The Inland Passage, north from Seattle to Alaska, passes in front of our house in the San Juan Islands. Occasionally, we will get a phone call from an old friend headed north and we recently received a phone message from Bill and Minne Isley.
They tied up at our dock and sat down that evening in our home at one of Laurie’s spur-of-the-moment potluck dinners. Bill and Minne are way off the scale of normalcy, in my opinion.
Bill began his career out of college as a community planner working for a Honolulu firm to help develop Palau in the South Pacific. He has become a world-famous architect from Seattle who, together with his partner David Hewitt, designed and built the Bell St. Marina Complex on Elliott Bay, the only pleasure boat marina in downtown Seattle.
Soon after the completion of such a massive, civic project, Bill dissolved his architectural partnership because he was fed up with bureaucracy, committee meetings and occasional requests for under-the-counter payoffs.
As his architectural business had grown, he and Minne would take a month off every summer and trailer their 16-foot captain’s gig rowboat halfway up Vancouver Island to Campbell River, where they would launch that rowboat with all of their camping gear, including sleeping bags, primus stove, tent, waterproof clothes and groceries, and camp on the small beaches in that part of the world.
The tidal currents in one inlet are as high as 22 knots at full flood. Needless to say, you would never venture a boat of any size in tidal currents of that magnitude. Instead, you would go through the passage when the tide is at slack or zero knots.
Bill told me that some days they would row and drift with the tide 25 or 30 miles and other days not travel at all.
Laurie and I have traveled extensively in that part of the Inland Passage, originally in a 20-foot boat with a cuddy cabin to sleep in and an outboard motor, so we have the utmost respect for anybody who would travel the same passageways in a 16-foot rowboat. We took many more trips over the years in a 29-footer, a 44-footer and, for the last 10 years, in much more comfort in our 47-footer.
Sometime in between those many rowboat trips they built their first house on Bainbridge Island located a 30-minute ferryboat ride from downtown Seattle.
Bill put his wide-ranging architectural talents to the task and sunk five tall telephone poles in the ground roughly 34 feet apart. Then, he built a five-story house hanging each floor on the telephone poles. It was a tall, thin house and as long as they could keep their health and climb up and down those four stories, they left a small footprint on the land. While all of this was going on, Minne had her own business of hand-knitted ski hats and traveled to trade shows in her Mini Minor, British motorcar.
During their courtship days, Minne was not sure if things were going to work out, so she took a year off and went to Greece with her daughter. Part way through that trial period, Bill was lonely and called her long-distance one night and she jokingly tells the story that she had to reach across her boyfriend’s shoulders and pick up the phone and listen to Bill ask her to marry him.
The year before Laurie and I met them, they had been rowing through a passage called Green Point, which is on the mainland side of Canada a few miles east of the inland passage where they saw a for sale sign on a piece of property. They tied up the dock to look at the property. On that first inspection, they decided to round up some partners and buy it.
Bill made a trip to Costa Rica and wound up buying a trout farm in the mountains. At dinner the other night, he told me that he kept that trout farm for 15 years, spent a month or two there every year, and sold enough fish to pay for his vacations there and make money on the real estate when he recently sold it. He had given part of the property to several families who had helped him with the business over the years, so his requirement of the new owners was to honor that property transfer. They are good people, Bill and Minne.
Currently, the Isleys live in a trailer park a short walk from the ferry landing on Bainbridge Island. They moved there to simplify their lives, as they wanted to spend more time on their boat and at the cabin. The owner of the trailer park kept raising the rent, so Bill got all of the tenants together, formed a co-op, bought the trailer park and reduced the monthly payments.
When Bill first told me about his rowboat, called a Captain’s Gig, I investigated it and found out it was the fastest through the water for a boat of its size, so I bought one for myself to use on our island.
This model is so named because in the early years of shipping, the captain was paid according to how few days he could accomplish his trip, so he’d send the ship ahead a few hours or day, depending upon the tides, get the final orders from the ship’s office, and then rowed like the devil in the fast row boat to catch with the ship.
I’ve had the privilege of meeting a lot of interesting people in my lifetime of travel. Many of which have made major contributions to the world virtually without recognition. I believe that Bill and Minne, in their own creative way, have done exactly that. With Bill’s unique architectural talents of doing the same thing in a completely different way and Minne matching him stroke for stroke in that rowboat and helping Bill to keep his many talents focused.
They are more than welcome to tie up at our dock any time they want to. That includes their 42-foot Grand Banks trawler or their 16-foot rowboat, so they can tell us about their latest adventure.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
