With a timely tale of a boat and the people it carried, of fisheries exploited, and of fortunes won and lost, this book offers an environmental history, a journey through time and across the sea, charting the ebb and flow of the cobalt waters of the Pacific coast.

By many accounts, the Western Flyer is the world's most famous fishing vessel. It acquired its literary and scientific reputation in 1940 when John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts chartered the vessel for a six-week expedition to Mexico s Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. Ricketts a pioneer in the study of diverse sea life of the West Coast Steinbeck and the crew spent those weeks collecting specimens along the margins of the sea. The Western Flyer hadn't been their first choice, but the local fisherman that dominated the sardine fisheries in Monterey at the time considered Steinbeck an activist in the labor movement who wanted to unionize their boat crews. The boat itself has been resurrected of recent, caught in a battle between its current owner, a developer who wants to turn it into a restaurant in Salinas, and the Western Flyer Project, a nonprofit group that wants the Flyer restored to its original working condition and used for educational voyages on Monterey Bay and elsewhere. After the Flyer s brief brush with celebrity, it worked for decades as a sardine seiner, a tuna boat, a crab boat in Alaska and a scientific research vessel along the West Coast.
The author, who grew up in Salinas, uses the boat as a device to trace the depletion of marine life, from shrimp in the Sea of Cortez to sardines, to salmon and king crab. The boat is just one character, but so too are those who have owned it, fished from it, and also who now battle over rights to establish its final resting place. The author has used Steinbeck archives, interviewed family members, and drawn upon his 32 years in Pacific Northwest Fisheries, casting a wide net around this vessel and the ecology of waters in which it has traveled."