Ross Anderson is a founding member of the Rainshadow Journal collective. He retired to Port Townsend after 30 years of journalism at the Seattle Times.
Famously, participants will not have engines – none whatsoever. Their 750 mile voyage to Ketchikan, Alaska, will be powered by some combination of wind, muscle and no small amount of human endurance and ingenuity.
Occasionally I’ll check his recorded longitude-latitude coordinates against my GPS, and they’re astonishingly close. Some of his South Pacific charts were used by the Navy as recently as WWII – 150 years after they were drawn.
From Seattle’s Fishermens Terminal to Port Townsend and Bellingham Bay, the boatyards and marinas are abuzz with power sanders and arc welders, the smell of varnish fumes and sawdust and diesel oil – fishermen and boaters gearing up for another voyage up the Inside Passage to Alaska.
Over the past 70-plus years, state ferries have carried hundreds of millions of passengers on perhaps 10 million trips. And yet, across seven decades, not a single life has been lost in a ferry accident. But if a ferry were to sink, here's how it might happen...
Each spring, as we approach Opening Day, I’m reminded that baseball is about a weird concoction of reality and fantasy, physics and psychics, curve balls and called strikes, nine-digit...
Our brains work differently. Scientists are specialists who know a lot about a few things. Journalists are generalists who know a little about a lot of things.
The crab pots were hung and the crabbers reposed
Since Dungeness season was finally closed.
The children were snuggled as if in a coma
Induced perhaps by the pulp mill’s aroma.
The sound will bulge to more than 1,000 square miles. Beaches will all but disappear. Waves on Elliott Bay may slosh onto piers and ferry ramps will flatten.