The Boat That Wouldn't Float, and How It Finally Did

My chapter about the Honeymoon Cottage mentions a boat named the Hera that sat at the bottom of Nelson's Bay, the one that Don and Patty Cameron fully restored. I had a conversation with Patty the other day while we looked at a series of photos depicting the transformation of the Hera into the NE Dunkin. Here is her story—with the photos—of a little boat that starts at the bottom of the ocean and ends up in Japan.

The Hera is on the left above, moored at Nelson's dock. The top photo was taken about 1977, Brian Burkholder of the Kolberg tells me. The Hera previously belonged to Paul Tennant of Bamfield in the late 60's, early 70's. It is unclear how it came into Nelson's possession. If you look closely at the bottom photo, near the stern of the boat is a post with what looks like a propeller attached. Someone once told me that Nelson had set up a windmill to operate a pump that was supposed to take the water out of the bilge. Ingenious, but at some point the pump proved to be insufficient, and the Hera sank to the bottom.

"When we came on the scene," Patty explained, "I remember that Don and Nelson tied a couple of logs on each side of the sunken boat. Every time the tide came in, they pulled the boat a little closer to the shore. And when the tide went out, they tightened the lines. They kept pulling the boat in until they were able to bail it out." Here the Hera rests on the beach in front of Nelson's house. You can see the windmill more clearly, with the large fin to keep it pointed into the wind. But the top of the cabin has been removed. "It may have been so damaged or rotten, and Don was going to rebuild that anyway."

Don patched the leaks below the waterline wherever he could, then re-floated the Hera and moored it to the dock. Most of the water that sank the boat was in the form of rain, so Don and Nelson securely covered the Hera with plastic. "Don just kept checking it and watching that the boat wouldn't sink again before we had the chance to tow it away."

Patty continued, "We towed the Hera with our troller, the Lucky Friday, to Tofino. We called up Gibson's Contracting, and they said they could move the boat with their crane. But there was no guarantee that the hull would remain whole. They asked if we had any concerns about the possibility of it getting crushed. And we said, No, go ahead, whatever happens, happens. We just needed them to take it out. Everything went fine. It’s quite steep getting up from the 4th Street dock, but they drove it all the way up and then over to the Whale Museum."

"The old whale museum was a maritime museum at the time. Huey Clark's brother Art was the Wharf Manager. He was looking after that building, and he told us that he could rent it to us for $100 a month. And we said, Oh yeah, that would be great. And then we could rebuild the boat there. Back then, you didn't need permits or anything. You just did what you needed to do.  We moved ourselves from our troller to the museum, and they set up the Hera in the yard. Don braced it up and built a shed over top. It took about five years to rebuild that boat because Don had to work in between. He did shake block-cutting and different jobs."

"Don built a steam box right away," Patty told me. "We had lots of wood that we towed up from Copper Island. We had gone salvaging with the troller whenever we saw a good log that we could use to rebuild the boat. And we had the Alaska sawmill at Nelson's and we cut big slabs by hand. But then there were other logs that we towed behind us to get milled up in Tofino so we could use them for the rebuild. We didn't really have to buy much of anything. These yellow cedar ribs—I helped Don with those. He cut all those ribs and then put them in the steam box for a certain time. I'd be inside the hull and he'd be on the outside and hand me the soft rib right out of the steam box. They were pretty hot. Then I would clamp it in place and he would pound the nails in. Don ended up widening the boat where the hold was going to be before he put those stringers across. He wanted to be able to hold a lot of fish. The boat ended up holding 10,000 pounds of ice and fish. At the same time, we started having kids, the first, the second. And by the time we launched the boat, I was expecting the third one. Don cut the leftover decking into blocks for our kids' toybox, and now our grandkids play with the same old growth fir blocks that we salvaged for the rebuild. So I tell them the story, and the memories live on…”

Just to show you the work involved in deciphering some of Nelson's letters... This one was found at the bottom of a cookie tin that had taken a swim when Pat Rafuse's car went off the road and into the river. If you can make it out, the letter mentions a Boy's Club that Don and Patty began. Patty told me how it started: "When Don was working on the boat, these young boys used to walk by. They were in elementary school and they always wanted something to do, but their parents were out working or something. They saw Don working on the boat and were curious about it. They'd always ask him if they could help. So Don said, Well, how about if we start a boys club for every Friday night? And they were so excited about it. They did all kinds of fun boy stuff. And we took them to Copper Island to meet Nelson, and they enjoyed discovering the island and going on the trails and Pebble Beach. The moms were thrilled about it and gave us meals to take along. And sometimes the boys would stay overnight at our place. 

