After the Storm
One boat continued to change people’s lives, even after it was wrecked on Locust Beach
By Landon Groves
On a balmy morning in late January, Foster Marcus Nelson set out to find a sailboat she lived on as a kid. She ambled down Locust Beach, rocks crunching underfoot as she peered out across the bay.
The boat was called The Osprey. She lived on it for the first four years of her life and kept returning to it until she was 13. It was rumored the boat was wrecked on a beach somewhere in Bellingham, and she wanted to see it again with her own eyes.
Foster hadn’t seen The Osprey in eight years. The last time she did, it belonged to someone she also hadn’t seen in eight years — her father, Karl Nelson, who owned it until his death in 2006.
Karl was the youngest of five siblings. He was an adventurous kid who was always drawn to the water. He spent the days at their cabin on Lummi Island making rafts, and from time to time he took a skiff from the marina to Orcas Island, about three-and-a-half miles away. When he was old enough, his parents enrolled him in sailing school where he learned the ins and outs of operating sailboats, a passion he carried with him his entire life.
“Karl, he was always looking for adventure no matter what,” Christy Nelson Marsh, Karl’s sister, said. “He was just an outdoorsy type of guy, and he always said he was born in the wrong century.”
Years later, Karl convinced his father to help him salvage a sunken ship off the coast of Anacortes. His father was hesitant — restoring a sunken ship is known throughout the boating world as a sign of bad luck. Eventually, Karl convinced his father, and they bought the boat that summer.
There’s another superstition in the boating world, one they chose not to cast aside: Changing a boat’s name is a bad omen. As they pulled it out of the strait, they decided the name painted across the bow would never change. The boat would remain The Osprey now and forever.
Karl and his family spent the years sailing throughout the Gulf Islands and San Juans beneath the black pirate flag he flew atop the mast. Between trips, they lived and worked out of the boat in Squalicum Harbor.
Karl was diagnosed with ALS in November of 2004 following his divorce. At the time, he was planning an expedition to Mexico with his girlfriend and a skeleton crew.
He made up his mind — he would die among the palm trees, drifting on the crystal-blue waters of the Mexican coast.
They left the Strait the following summer and traveled south along the coast. Karl made it to the Columbia River before his muscles began to betray him. Karl, the most experienced sailor aboard, decided it best to turn back before symptoms worsened.
The disease spread quickly. It affected his speech at first, and without realizing it he began to slur his words. Not much later, he couldn’t walk. Resigned to his bedroom on the boat, he spent his days lying in bed, bobbing up and down with the currents. He smoked cigarettes through a contraption Christy made that minimized the amount he had to turn his head. When they returned to the harbor, all of Christy’s in-laws carried him off.
A year after setting sail for Mexico, he died. Karl is buried in Lynden — a place Foster and her father never liked.
The uninhabited boat lived peacefully in the harbor for a time, but not for long. Karl’s father, the new legal owner of The Osprey, sold it to a man named Bill Mustard in August 2006. Bill was an older, affable member of the boating community, but he was rough around the edges.
Alex Zecha, a fellow boater and Bill’s neighbor from 2012 to 2015, likened Bill to a character in a Steinbeck novel — lively but unpolished. Alex and Bill ran into each other often at the Community Boating Center. Bill would row in on an inflatable skiff, painted black with roofing tar, and fill his gallon jugs with water.
The Osprey entered a general state of disrepair. Bill built a shoddy plywood cabin on the deck and moved it closer to the boardwalk, right in front of the Chrysalis Inn & Spa. Six months later, the city stepped in and chased him away. The Osprey, once a beautiful vessel and a winner of decorative awards, was an eyesore.
Like Karl, Bill had grandiose dreams of Pacific excursions. He saw himself sailing to Costa Rica, though Alex posits both Bill and The Osprey looked in poor shape and weren’t up to the task of sailing thousands of miles. Bill’s health was already diminishing, and to
those at the Boating Center, it looked like he was finding it harder and harder to get around. He sailed as far as Cape Flattery, where the Strait empties out into the Pacific Ocean, before a combination of poor health and bad weather forced him to turn around. The Osprey returned home once again. Its journey abruptly ended; its dreams never realized.
After the attempted trip to Costa Rica, Bill and The Osprey were the subject of a photo essay by photographer Mark Katsikapes. In the essay, titled “The Curse of the Osprey,” Mark asked Bill if he thought the boat was cursed, doomed to sap the health of anyone who tried to remove it from the bay.
“Boats don’t have curses themselves,” Bill told Mark. “Just the people who sail them.”
Not long after, Bill disappeared.
For the second time, the boat was ownerless. It floated alone in the bay, abandoned.
Then the storm came.
On Thursday, Dec. 20, 2018, a storm blew through Western Washington, leaving some 322,000 homes and businesses without power. Whatcom County caught the worst of it, with gusts reaching a reported 66 mph. Fire crews, overwhelmed, responded to 45 reports of downed power lines in just under nine hours.
To make matters worse, an exceptionally high tide — what oceanographers call a king tide — put the many boats anchored up and down the Puget Sound at risk. The storm left a number of boats unmoored, cast violently adrift on the Strait, and grounded high up on nearby beaches. In the days and weeks that followed, rescue boats were unable to retrieve them.
That’s how Foster found The Osprey at Locust Beach a month later. Her spirits lifted when she first saw it, then fell as she got closer. Moss was growing sideways in the folds of the sail, and the sun’s reflection glinted softly off the stern as it sat cockeyed on the beach. Beer cans were scattered everywhere. The bright orange plastic of insulin needles poked out from nearby rocks. The hull, once a uniform shade of royal blue, was now covered in graffiti.
Still, she knew it was the right boat. She climbed around on the deck like she did when she was a kid, pointing through passageways to rooms she remembered from her childhood. Here was the kitchen where her father cooked nothing but ramen and eggs for months at a time. Here was the bow where she
spent long days peering out across the bay, watching the water lap up against the side of the hull.
Foster said in an ideal world she’d like to see The Osprey salvaged and sailed again, but she knows she doesn’t have a say. That’s for the new owner to decide.
Josh McElhaney, a lieutenant in the Coast Guard’s incident management division, has been on the case of The Osprey since the wreck. He tracked down past owners and went out periodically to make sure no hazardous chemicals were leaking into the bay. He learned the ownership changed last spring, and the state was working with the new owner to determine The Osprey’s future. He declined to disclose the owner’s name.
For some, The Osprey was a kind neighbor and a constant, something you’d look to when you wanted to make sure the Earth hadn’t shifted seismically beneath your feet. For the Nelsons, it was an embodiment of a person they’d never see again. A time in their lives they’d never return to.
As Foster left that morning, trodding back up the beach to her car, she kept peering over her shoulder, watching The Osprey shrink in the distance.
“That almost feels like a better burial spot for my dad, you know what I mean?” she said.
