www.montereycountyweekly.com November 2-8, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 23 from the book Ed Ricketts: From Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska. It is not a coincidence that the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s award to honor scientists who have exhibited exemplary work and advanced the status of knowledge in the field of marine science bears the name of Ed Ricketts. Or that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has an unmanned submersible research platform named ROV Doc Ricketts. Ricketts’ scientific legacy, in many ways, has lived on, even before the Western Flyer was located and restored. Steinbeck and Ricketts hated museum pieces and had no patience for artifacts, according to Gregg. “They would want it to earn its own keep,” he says about the Western Flyer and its future. “As cool as this boat is because of its place in history, it’s sort of meaningless if it can’t go and do good work in the future.” It was Steinbeck and Ricketts who came up with the idea of a lab in the fish-hold, but feared dampness there would have rusted their instruments overnight. They had no darkroom, no permanent aquarium, no tank for keeping animals alive, and no pumps for delivering seawater—and they were painfully aware of it. “We have concluded that all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice, once to make a mistake and once to correct them,” Steinbeck announced, adding that next time they would take along a cameraman, who would do nothing but take pictures. Now, the Western Flyer has access to all these technologies—high-tech scientific equipment, meteorological instrumentation—so the lab will be constructed and named after another influential local scientist, Chuck Baxter, a longtime instructor at Hopkins Marine Station and a co-founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who died in 2022. The plan for the foundation is to keep the Western Flyer in Monterey Bay nine months of the year, doing research trips with local colleges and universities. Each year, it will travel for a few months—one year to the Sea of Cortez, another to the Pacific Northwest. “The boat will be going on trips all the time,” Flumerfelt says. This year, the foundation has been shifting from the restoration effort to stewardship, research, education and outreach. In addition to a captain, it hired a full-time science manager, Katie Thomas, who is busy developing details of the research program. There’s also a new education manager, Rebecca Mostow, and the plan is for all education programs to be free. They are scheduled to start in the spring or summer 2024. (For now, the boat will remain mostly in Moss Landing; Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey is its intended final home.) Students will not only use the boat, but also a 1947 bus that the foundation bought from an old Hollywood set, which will transport Monterey County students to the ocean to do on-land or on-boat work. The foundation plans to rely on a mix of government and private funding, maintaining partnerships with institutions such as Stanford University that are also interested in using the boat. Additionally, they will be chartering the Western Flyer to scientists, who can do work and spend nights on board. Because the Flyer is so quiet now, thanks to the new engine, the foundation expects to see demand. “We are not theory-driven,” Gregg says. “We want to go to places on a regular basis over a long period of time to record minor changes [in the environment]. That’s really important to science. “When I look around, it’s hard to take a victory lap,” he adds, taking a sweeping look at the reborn Western Flyer. “There’s so much work to do.” The idea is to try as many different programs as necessary, from scientific monitoring to boat building, to see what works—while always trying to combine art and science, Steinbeck and Ricketts. The Western Flyer and boat parade arrive in Monterey Harbor on Saturday, Nov. 4. Boat parade starts 11:30am; welcoming ceremony at California Dock (end of Fisherman’s Wharf) 12:30 pm; tours of the Western Flyer 1:15pm-4pm. Free. 220-8047, westernflyer.org. “Aw, we’re going down in the Gulf to collect starfish and bugs and stuff like that.” PRESENTED BY
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==