in today? Are there more big projects on the horizon?

CC: Everything was restored, at a cost of about $2.3 million, which actually in today’s dollars isn’t that much! We finished with a million-dollar deck. Thankfully that was finished a year before COVID hit. We were very fortunate to be able to finish the restoration. The one thing we didn’t do is put back on the topmasts. We are working on that now.

She’s in extraordinary shape right now. It’s really something. It is an incredible success story for the team that got this done. I’m super proud. She’s in incredible shape.

What’s gonna happen this winter… now our schools and your youth groups are starting to come back. We’re not thriving yet programmatically, but we’re looking really positive. And we know next year’s going to be even better. So we’re thinking about getting the topmasts back. What needs to happen?

We had some people join our community recently, retired naval architects, great project managers. In pretty short order, people came to the table with the $60,000 we needed to be able to return the topmasts to Adventuress. Haven Boatworks is contributing labor and materials to the building of hollow topmasts. It is an extraordinary gift to this ship and mission.

We are currently working with the Coast Guard on ballasting and stability. We have incredible support from these naval architects who have done all the calculations and are working with the Coast Guard. It’s not a done deal, but we’re really hoping that we can bring back the topmasts this winter. It’s going to be a very big party in the spring!

It really is the icing on the cake. She doesn’t look right without her topmasts. It’s quite a story that this ship has got the love and the support of the larger community and the professionals in the community, such as the yard that we worked with to completely restore the ship. I know they’re really proud of that — Haven Boatworks in Port Townsend — and we’re so grateful to them.

MS: The hollow topmasts — is that a feature that she previously had, or is that a project you’ve undertaken to reduce weight aloft and improve stability?

CC: It’s new. But I am not the expert on this [laughs]. Right now we’re waiting to see what the Coast Guard thinks. We’ve got our fingers crossed and hope that it works out for this winter. I think when we haul out in December and start working on this, it definitely could be a cool update for Marlinspike. This is a super geek-out kind of project. We have the incredible support of Glosten Naval Architects to do this project. We really can’t thank them enough. I think it was a 300-page document they put together on stability calculations.

MS: Let’s switch gears and talk about COVID. When the pandemic shut everything down in the spring of 2020, it caught all of us flat-footed. I remember being on zoom meetings with you and with other Executive Directors in the industry, and people saying things like, “My business model is burnt to the waterline” and “I don’t know how we’re going to go on.”

And yet here we all are, two and a half years later. What helped Sound Experience make it through COVID and come out the other side?

CC: This incredible core team that’s here — four staff members and two captains — just kept doing it. Whether “it” was virtual programming, or maintenance by yourself in the winter on the ship in a cold, dark winter with nobody else to work with… they just powered through it.

On the financial side, we had some donors say, “Look, I’m going to give you the money now that I was going to leave in my will for you, because you need it now.” And that was super humbling and unbelievable.

We got PPP loans, we kept paying our bills, and we started to come out the other side in 2021. Initially, we had to pay — as I think we all did — all our school deposits back. It was an incredibly painful time, an uncertain time. I’ve never experienced that kind of uncertainty in a nonprofit or business situation, ever. There was a lot of miracle in getting through that. I still can’t believe we did. What I know is that our operating budget was cut in half overnight, but we got through it, thanks to our community.

Elizabeth Becker

MS: Did you ever think, “There’s no way I’m still sitting in this chair six months from now”?

CC: Oh! Every day! Every month I’d be like, “Well, we did it. We got through this month. So, what’s around the corner?” We couldn’t see around the corner, had no idea what might come next. So there was a whole heck of a lot of faith.

And we took advantage of every tool out there. One of them was going down to four days a week and taking advantage of a generous unemployment-sharing situation with the State that we were able to tap into. We used every possible tool, from federal support to grants to PPP money.

