Bona Fide Bainbridgers, Finally

I took a powder from posting here for several months. In part because my corporate blog took up my blogging bandwidth, but mostly because I started this to write about our new home on Bainbridge Island – which is only now truly becoming our home.

After a couple months of holiday and weekend living in Dec/Jan, we began a four month remodel in March and are only this week moving to the Island for real. Anyway hopefully I'll have more to say soon after the dust settles on our remodel and move craziness.

The Economics of Development

Elua replied very calmly and thoughtfully to my criticism of her post on the imminent meltdown in Bainbridge real-estate prices. I give her points for not rising to my bait and attacking me as some kind of liberal nut-case. If even the conservatives on Bainbridge believe in polite discourse, it’s even closer to Paradise than I expected. She did elaborate on her thesis about the economics of development, arguing that “once SFHs and condos on BI consistently sell below replacement cost, building will stop”.

But, this really makes no sense to me. If $750K SFH’s and $400K condos can’t sell, then it seems to me that builders would just keep building, shifting to $400K SFH’s and $225K condos. Assuming Puget Sound as a whole keeps growing, the finite supply of buildable “slots” in the overall megalopolis within a 35 minute commute distance to downtown Seattle is simply destined to be developed. Part of the price haircut would come out of falling land prices, part from builders going for more plebian “fit and finish”. If as Elua points out new developments in S. King County can get done for 1/2 the price of Bainbridge, then Bainbridge at 1/2 price should still get fully developed. And, BI will be even more attractive to California refugees at “fire sale prices”. So, I don’t really see where she’s coming from.

The only way I can see to keep BI from becoming another Tiburon is regulatory measures that restrict how many slots there are, and/or how fast they can be developed. Stop blindly accepting that the “Growth Management Act” requires BI to accept some mythical “fair share” of future development, and lean on our limitations, such as the finite water supply of our aquifer.

Potters and Guppys and Sparrows (Oh My!)

I recently became the proud owner of a Sparrow 16 “pocket cruiser”, circa 1981 (“QT”, hull #87). I discovered that “QT” had a pedigree, albeit a bit murky. A design by the well-known Herb Stewart, thus kissing cousin to the famous West Wight Potter, sounded like a peachy side benefit to a “craigslist special” starter boat. But the fragmentary information available online didn’t all add up. The following trivia will be of absolutely no interest except perhaps to a few folks who care about somewhat niche-y class of boat.

With some digging, I got the real scoop: the Sparrow 16, built by Northshore Marine, in fact originated as the Melen Marine Guppy 16, and has no connection to HMS or International Marine. And it is not a Herb Stewart design at all! Rather, it was designed by the even more prolific Ron Holder (Holder/Hobie 12/14, Holder/Vagabond 17, Holder 20, etc.). Heretofore I had seen no hint of a Holder connection to the Sparrow family, but I have it from the horses’ mouths: the founder of Northshore Marine, and Ron Holder himself.

The first clue came last week when I made my first-ever boat show visit here in Seattle – my recent purchase used having innoculated me against all the “boat show special” deals on new boats. Chatting with the International Marine rep, he mentioned that a fellow had stopped by the day before and said he was the guy that built the Sparrows up in Bothell, and had some interesting stories. Unfortunately he didn’t remember his name! Web searching didn’t pan out. But I had the wacky idea to test out my local Seattle Library‘s research services. 2 days after asking “do you have any records of a Northshore Marine in Bothell circa 1981?” I not only had a DBA name but two possible local matches. This afternoon I finally connected by phone with Chuck Gaylord, original owner of Northshore Marine.

A forthright and cheerful man, Chuck happily dished out a number of revelations. First, according to Chuck, the Melen-built Guppy 13 was an outright rip-off of the Herb Stewart designed Sparrow 12 which Chuck later legitimately licensed from Herb’s HMS, the original builder. The owner of Melen Marine (who had been a close friend of Herb’s) apparently ordered hull #3 of the HMS-built Sparrow/Guppy 12, without windows or cutouts. Then Melen did a “splash off” – industry lingo for an illicit mold, made from a fiberglass boat turned upside down and standing in for the wooden “plug” of an original design. Melen changed just a few cosmetics – moving the mast forward, putting a bit more curve in the keel. According to Chuck, this escalated into a legal dispute, with courts ultimately ruling in favor of Melen.

So by the time Melen wanted a larger boat in the product line, Herb Stewart as designer was definitely not an option. Instead Melen hired Ron Holder, who had already come to some fame with his Vagabond 17, to create what was initially the Guppy 16. Only 4 Guppy 16’s were built before Melen went bankrupt, and Chuck was able to acquire the molds. The renamed Sparrow 16 became Northshore Marine’s best-selling boat, with over 150 sold (vs. about 50 Sparrow 12’s). Chuck sold the business around 1982 to his son, and then it was sold a couple more times. During this time Northshore Marine was also a West Wight Potter dealer, thus the shoal-keel Sparrows complemented the WWP15 and WWP19. According to Chuck both Sparrows (12 and 16) were relatively speedy, able to outsail P19s and even San Juan 21s on occasion.

