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Western Flyer relics draw no bids at auction

Ten years of efforts and dreams sank quickly in a sea of disappointment Thursday morning.

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Michael Hemp sat quietly in his Wauna home watching them founder, live online. It took less than four minutes of an auctioneer’s time.

“That’s brutal,” Hemp told the Gig Harbor Now reporter watching with him.

No one bid on any of four items — a steering wheel, two compasses, and a control handle, all original gear from the famed fishing boat Western Flyer. All carried four-to-five-figure minimum starting bids, for example, $20,000 for the wheel.

Michael Hemp of Wauna watched Thursday’s online auction, but was disappointed in the results. Photo by Chapin Day

Past appraisals for the collection had ranged beyond $75,000.

The online event was an auction in Berkeley California. For sale were 63 individual items, or “lots,” related to writer John Steinbeck and marine scientist Ed “Doc” Ricketts.

In 1940, the pair chartered the Western Flyer for a round-trip, month and a half cruise from its Monterey homeport into the Gulf of California in Mexico. They famously portrayed the voyage in their book “The Sea of Cortez.”

Most of the other lots auctioned Thursday — documents, letters, books and photos — sold at prices well above minimums. One document soared to $18,000.

The auction results mean no commission for Hemp, as agent for the owner of the four items, and no payday for their owner, Dennis Fry, who lives in Northern California.

Gig Harbor Now reached out to Fry after the auction.  His wife Vonnie responded in a phone call.  When asked how her husband was doing, she said, “Not well.  He doesn’t want to talk to anybody about it.”

Michael Hemp of Wauna, left, and Dennis Fry with the auction items recently at Doc Ricketts’ lab on Cannery Row. Photo courtesy Devin Armstrong

“We don’t know” what comes next,” she said. “We’ll probably just have to drive down (to Berkeley) to pick them up.”

As for Hemp, a former resident of the Monterey area and author of a history of the town’s landmark Cannery Row, he mused post-auction over reasons the relics failed to sell, including a diminished market for historic maritime artifacts and “maybe a kind of slide in the interest in history itself.”

His offered this advice to the Fry’s about their collection, “Just keep it,” adding moment later, “It just wasn’t meant to happen today.”