In 1978, at 42 years old, Dave Davelaar retired and moved his family from Sacramento to Guemes Island. He’d developed love for the Pacific Northwest after years of fishing trips with friends. “One day, I was sitting at a picnic table in a state park and I said to myself, why shouldn’t I live here all the time?”
Dave and his wife, Linda, were anxious to get their kids, who were about to enter junior high, out of the Sacramento school system, which was in bad shape at the time. One day, Dave asked Linda if she was ready to move.
Soon after, the family made the move, Dave driving a U-Haul and Linda following behind in their AMC Pacer. They explored different parts of Washington, including Whidbey Island and Bellingham, but decided they liked Anacortes best. Their realtor, Lillian Armstrong, told them Guemes was the best place to live (which is absolutely right).
After trying out life as a “hippie farmer,” raising meat rabbits called New Zealand whites and working as a local contractor, Dave decided, like Noah, to build a boat in his backyard.
It began with the delivery of 36 sheets of 4′ x 8′ steel plates on a 35′ slab. Why steel instead of wood? “Steel is something I understood,” said Dave. “I thought it was going to last a long time and frankly, it was a friendlier material than wood to deal with.”
Dave would know. Being a metalworker/blacksmith at heart, Dave has been creating metal artwork for his home for years. His ironwork garden gates and sculptures are particularly visible in his and Linda’s beautiful garden.
In 1980, he hired a marine architect named Glenn Freedholm to draw up a full displacement hull steel cruiser, christened FM Agnes*. “A full displacement boat will only go so fast, but I wasn’t interested in traveling fast. I could go two hours on $1.50 worth of diesel. The keel was all fuel tank, designed so I could set it on the beach.” The boat was 35 feet long with accommodations for three in the foc’sle, a full bed in the back for him and his wife, and a diesel stove.
Once the plans were finalized, Lee Thompson, the welder went to work. According to Dave, Lee was a hard-drinking, hard-smoking character. When he didn’t show up one morning, Dave found him in a local bar and had to pay Lee’s $300 tab to get him back to work.
Pat Brody and Kenny Powell built the interior of the FM Agnes. She was constructed of locally beach-scavenged yellow cedar logs, delivered to a sawmill on West Shore.
Completed in 1982, it was quite a sight to behold: the FM Agnes lifted by crane onto a trailer in his backyard, loaded onto the Guemes Ferry, and hauled to the marina in Cap Sante in Anacortes. The new boat was powered by a Ford Lehman motor with a cruising speed of 6 knots. Dave put 2000 cruising hours on the FM Agnes, mainly up and down the inland coast of Canada.
After eight years, Dave decided to sell the FM Agnes to a fisherman from Alaska. One day, as Dave was passing a local boatyard, he unexpectedly discovered that his former boat had been chopped in half. “I thought it was a perversion, but on the other hand, I took his money, so it was his boat.” The new owner added 8 ft of deck space to make her a fishing trawler. To Dave’s knowledge, she is still fishing in Alaskan waters.
The FM Agnes took two years to build. Dave weighed 200 lbs when boat building began in 1980. Once the boat was completed, he weighed 160 lbs. “One morning, I had breakfast and I walked out the back door and the boat wasn’t there. I said, “what I am going to do now is put on some weight.”
*Why FM Agnes? Well every time Lee stood up and banged his head, he would shout out, “Well, fuck me, Agnes.”
– Betsy Passarelli