Some further Sparrow 16 details from Chuck: there is foam flotation built-in to the bow, which unlike the flotation next to the cockpit seats is glassed-in and thus not visible. As a result Sparrows should be unsinkable: Chuck says he repurchased #25 holed and awash with water in its mooring, but it was well afloat with water only barely over the cockpit seats. The integral shoal keel has lead ballast with concrete over it, 350 pounds of ballast (although Ron Holder had spec’d 250 pounds), biased towards the bow to offset weight of crew in the cockpit. 4 layers of fiberglass roving were added to cover and isolate the keelhole, because Chuck had seen a boat nearly sink in the San Juan’s after a keel grounding. In general the Sparrows were significantly hardier (and heavier) than the contemporaneous Potters, which were lightly built, with only 2 mats and a cloth making a hull only 1/8 inch thick, whereas the Sparrow 16 was more like 3/8 inch. The S16 was also all glass, with no balsa or other wood. This is consistent with QT, which after 25 years is still firm on deck and cabin roof.

 
I had no reason to doubt Chuck’s story and scrutinizing Web photos of Guppy 16s and Sparrow 16s it was evident that they were essentially identical, with only the cosmetic change of the Guppy having 3 small round cabin portholes vs. the Sparrow 16’s two larger oval windows. But I was able to track down current info for Ron Holder, now a high-tech executive in the LED lighting business. He confirmed the essentials of Chuck’s story. Since the Vagabond 17 is round-hulled and very unlike the Sparrow 16, which has the hard chine and high freeboard typical of the Potters, I asked Ron whether there had been a request from Melen for a “family resemblence” to the Stewart-designed Sparrow12/Guppy13. Ron demurred, noting that several of his other designs, including the International 16 and Panther, had been hard-chine and that he had decided on hard chine in order to create a stable shoal-keel configuration (the swing-keel Vagabond which had more inherent keel-length stability, didn’t require the hard chine). Ron noted that he had also designed the Guppy/Sparrow 17, a similar design but with a longer cockpit and minimal cuddy cabin. He remembered some other details about the Sparrow 16, including the relatively small jib which he said was intentional to give it better sailing character.

So that’s it then: a minor bit of sailboat design arcana. I guess a better title would have been “Guppies and Sparrows and … Holders!? (Oh My!)”. Ron expressed some regrets at having been pushed out of boat designing courtesy of a noncompete in conjunction with selling his company to Coleman/Hobie (but doesn’t miss the bondo). Chuck is still a pocket cruiser aficionado, presently refitting an original Herb Stewart-built HMS 18 (later the Potter 19). I hope to run into Chuck in the Gulf Islands this summer.

Alarums and Excursions

It was nice of Julie Leung to give me a shout out in her blog. Her post also introduced me to Eleua’s Clearcut Bainbridge, whose thesis of an impending massive burst of an Island real estate bubble hit a nerve with me on several levels. Heck, we’ve got a home in Seattle still to sell, I don’t want to hear from bubbles. And the California bashing – well despite a decade in 981xx I’m still a bit sensitive on that topic.

On the other hand, Eleua’s arguments don’t seem to totally hold water. In some ways her alarmist  scenario of an up to 75% drop in BI home values gives me comfort, because the accompanying exaggerations and mischaracterizations just help convince me it isn’t going to happen.

First off, she uses the standard device of isolated use of impressive statistics. She claims that Bainbridge real estate is way overpriced and notes our average household income level is only $70K (2000), good for only 24th place out of 522 ranked areas. But, she presents no property value data whatsover, so this information is essentially meaningless. She alarmingly notes BI’s not “#1, or #2, or #3” but so what? BI’s far from #1, #2, or #3 in home values. In fact to me BI being in the 95th percentile of income sounds about right for our home prices. I’m not saying BI is a paragon of affordability, but her post doesn’t present data that supports the conclusion that it’s way out of whack.

Secondly, homes are not fungible commodities and there’s good reason that affordability is always highly variable across neighborhoods and communities. Some places are more desirable than others, and people will pay more to live there. The reasons vary but BI has many of them including great schools, great open space, and a lack of ugly industrial strip-mall development. And while the ferry commute is less romantic than it sounds, if you work in metro Seattle a walk-on boat ride beats the heck of slogging it out on our congested highways.