"The club really meant something to those boys. About 10 years ago, we bumped into one of the fellows, and he had never forgotten the boys club. One of the other guys kept in touch with us all the time, and he grew up and had his own family, but he always wanted to keep in touch because it really meant a lot to him. And you don't realize how much something like that means to somebody's life. You're just living your own life, but you're including them in it, in the fun things. The boys were pretty wild, but we had great times with them. And it was all because of the rebuild of the Nelson E Duncan."

Here is the rebuilt boat nearing completion. "Don took the tarp down and was ready to get it moved. He did so much of the work by hand. He didn't even have a power tool until he started building the cabin. I was the one who saved up some family allowance, and I remember finding a Makita drill for $35 at the Tofino Co-op. And I saved hard for that $35. I went and got it for him because I thought, he needs to have some power tools. He was doing it all by hand, like drilling down into the keel—at one point, the drill bit wasn't long enough, so he got someone to weld an extension to it. Don learned a lot from Nelson about hand tools and how to keep things straight, like when you're drilling. Nelson had hand tools for everything. I know that Don knew some things on his own, but he was really intrigued by how Nelson did things. Don loved what was done by hand, so the boat was largely handcrafted."

"Then the day came that we were going to launch the boat. That was in May 1986, and Don started fishing in July. I was expecting Caleb, but in the photos, I was hanging on to Amy's hand, who was almost three. David was with Don, and the family dog is there too."

The trip from the whale museum on Third Street to the Fourth Street dock was not far, but steep at the end. A number of people came to watch. Patty recognizes Bernd Schmeuker, a fisherman who fished with them, and Bob Winters—Bob and Edna are well-known in Tofino, a logging family. "They were curious about watching it go down into the water. And it was a windy day." At first, the boat floated like a cork. "It was really corky, like, moving around quite a bit. It had to soak in the water for a while before it settled down. And the wind was really taking it. I'm not really sure who's in the Zodiac. The boat was pulled to the dock and then tied up. They had to put different weights in the right spots to balance it out."

The first year, Don fished with his brother Garth. Don found that the poles were pretty long, and he ended up shortening them.

Don took the boat to Copper Island to show Nelson the finished product, which he named the Nelson E Dunkin. The next time he painted the boat, Don shortened the name to the NE Dunkin. Patty told me, "The boat was operating really well. Don got it really fine-tuned, and Nelson was pretty proud of it. It looked so different from the boat that once sat at the bottom of his bay."

The Cameron family aboard. Patty said it was a tight fit with four kids. "You don't think that you're on something that small because you get used to your area. And all the other boats around you are the same. And you realize when you get off the boat how small it is, tied up at the dock. But we spent a whole season fishing like that together and were off the West Coast of the Island for a bit. One season, we also fished off the Queen Charlottes. Don and I slept on the floor in the very centre of the cabin on a foamy that we had stuffed in the bow, and we'd lay it down there. It was only two feet wide. We had two kids in each bunk down below. Sometimes at night, the youngest one—you can just see his head poking out of the doorway there—he would climb up and squeeze in between us on our two feet of floor. So I'd have to take him back in the night down into the bow because it was a little too squishy and we had to fish all day. We put up with a lot, but it was just life. And we did it every day."

"We let the boys, David, Caleb and Ryan, drift out to fish and explore in their little skiff as we were tacking back and forth. Don is in the stern of the boat. We're just letting them loose, and they always had fun. We weren't moving very fast and the kids loved exploring and we would pick them up on the way back. Give them a bit of adventure. Kind of a big playground for them. We did that quite often, and when they got old enough, they had their own little zodiac."

"We sold the boat to Mark Shaw of Ucluelet. And we bought another boat and renamed it the Prairie Rose III. We were travelling up to the Charlottes, and Mark had asked Don's brother Garth to skipper the NE Dunkin. It was running behind us as we were approaching Rose Spit. I noticed the NE Dunkin come out of the water and then plunge down. We weren't doing that because our new boat wasn't a double ender and it was a bit longer, so we were riding a little bit differently. I got a picture of it as high up as it would come, and then I snapped another one of it plunging down. Like you do for hours, you know, up and down for hours."

Photo Source: Universal Studios Japan

Mark eventually sold the NE Dunkin to a fellow who was looking for a boat to display at Universal Studios in Japan. Patty said, "I remember watching the boat leave. We were returning to Ucluelet one time, and we saw a boat mover with the NE Dunkin on the back and it was just leaving. They were going to put it on a freighter. It's interesting if it was one of the Japanese boats and it ended up back in Japan." When Patty first saw this photo, she wasn't sure if it was the right boat, as there had been a number of changes. But its location and the many details that are identical make it pretty certain that this is the NE Dunkin, repainted and renamed the Farallon out of Pacifica, California.

"It is an amazing story, when you think of it," Patty concluded.