My attraction to the water goes back along way.  I grew up on Whidbey Island.  We didn’t live on the beach, but close enough. Our dog, Sam, and I walked the beach on the north side of Penn Cove daily. On one of my daily walks I walked into what was going to be the buzz of Penn Cove Park for awhile. 

The beach was always changing.  After a storm, drift logs were jumbled, sand was where rocks had been or the other way around.  And, storms would deposit on the beach new treasures.  One morning after a storm, I walked head down, looking for agates and I literally walked into my discovery.  During the storm, a large float had broken loose from somewhere and had washed high up on the beach, at the foot of the high bluff.  It was about eight feet wide and thirty feet long.  I jumped up onto it's canted deck, surveyed my find and immediately started making plans.

It wasn't my beach.  It wasn't my float.  But somehow I must have thought anything washing up onto it must be mine. 

With thoughts of Tom Sawyer in my head, I hurried home, called a couple of friends and started immediately on the project.  It occupied the better part of the next couple of months.

Back at the raft later that morning, with charcoal from a beach fire, we drew plans on a sun bleached plank.  We figured a house six feet wide would give us a foot on each side to walk.  And, with five feet at each end we had room for a six foot by twenty foot cabin. We went to work.

There was plenty of material on the beach.  We combed the beach for a half mile on either side of the raft finding every piece of useable building material we could.  Soon enough we realized we needed something uniform in size for framing material.  We needed Johnny.  Johnny’s family lived on the beach. His dad was an engineer and surveyor.  Alongside his house was always a healthy supply of 2 by 2's to be used as survey stakes. Johnny earned his allowance painting them hideous orange.  We needed some of those uncut 2 by 2's.  We asked Johnny to be a partner in what might have been the first marine fractional ownership program.

Construction began.  Hammer, saw and nails.  The type of carpentry I still practice today.  Tape measures and carpenter's squares were not employed.  We used pieces of string, direct measurement and eye-balling to get it done. The lumber disappeared faster than we had guessed.  But, we were flexible, rewriting the script as we went.  The original 6 by 20 plan changed into a 6 foot cube in the middle of the raft. It was smaller and had less ports than planned…we got so busy slapping on the various flat boards as siding, we covered up two windows in the process, not noticing until later.  That wasn't reason cause dissention.  We laughed.  We laughed a lot.  Besides, there was enough room between most of the boards to see out anyway.

Whidbey's second growth fir are tall, gangly things, products of trying to outgrow neighbor trees reaching for the sun.  Perfect for our mast.  Smaller ones were to be used for polling...our planned auxiliary option to sailing.

Our launch date was during one of the highest tides of the year, in June, after school was out…weeks away.  We worked on our dream and tried to keep it a secret.  But, it's tough hiding a six by thirty raft with a drift wood house built on it.  We were discovered.

            Another group of friends, it seems, had discovered and claimed the raft, just as I had done, only after we had built the house on it.  Rival gangs is a bit strong.  We had been in cub scouts together….but we felt we had salvage rights.

In the end, it took friend and foe together to get the thing launched.  The winter storm had pushed the raft up the beach above the target high tide.  It took all of us to pull and push and pry the raft off its resting spot and into the water.  But float it finally did and with kids hanging from every possible perch, west we polled.

The first night, we tied it up in front of Johnny's house.  The next morning one someone’s dad showed up in a runabout and towed the thing another quarter mile, just west of the boat launch ramp.  The gentle curving sandy beach was posted as private but everyone used it.  People did swim in Penn Cove then.   Our  anchor was an old washing machine full of rocks.  I don’t think we named it.  But, “It” swung on the hook like a yacht in Bermuda.  At least, it did until the tide went out.  You could walk to it on a minus tide and waded to on most any low tide. 

A week or so later it was gone.  It seems the raft belonged to the Coupeville Water Ski Club.  They identified it as theirs, claimed it and towed it home, across the cove.  Reports are that the cabin we had labored over was torn off and pushed overboard without a thought during the crossing the cove to Coupeville.

In some ways, this was the first of many projects in my life, private and professional which took all my time, energy and imagination and then amounted to very little in the end.  But the effort was worth it.  We had fun.  We laughed.  We compromised.  We learned about cooperating to get things done.  And, after all, I was on the water and that’s never a bad thing.