continued from previous page We motor around the Humboldt State University’s big, green research boat, the Coral Sea, to marvel at another huge green boat — the 121-foot-long, skinny, nameless and now-stalled project of retired professor J.A. Gast. Gast, who founded HSU’s oceanography department in 1961, started building the vessel in 1989, thinking it would be a good instruction ship. He once called it the Phuma — a South African term that for him evokes “unusual, different,” and that also means “go out” in Zulu. It’s narrow, only 16 feet wide, and light for a steel boat its size, sitting high in the water. It’s only left port a couple of times. It’s a labor of love (Gast says he still has the utilities left to install but his interest has waned). DeWitt zips our boat back into the bay and points it north. Hills has one more thing — well, a couple — left to show us. As we near the marshy shore of Indian Island, he points at a tiny warped-wood building on stilts at water’s edge: The old Baptist church. Then, he says, see that copse of trees, where the egret rookery is? That’s where Mia, the black lab and the Madaket’s old mascot, is buried. She lived a long life, charming tourists by swimming after the Madaket, until she died when Hills was 4. Then he lowers
RETIRED HUMBOLDT STATE UNIVERSITY OCEANOGRAPHY PROFESSOR (HE FOUNDED THE PROGRAM) J.A. GAST, WITH HELP FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY, BUILT THIS BOAT IN 1989 ON THE SAMOA PENINSULA. HE WANTED TO USE IT FOR INSTRUCTION, BUT NEVER QUITE FINISHED IT. IT SITS IN THE WOODLEY ISLAND MARINA.
his hand, drawing our eyes to what looks like a corroded old wood wall sticking out of the shallows by the shore. That, he says, is writer Jack London’s old boat, the Christine. The nameboard, taken from her long ago, is now at the maritime museum.
It’s hard to find evidence proving that this was indeed one of London’s old boats, although a 1966 story in the Eureka Humboldt Standard also says it’s so. London had several sail boats — famously, The Snark — and wrote in a memoir,
Four Horses and a Sailor, about sailing in Humboldt Bay. Like the 1910 barfight between London and Stanwood Murphy in the Oberon Saloon in Eureka — recorded later by eyewitness W.J. “Hap” Waters — the story lives on. ●
IS THIS ROTTING FIN OF WOOD PLANKS REALLY ONE OF JACK LONDON’S OLD BOATS? ONLY THE EGRET KNOWS.
18 NORTH COAST JOURNAL • THURSDAY, DEC. 6, 2012 • northcoastjournal.com