Thirdly, if Bainbridge Island is a far cry from La Jolla, Hillsborough, or Martha’s Vinyard – well, I say, that’s just fine and dandy. In fact with all her liberal-bashing it’s hard to see what kind of connection she’s trying to make. If anyone it’s the real estate developers who are prodding BI towards a Hillsborough-manque future, and developers tend to be a rather conservative, Republican-ish bunch, as are quite a few of the ultra-rich folks who live in the actual Hillsborough.

Lastly, I have to confess I feel OK about her hypothetical scenario of materialist immigrants from California, with his-and-her Escalades, who paid too much for a home on BI last year and are destined to get squeezed out next year when interest rates go up and home prices go down. BI is growing fast, too fast in my opinion, and I wouldn’t mind seeing some air let out, and as a result fewer spec homes going up, and fewer people coming to BI for the big house, big view, and 3-car garage, rather than to meaningfully participate in the community. Indeed, despite all her talk-show-esque liberal-bashing, Eleua’s shallow soon-to-be ex-Islanders sound pretty darn Red State to me.

Rain, rain … come again another day!

Yesterday was Day 27 of what’s now the second-longest streak of consecutive days of rain in Seattle’s history. The record – 33 days, set in 1953 – is in sight, and indeed the 5-day forecast calls for rain every day. I found myself heading outside this morning hoping to feel some precip. I realized not only is the rain not bothering me, but I actually want it to continue. Not because of the record, because of the reputation. The bad reputation. That it never stops raining up there reputation Yep, I’ve become a card-carrying member of the Lesser Seattle society.

Of course native Californians like myself would probably be excluded by covenant if such a group actually existed. We do find ourselves emphasizing Molly’s much more palatable New Hampshire origins. And as a family we’ve definitely put down some roots, with two native sons of Seattle, one even born in Ballard (surely the spiritual capital of Lesser Seattle). Anyway I feel some cred over newer transplants from having been here a decade – in time to have witnessed the 1995 Mariners pennant run.

So, what’s up with all this growth? Where are all the people coming from? Can’t we stop it? Hypocritical, perhaps, but neverthless I worry about how the Puget Sound area can handle all this growth. I lived in what one might call a climax forest of urban growth in the Bay Area, and growing up in then-rural North San Diego county I lived through the first stages of what became another massive development surge, that literally quadrupled the size of my home town. I may be a high-tech capitalist (of sorts) but I also empathize with Knute Berger’s plaintive column which rhetorically asked Who Killed Lesser Seattle?

Yesterday I was sitting at the bar at Doc’s Marina Grill catching a bit of the Seahawk’s playoff game after a bout of boat maintenance. Doc’s is the opposite of yuppie; I felt fully at home in rubber boats and a slicker. Bonding with the fellow next to me, who also had been scraping a hull, I heard a very worrisome tale. His home-town for three generations, Tiburon, CA, had become gentrified to the point that he felt literally run out of town by the new rich folk: he finally sold out and moved here last year. I knew Tiburon had gone very upscale (it now rates #19 on the top zip codes in the U.S.A); but what really got me was when he continued “… and I can see it happening here right in front of my eyes”. Yikes! We certainly aren’t moving to Bainbridge Island to see it become another Tiburon. Worse yet is the realization that we may represent, demographically, another step in that direction.

I wish that those who have been here long enough to say “let’s pull up the drawbridge” with a straight face, would pound on our growth issues even harder. Does Bainbridge Island really need to grow by 50%? Given our water supply can we? Most importanly, should we? I hope we just don’t roll over and let developers and land owners – whether the are 4th-generation natives or Californicators – do whatever they want with this wonderful place.

Island Fever

It took only three days after taking possession of our new home on Bainbridge Island for me to come down with the boat bug.  With a remodel looming, my better half was rationally browsing colors at Winslow Paint and talking to potential builders, so my browsing dodgy-looking sailboats on Eagle Harbor docks and craigslist seemed at best poorly timed. But, something about BI had already given me a bad case of “Island Fever”, and there was only one cure.  Yep, “we” bought a boat.
Now, I understand full well that “a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money”. And I appreciate the old joke that to simulate sailing, you can simply take a cold shower fully clothed while slowly tearing up $20 bills and watching them go down the drain. While I have enjoyed very occasional sailing since college days, I had so far managed never to own anything larger than a sailboard and sail rig for my classic Klepper. So what happened?

While BI’s attractive marine environs certainly deserve some credit, other factors may have played a role. We are downsizing and moving into a more community-oriented environment. Since I could no longer be “king of my own castle”, perhaps there was unconscious appeal to becoming “captain of my own ship”? Since we were not plunking down millions for waterfront real estate, perhaps there was some appeal to having in effect portable waterfront property? Indeed the boat I bought is (affordably) moored on a somewhat dilapidated private dock that happens to be adjacent to an expansive estate. Was that what sealed the deal? Or was a boat purchase just an instrument of procrastination and avoidance of other tasks at hand? Or (worst of all) just an expression of middle-age fantasies?

