Winter crab fishing at La Push, Washington. 1966-67
By : William Wandke
Part 1 Their early years!
The two men who also are also first cousins, really didn’t get to know each other until the older of the two was about eighteen years old. By this time his family had moved to Anacortes, Washington, and the other boy’s family had moved to Mineral, Washington, one hundred and fifty miles away!
The older of the two is Kenneth Holland, and he was born in Cooperstown, North Dakota in 1928 to Melvin and Frieda Holland. Ken is an only child! Cooperstown is located in the eastern third of the state. His mother’s family, the William Steffen’s, homesteaded this area in 1891 and one of Steffen boys, Clarence Steffen, still lives there.
The other fellow’s name is William Wandke, and I was born in Beach, North Dakota in 1936 to William and Edna Wandke. I am the youngest of five children, four boys and one girl! Beach is located in the western part of the state just a few miles from the Montana border. Its my guess that we ended up so far from the rest of the family is because employment wasn’t always easy to find so you went where you could find work! My dad operated a grain elevator near Beach before I was born. Years earlier before moving to Beach my dad taught school in a one room school house near the Steffen homestead where he taught both of our mother’s as well as some of the other Steffen children. Our mothers are sisters born two years apart, to the day, my mother is the oldest of the two. They came from a large family of twelve, eight girls and four boys. My mom and Aunt Frieda were numbers seven and eight. An interesting fact is that all of the sisters and their youngest brother, Clarence were married in the family home!
The big depression was still in full swing and work was hard to find in North Dakota. So in 1933, Ken’s dad, also a school teacher moved his family to Grand Coulee, Washington, where he got a job as principal at the school there. This would be his last teaching job! In 1934 Melvin moved his family to Olympia, Washington where he built two homes over the next few years, he also worked on W.P.A. projects part time.
In 1937, Melvin, along with a group of men, started working on a plan to start a plywood mill somewhere in the Puget Sound area, and they decided on a place called Anacortes, located about one hundred miles to the north of Olympia in the San Juan Islands. The Anacortes Veneer Inc. was formed and he being one of the original stock holders and secretary treasurer moved his family to Anacortes in 1940. Young Ken was now around a lot of water! There was salt water in Olympia, of course, but here there was water everywhere with, what seemed like, a never ending group of beautiful islands to explore!
While the Holland family was making their way out west, my dad was still finding it hard to make a living in Beach. The depression was winding down but jobs were still scarce where we were, so in 1942, Dad along with some friends also headed for Washington, with barely enough money to get them there. They had no jobs lined up but there was news of construction jobs out there and the pay was good. Dad got a job working at the Alder dam that was being built across the Nisqually River, a glacier fed river flowing from Mt. Rainier. He got a two room cabin in a small town named Elbe, located right next to the Nisqually River about eight miles from the dam site.
By this time my three brothers, Robert, Bruce and Ken and my sister, Dorothy, were all grown and on their own, but I had just started the first grade. So while Dad went to start our new life on the west coast, Mom and I stayed in Beach until school was out and we joined Dad in Elbe in June of 1943. I was now living by the first big body of water that I could remember, a glacier fed river forming a large lake that was already starting to fill just behind the cabin that we lived in. Granted this wasn’t salt water, but it made no difference because I hadn’t even seen the sea yet. But I would soon be drawn to this new lake and of course, the river!We lived in Elbe for about three years and in that time I caught hell many times for sneaking to the river to fish and to check on the progress of the slowly filling lake, so many times in fact, that I hate to think about it because there were a few spankings included for the more serious misdeeds!
The dam was completed in about 1945 and Dad had to find work again, and this time he got a job in a shingle mill in another small town named Mineral. Mineral was about six miles from Elbe and we moved there in 1946. And guess what, another lake, this one a smaller lake nestled in the mountains surrounding Mineral. I was in paradise, a lake and several streams to fish in and for the next twenty years that’s just what I did! Of course I did other things, too, but fishing and hunting was my favorite pastime! (It was in Mineral, during September 1959, my dad died of a heart attack at age 76.)
Ken was now in his teenage years, and was a very ambitious young man. His life long work pattern started showing at an early age by delivering papers, operating an ice house at the housing project and working at the Navy air base on Whidbey Island. But Ken also played and he spent a lot of his free time on the water, in fact, he built a 19 foot sail boat in high school. He never put a mast on it to sail but he did put an outboard motor on it and ran it around the waters near Anacortes. He had another passion in his teen age years, motorcycles, but that’s another story!
About Christmas time in 1946 when I was 10 years old, my mother and I took the bus to Anacortes to visit the Holland’s. Even though I may have met them at some point in my life, I didn’t really know them so this in itself was quite a treat. So it was at this time that I first remembered Ken Holland. I have to tell you, here was a guy who was all grown up and doing things that I hadn’t even thought of yet and there I was just a kid. In my eyes at least, he was the man. I figured that he could and probably had done just about anything! I looked up to him then and I still do!