And the really cool thing is that if this hadn’t happened, we would not be in such trusted partnership with organizations that really want us to serve their kids now. And the communities that we’re in, whether it’s South Everett, just north of Seattle, or communities in Tacoma or in Seattle, everybody’s like, “Wow, you’re still here.”

Our attitude was always, “Yeah, we’re here for you, ‘cause we know that this is really hard and we’re gonna be here for you when this is over. And we’re here for you now. What do you need?”

That’s what we led out with in 2021 as we came back: those community partnerships. We raised grant money, people were generous. It’s all about relationships. People know and trust us, they trust us with their kids. It’s a big deal!

God, I’m getting emotional [laughs].

MS: Talk a little bit about your partners and your programs. You’ve already mentioned some of the many programs you guys run. You have a lot of irons in the fire!

CC: We have day programs and we have overnight programs. The overnight are by far the most powerful, because it’s a journey, it’s a voyage and it takes a while for shipmates to come together.

We have flexibility in what we do and deliver. I would say that every program is pretty much custom, with certain elements that are always there. Whether it’s shipboard skills, deck skills, engineering skills, system skills… this is a testament to our shipboard crew and captains, but we can do everything from skills development that results in high school credit to building community for populations of kids that may not be welcomed in other places in the same way.

For all of it, the ship is our teacher. Whatever element is needed, this is the power of experiential education, and good experiential educators know what tool to use, what resource to bring. And so it can be a boatload of fifth graders as part of an outdoor school initiative here in Washington. There is an initiative underway where every fifth and sixth graders in the state we hope we’ll be able to have a chance at a weeklong outdoor school. We qualify and work in that environment as well as in a public high school environment. And occasionally private schools will bring their kids out for a week. We do a number of Waldorf School programs.

We have an education team in our office, four staff members dedicated to working with schools and with partners. That’s where we’re growing. We’re going to be adding infrastructure on partnership development as well as fundraising. Because you can’t do this without a lot of resources.

MS: Tell us about the Adventuress Cup.

CC: Ah! We had grown, over a period of 12 or 13

years, this incredible gala that we had every fall for 300 people. We’d raise over $200,000 a year. Major auction, major gala, everybody loved it, wear your finest! And all of that came to a crashing halt in 2020. There were no galas, no regattas, nothing going on.

But I have this brother who’s just brilliant and he is the CEO of the Pan-Mass Challenge; it’s the largest bike fundraiser in the country and raises tens of millions each year for Cancer research. I went to my really smart brother and said, “Do you think we could replicate a peer-to-peer fundraiser? Like the Pan-Mass Challenge, but on the water, with boats?”

And he said, “Yeah.” So I got him together with my team and we talked about it and said, “Well, we could have some in-person boats and we could also do it online. What would that take?” My brilliant team member, Jenny Huntley, found a system to do it, found the back-office system to make it work. And we implemented it.

Over the past three years, it’s grown more online than it has in person, because once COVID was over, people started doing their in-person races again. The on-the water portion became a little bit more challenging to fill. But in 2020 nobody else was out there, all the races had shut down. And over the past two years, it’s grown. And this year we raised, I want to say, $120,000.

Our old gala cost $50,000 to put on; this only costs about $10,000!

We have an amazing board member who really spearheaded it, Rusty Lhamon. He’s a racer and he’s completely committed to youth education and youth on the water. He just ran with it. But it was our team, our collective team, that made this happen.

It was really fun. People gave generously. And then they get awards and plaques and we had a big party at Corinthian Yacht Club, who was a big supporter. It was not the gala, but it was full of love. You felt the community’s love for the ship and the work and the mission. And it was so great to be back together again this year.

MS: Has the Cup replaced the Gala for you now, or are you going to do both?

CC: Such a great question. My suspicion is that our board and our community would like to get dressed up again to celebrate the ship and the mission. And I don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but it is very possible we could do both.

MS: I don’t think you can ever have too many successful fundraisers! ❂

For more info, visit SoundExp.org