You know how that old saw goes: “The two happiest days in a sailor’s life are the day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it.” Well, the third happiest day is when he buys the next boat. I was very happy when I sold my 1977 30-foot Willard Mark IV Flybridge trawler. But being boatless for more than a decade was not happy for me at all.
Willard Marine was among the first companies to make production, recreational fiberglass boats, launching its first 36-foot trawler in 1961. It stopped in the early 2000s. Between 1999 and 2002, it built only four 30-foot pilothouse trawlers. Hull No. 176—which former Passagemaker editor Bill Parlatore and maintenance expert Steve D’Antonio outfitted for a crossing from Virginia to Bermuda—was the company’s last recreational boat. It now makes boats and warheads exclusively for the military.
So, when I saw Hull No. 175 for sale online, I was sure the pocket trawler wouldn’t last long, even though the owner lived in remote Meyers Chuck, Alaska, just north a Ketchikan. A few days later, when the listing was no longer there, I was sure someone had snapped it up. A 1988 Mark IV soon came up for sale in Anacortes, Wash., close to me. I went down to look at her and left disappointed. The boat was in poor shape and had a Perkins 4.108.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Perkins 4.108s. I called the engine that powered my 1977 Mark IV “Miss Perky.” And one of the things said about this fabled British engine is that the only time it’s not leaking oil is when it’s not running. Mine leaked because of a rear main seal in need of replacement. While it caused me to explore an untold number of remediation steps, including growing a colony of oil-eating bacteria in the bilge, several engine mechanics told me the rear main seal could be replaced at a fairly exorbitant cost, and the leak would stop for at best six months.
I kept dreaming of a trawler that would fit my modest budget with an engine that wouldn’t leak, namely that Willard 30 Pilothouse. On a lark, I emailed the owner, who emailed back that the boat had not yet sold. It was on the hard in Ketchikan.
“I’ll fly up Sunday,” I texted. “If I like the sea trial, and we can come to terms, I’ll buy it and drive back down to Bellingham on her own bottom.”
“Do you know what you’re getting into?” the owner asked.
I do. I’ve done most of the Inside Passage solo. And the few parts I’ve not done solo, I’ve done with a fellow boater when we were delivering a Grand Banks 46 from northern Vancouver Island to Ketchikan.
The owner met me at the airport and dropped me at a hotel. We had lunch, and then we were off for a sea trial. The yard dropped the boat into the water. The 56-hp Yanmar diesel purred like a kitten and had only 1,400 hours on it. Best of all, the bilge was oil-free. Soon, the owner gave me the wheel. I was in heaven.
That evening, over dinner, we struck a deal. The only problem was that Pacific Maritime Title and my bank were in the state of Washington, and the only document-shipping service out of Ketchikan required depositing a letter or a package at 8 a.m. There was no way to get a document to Washington in one day, have it signed and notarized, and get it back to Seattle the following day.
The owner was anxious to get back to Meyers Chuck, so, after he signed the papers, he handed me the keys and said, “She’s your boat. Stay on her until all the papers are signed.”
And I did, which took almost 10 days. On the eighth day of my stay in Ketchikan, Hull No. 174 pulled into the public marina, where the owner was shocked to see another late-model Willard 30 Pilothouse there. “I know that boat,” he said. “I tried to buy her several years ago. She’s the best of the pilothouse models made.”
He had done a superb job outfitting his boat and was on a 4,000-mile trip south from Seward, Alaska, to Ensenada, Mexico, which I’m happy to say that he made safely in his Willard.
I left Ketchikan two days after meeting him, and it was quite the adventure bringing the boat home, with long hours of enjoyment punctuated by a few moments of sheer terror. The boat’s radar went down in heavy fog and rain over Queen Charlotte Sound. Fortunately, the Garmin chartplotter kept working, and I’d brought along another portable chartplotter and AIS, so I could at least see where cruise ships and ferries were. A humpback breached fully out of the water 100 yards off my port bow during the Queen Charlotte Sound crossing as if to say, “Don’t worry, you’ll get through.”
South of Robson’s Bight, I hung out with an orca family for about an hour, watching what I think was a female teaching her young how to fish. The matriarch would corral salmon in a small bay, and fish would jump wildly over the water. The young orca—two calves and a juvenile—would then swim into the bay and feast, while the mother moved down to the next small bay to do the same thing.
Mostly, I had calm conditions until close to home, where I hit 4- to 5-foot seas coming into Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. They were following seas, and Willards are double-enders. So, once I stopped oversteering and let the boat find her rhythm, she was just fine, even if I was a bit scared.
I made a promise to myself on the way down that I would not try to fix anything mechanical as long as the engine remained running. That was a good decision. Two days into the 12-day trip, I noticed the aft bilge pump ran more often than seemed usual because the packing gland was dripping more than it should, even with the engine not running.
Packing glands are not a major issue on a boat, but once I’d made it home and safely into Squalicum Harbor, Wash., I put a wrench on the compression nut to loosen it. Before I even exerted any pressure, water gushed out of the gland, and the bilge pump was running nearly continuously. The compression nut and the packing gland nut were frozen. It took two wrenches, penetrating oil, a hot air gun, a ball-peen hammer and three hours to free it. Yes, I was glad I had not started that process in some remote cove along the Inside Passage.
With the packing gland squared away, I toiled for several weeks on other projects I deemed critical: brightwork to make the gray and black teak nice and shiny, an EVA foam teak-and-holly sole to replace the cherry veneer that was splintering, a replacement galley table and a pilothouse table that I built… You know how it goes. I renamed her Mystic Voyager.
Looking back over my solo trip down the Inside Passage, I’m aware of how much I love my newly purchased Willard 30. I’m also aware that as a black mariner, I proudly join the ranks of other black men and women who’ve put to sea. In the 19th century, black sailors—enslaved and free, from captains to deckhands to shipwrights—made up 18 percent of the maritime industry in America at a time when blacks made up 18 percent of the country’s population. They were called “Black Jacks.” Guess that makes me a modern-day Black Jack, too.
This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.