Mom and I returned to Anacortes a couple of times after that by bus and the Hollands drove to Mineral to visit also, because both of our sets of parents were quite close and they really had a lot of years to catch up on. Our dad’s had two very different personalities but they were great friends and really enjoyed getting together! They would sit up late telling old stories, discussing politics and maybe even having a little nip out of a bottle of "Old Grand Dad". And just to add a little more atmosphere to the moment , they just might light up a pipe or a cigar! I would sit there listening to every word until I was told that it was bed time, and then I would go around the corner of my bedroom door to listen some more. We never had a telephone so an occasional letter was our only communication, so these visits were very special to all of us!
This reunion of sorts kind of set up a pattern for me because it was about this time that I started going to Anacortes to spent the summer months with the "relatives". I thought I liked the water before but now with all of this new country surrounded with salt water, I was becoming attracted to the sea!
In 1948, Ken married his wife, Carolyn Elder, the oldest daughter of a family of six girls. In fact he met her when he had his ice business at the housing project, however I’m not sure if they were an item then. They built a home next to Ken’s folks home on Commercial Avenue, in Anacortes, and in 1950 he bought into the Anacortes Veneer and became a share holder too!
About this same time built Ken built a small three point hydro-plane. There may have been two, but I remember one for sure, because one afternoon we were playing around out in the bay and Ken flipped it. That was shortly after I was out playing around and when I came in, I mis-judged the distance to shore and put the boat way up on the beach. It wasn’t one of our most memorable days on the water!
Shortly after we got the new house livable, I moved back home with my parents and got my first full time job at the shingle mill where my dad worked. I got married in November of the next year, so now I had established a home for myself and my wife and we started our family the next year. We have three children, a girl, Janet, and two boys, Steve and Mike. I stayed on that same job for many years and only got to Anacortes for short visits, two or three times a year. I still fished the lakes and streams around home, and I enjoyed it, but at the same time I missed the smell of the sea and all of the adventures that go with it! I guess I would have to be satisfied with my memories!
Ken and his family were settled in their new home on Similk Bay and they really liked it. They now had four children, Ken Jr, Rebecca, Ricky and Kathy. This beach wasn’t like the beach at Marches Point, that had a highway and steep cliff between their home and the water, this beach was right on the water with no steep bank or road to create a danger for the kids. They felt that they had finally found the place where they would stay! Similk Bay is a protected bay that has oyster beds, and a processing plant and a golf course on the north end and the south end is about 3 miles or so from the Deception Pass bridge that connects Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands. It’s also a well known tourist attraction because of the steep cliffs and strong currents that run beneath the bridge.
Ken still worked in the plywood mill, but this didn’t stop his love of the sea, and in 1956 he learned that an old fellow across the bay had a boat with some crab pots for sale. He
checked it out and bought it! It was an open boat about 24 feet long with a single cylinder Wisconsin engine. He started fishing Similk bay, and the crab pots had to be pulled by hand. It was hard work but he enjoyed it because he was on the water!
This boat was fine in the bay, but now he was thinking about venturing to other islands to fish crab and this would work better if he had a boat that was a little faster and maybe had a cabin to help keep him out of the weather. So he found a 26 foot double end-er with a cabin and the best thing was it had a power take off, so now he wouldn’t have to lift the pots by hand anymore. Now he was crabbing in some of the bays at some of the other islands. The crab he caught were kept in a live tank that he kept in front of his home in the bay. On week ends they would cook up the crab and they sold them from a refrigerated canopy that he had on his pick-up. They would park at a good busy spot and set up shop, and they did quite good, too!
By now Ken was really getting into this hobby of crab fishing and in 1962 he took a leave of absence from the plywood mill and hired on a crab boat that would be fishing in Southeast Alaska. What he learned up there was that he really liked to catch crab and that he wanted a bigger boat so he could take it to Alaska. So in late 1962 Ken found a business partner and they bought the "Dora H", a 52 foot commercial boat built in about 1912 or 1914. About a year later he bought out the partner and the "Dora H" was his!
Ken kept his stock in the mill but he quit the job and became a full time fisherman. He fished the first year in Southeast Alaska and then decided to venture a little farther west, so in 1964 he took the boat to Kodiak Island. The boat was left there for repairs on some damage that had happened earlier, the fellow who worked for Ken at the time had run the boat up on a rock and did quite a bit of damage. Ken returned the next spring to complete some work on the boat and to get ready for the 1965 crab season. After the season was over he ran the boat back to Anacortes and that fall he decided to put a new cabin and wheel house on the boat. So while this work was being done he helped out on the project and to see that it was done the way he wanted it. The double end-er that had been put up on the beach was called back into service and Ken hired a fellow that he met in Kodiak the previous summer, Bruce Murphy, to run it. His family lived down here some place and they were pretty well down and out so Ken and his family took them under their wings. Ken just as easily could have run the boat but this way would give the Murphy’s some income and keep them going until next spring when they would go back to Kodiak. Unfortunately, Murphy got caught out in a bad storm one night and the boat sank, he survived after drifting up on the last piece of land before drifting out into the open sea! Murphy went to Kodiak the spring of 1966 and worked the season up there on the Dora H but didn’t return when Ken ran the boat back home for the fall crab season in the San Juan Islands. Ken’s plan was to crab the islands from September first until the second week in November and then get ready for his first winter crab season off the north Washington coast at LaPush, Washington. The season opens on December first and promises to be completely different, weather wise, than when he fished here during the summer months two years earlier!
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