Rick exclaimed after a dinner of fish and chips at the “One Eyed Crab” that he would pay up to $200 to stay in a hotel that night. He only had to pay eighty and to the four of us the two double beds seemed to be acres of mattress compared to the boat. Morning brought doughnuts from an excellent local bakery as well as a great deal of fog that we (mostly me) got lost in on our way to the “Hell Hole of the Pacific” the charming late 19th century name for the Aberdeen Hoquiam area.
Grey’s Harbor is very shallow and we had to pull up our dagger board in a few places in order to decrease our draft and get back to the main channel that is deep enough to accommodate large ocean going freighters that travel a few miles into the Chehalis River to pick up logs. Our plan was to pull out in Aberdeen, borrow a car from our generous friends Lori and Scott Berken at BottomSiders, (the makers of our boat pads and seat cushions) drive back to La Push and pick up our trailer and get the boat.
I like Aberdeen for a lot of reasons, not just for its most recent famous resident Kurt Cobain.
For one it’s located between two other towns with fantastic names: Hoquiam to the west and Cosmopolis to the west. “The Hellhole of the Pacific” as it was once known was a wild lumber/ sailing town where the tough hard men who logged meet the tough hard men who sailed tall ships on the flats around where the Wiskah and Chehalis River meet the Harbor. On the hills above the town were the fine houses of the lumber barons and the shipping merchants made millions off the sweat and labor of these men.
It was as wild and violent as any city in the Wild West except no cacti and 84 inches of rain a year. One of its more charming residents, Billy Gohl was almost single handedly responsible for its other nickname as the “Port of Missing Men.” Billy aka the “Ghoul of Grey’s Harbor” who made a living as a bartender, small time entrepreneur, shanghaier extraordinaire, arsonist, thief, bully and most infamously as the local Agent for the Sailors Union. Sailors from all over the world would show up in Aberdeen and one of the first things they did was check in with the Sailors Union to store their gear and paycheck where they would meet the curious and charismatic Billy. “Where are you from?” he would ask them in his slight German accent. “Where are you going too? “Do you have family around?” When he had gauged whether or not this person would be missed he would club them on the head with a belaying pin or shoot them and dump their body either into the Wishka River, or if he was feeling cautious row them out into the harbor and dump their body. (Remember, rowboats don’t get rid of dead bodies, crazy serial killers do). Billy’s work became one of the biggest secrets in town as “the floater fleet” or name for all the dead bodies found floating in the harbor became internationally known. Eventually he was caught, tried, and sent to life in prison for two murders however, local historians attribute anywhere between 42 to 124 murders to Billy who was once called by local historical Anne Cotton, “Aberdeen’s only first rate tourist attraction.”
Lori and Scott live a half mile or so up the Wishkah River from its mouth on the harbor in a house Scott bought years ago when the nickname for the area “felony flats” was probably not said as lightly as Lori now joked about. Indecently they were the ones that clued me in on the areas more ridiculous history. Keep in mind their house is in the area where Billy Gohl would dump his bodies. Lori runs the boat pad company “BottomSiders” and Scott is an optometrist. They have two nearly grown kids and have just finished having a Brazilian exchange student finish a year with them. I have known them since our first row across the ocean and each time I meet them I have humbled by their generosity, kindness and good humor. Lending us their car to get our boat trailer made our logistics a lot easier and if that was not enough they invited us to a going away BBQ for their Brazilian exchange student. Meeting, connecting and reconnecting with folks like Lori and Scott is far and away the best parts of rowing an ocean.