She began her life as a log boom tugboat, called the Edward A. Young. She plied the waters of Puget Sound. Built by Tacoma Tug & Barge company in 1926. She had deep ruts in her decking from the cork boots of the men who worked on her. Her starboard bow showed some sort of impact but that story is known only to those who can no longer speak. We removed the damaged wood during our initial haulout. Even such an impact, though, has little long-lasting effect on such a vessel. She was built hell-for-stout, having 2" thick planks of old growth Douglas Fir, with 3"x 3" ribs on 12" centers (12" from the center of one rib to the next). But her real integrity comes from her ceiling. No, not like the one above your head, but a boat's ceiling, which is what a tugboat's inner planking layer is called. Yes, you understand that right: a tugboat like the Edward A. Young has two hulls - an outer one and an inner partial hull!
We sadly don't have a complete history from her time as a working tugboat. With patience, we are hoping to get more information from the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society and other sources. Meanwhile, we have been able to fill in a couple of the gaps from listening and reading. One tantalizing historical tidbit came in the shape of an old salt who knew her 'back in the day.' One day in 2008, while we were hauled out in the Port Townsend Boatyard, Rich was working on a long list of smaller and larger repairs. Port Townsend was the only yard in the region with a lift large enough to haul all of her 60 tons out of the water on their mammoth Travel Lift.Rich was working on the seams, standing on scaffolding 15 feet up in the air. The hull's big belly stretched a full 20 feet from the ground to the top edge of the deck above him. An old sailor came up to him and, without preamble, asked Rich, "Is this was the Edward A. Young?" Rich answered, "Yes," to which the old salt replied, "Well, sir, I was there the day she died." And, indeed, he had been! The old salt went on to tell Rich of that fateful day in 1969 in Tacoma's Foss Waterway when the Edward A. Young met her demise. "She went into irons," he said. Rich, not familiar with this term, asked him what he meant. For a tugboat, this is a fatal maneuver. Normally the tug, the towline and the tow all line up with the tugboat pulling it all along straight. Sometimes, though, a situation develops when the tug tries to moves its tow into a different position but the tug's towline ends up on the opposite side of the tug from the tow (what's being towed). Its much larger, heavier tow, pushed by current, wind or tides, moves away from the tug and the tug capsizes! (For a YouTube video of another tug in this kind of trouble, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgC2SOQNCTk). Well, my friends, was the end of the tugboat history of the Edward A. Young.
We're not sure exactly how long she sat on the bottom in the Foss Waterway before she was bought for salvage rights by a family with long maritime ties to the Pacific Northwest boating community. A daughter of the family came onboard decades later, when we were hauled out in drydock in 2016. She had stories about spending an entire summer digging sand out of the stern of the boat, accumulated from the riveroutflow while she sat waiting patiently on the bottom. But she was saved. Before the Edward A Young had a chance to catch its breath, and marvel at te trun taken in its lfe as as a boat, the new owners had placed two tall masts onto its deck with crutch poles set below deck on either side of the masts' foot. Yes, she was successfully turned into a sailboat. (Note: In the 1920s, the hull for a sailboat and the hull of a tugboat were essentially the same, unlike today.) Now over the next 40 years, the deck slowly deteriorated from the pressure of the sails, masts and booms on the deck planking but she was glorious as a sailboat, as long as there was wind of at least 25 knots. Her topsail didn't come down very often, reflecting the difficulty of bending it on to begin with.