In Humboldt Bay, stories lurk within the rusting beaters and gleaming glories
12/6/12
Cody Hills leans back in the stern of the small boat owned by Humboldt Baykeeper, which is zipping north through the Eureka channel of Humboldt Bay. He looks as relaxed as if he were reclining on his living-room couch. Around him the water crinkles and winks, like smoothed-out foil gift wrap. Two frothy white tracks stretch parallel behind the moving boat, creating a broad path back in time.
Beyond the wake sits the Schneider Dock, which knew the bay when it was a working man’s paradise, full of mills and ships and fishing boats, even whalers, and ferries. The work has dwindled — there are mostly fishing boats now — but stories linger out here, sealed in the grain of old wooden boats, in the iron cells of former war ships like the World War II Navy landing craft Ten Ninety-One, now a civilian museum ship docked north of the Schneider dock, and even in some of the more modern boats.
There are boats in this bay that look like old beaters, ready for retirement in some quiet, forgetting cove. And others, seemingly in good shape, that never leave port. There are nameless boats. There’s a lovingly oiled wooden boat: “Admiral” Jim Blum’s 1965, 49-foot golden-brown crab and tuna boat, the Tempest. Rescue barges. Ordinary old fishing boats, and new ones made by Eureka boat builder Ken Bates. And more.
Hills knows many if not most of them — he’s spent his whole young life so far living and working on the bay, drinking in the lore like an essential nutrient.
Sure, he’s just a kid: 22. But he’s Leroy Zerlang’s kid: Zerlang, also reared on the bay, who owned the Crab Shack at the foot of C Street when Hills was young (he called Hills, to whom he’s been father since Hills was 1, the “Crab Kid”); Zerlang, captain of the Madaket, the oldest boat on the bay, which began as a ferry boat in 1910 and turned into a harbor cruise boat in 1972, after the Samoa Bridge was built rendering ferries useless. Hills learned how to walk on the Madaket and how to row in a little boattethered to the dock at the foot of I Street, outside his childhood home. Three years ago, he became the youngest licensed merchant marine captain in California (just like his dad before him).
Hills works for Brusco Tug & Barge and Knutson Towboat Co. and is one of just four remaining guys who operate tug boats to haul in the big ships. He also works for his dad at Zerlang and Zerlang Marine Services, the family’s boat-repair business on the Samoa Peninsula. The Zerlang boat yard is where volunteers and local boatwright Dave Peterson are helping Veterans for Peace restore the Golden Rule, the little peace-protest ketch that in 1958 tried to storm the Marshall Islands atomic testing grounds.
Veteran Chuck DeWitt, who coordinates that restoration, is piloting the Baykeeper boat that carries Hills, another Veterans for Peace volunteer named Skip Oliver, and a couple of Journal staffers on this late-November morning.