I’d like to think that instead what sealed the deal was the wide smiles of my 8-year-old son after we went on a test sail. After all, there’s very little status envy to be gained from ownership of a diminutive “pocket cruiser”. But no extravagence can be completely irrational if a family enjoys it together. And if part of the enjoyment ends up being hanging out on a scruffy dock next to status-flaunting rich folks, well so be it. Meanwhile,  Swallows and Amazons Forever!

The “S” Word

Molly and I have long thought of ourselves as “city people”. Before moving to Seattle a decade ago, we lived in San Francisco. At the time my employer was moving its headquarters south to San Jose and I joked that moving to Seattle would be a smaller change than moving down there. It seemed to me that an amorphous and undifferentiated spawl started just south of Oakland, curling around the Bay to butt up against Palo Alto on the other side. The horror, the horror… the suburbs. Yet now here we are moving out to a Seattle… uh… uh…. The word just doesn’t want to come out.

Bainbridge Islanders seem to collectively have a conflicted relationship with the S-word. On the one hand, preserving rural character and not becoming just a “Suburb in the Sound” is practically a mantra on the Island. On the other hand, Bainbridge Island is factually a bedroom community with an overwhelming economic dependence on commuters to Seattle, and real estate brochures and even BI’s own Chamber of Commerce cheerfully describe BI as a “Seattle suburb”.

I share this evident schizophrenia. For me, “suburbs” has never been meant strictly a satellite relationship to a metropolitan nucleus. After all San Jose is now the 10th most populous city in the country, far outstripping San Francisco and almost two Seattles. To me “suburbs” means a prevalence of cookie-cutter housing developments, strip malls, zig-zagging highways, lack of pedestrian-friendly downtown core. By way of example, to me Phoenix is basically one conglomerate suburb. Yet perhaps most of all the “suburb” pejorative to me signifies the presumed SUV- and minivan-driving denizens, snug next to their 2- and 3-car garages, who create and consume chain-store suburban culture. And, while I absolutely do not self-identify as one of those people, objectively, I “are one”. Two kids – check; minivan – check; corporate job – check; moved out of the city to the low-crime great-schools suburbs – check. Cue Once in a Lifetime. Damn.

But yet… but yet. Bainbridge Island is not Bellevue: there’s a lot more open space, and a lot fewer parking lots. We are moving from Seattle but we are also going from two cars to one car, from a 3300 square foot house to a much smaller home, from being walking distance from a faux village shopping center to living in a real village, and effectively being walking distance from downtown Seattle. 

And that “rural character” badge is not just hype. I can walk to more restaurants and caffeination than in in our Seattle, but there are also chickens right here, and a woods. People complain about traffic on Highway 305 but it’s a cakewalk compared to any major Seattle arterials, much less I-5. We have the Grand Forest, Fay Bainbridge, Manzanita Park, Battle Point Park, and IslandWood, and more. And only 23,000 people. My kids and I were strolling Battle Point yesterday during a sunbreak, and stumbled on a paved trail around a large pond reminiscent of Green Lake. Yet instead of the hordes and the lycra-clad there was just us, and a lone stroller-walking mom. You couldn’t have that experience on Green Lake in the middle of a rainstorm, unless it was accompanied by a neutron bomb.   

I guess the bottom line is that I feel a real connection to this Island, and to the community which we’ve joined here. I’m still conflicted about “leaving the city” but if that conflict is simply part and parcel of the Bainbridge Island psyche, it seems like a reasonable deal. S-word and all.

Hello to Bainbridge Island

A new study concludes that men and women use the Internet differently, and I have to agree. While I may be more of a communicator than some of my gender, I tend to be “goal focused” even in this medium. I kept a personal weblog when I was investigating the use of weblog technology in schools almost 4 years ago, yet after the resulting CMS-based school site was launched my itch to post dwindled. Now, as my family and I undertake to move from metro Seattle to Bainbridge Island, I feel a similar itch to put down in writing some of my thoughts and experiences as an arriviste to our new community (“communities”, actually, but that’s another subject).

This may end up another goal-oriented blog of limited duration. But truly arriving in a community can take a lifetime, or longer, so then again it may last a while. Ten years ago, on first moving to Seattle, I read Andrew Ward’s excellent Out Here and almost tangibly felt his public embarrassment at being put in his newcomer’s place in a town meeting by a 4th-generation Bainbridge Islander. Little did I know I’d myself end up a newcomer here “on the Island”, much less that I’d be tempting public embarrassment myself (I do hang it out there in my corporate blog but for that at least I get a paycheck).