Scientific, Literary Team to Re-Create Steinbeck’s Voyage

Weary from writing “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck set sail from here in 1940 with his pal, Edward F. Ricketts, on a sardine boat that ferried them on a six-week scientific and literary adventure around the Baja California peninsula.

The expedition, made famous by Steinbeck’s account, “The Log From the Sea of Cortez,” has long made scientists and armchair adventurers dream of re-creating the seafaring voyage of the novelist and the marine biologist who was the model for the character Doc in the novel “Cannery Row.”

“People have talked about doing this for decades,” said Edward F. Ricketts Jr., the octogenarian son of Monterey’s famous marine biologist, who died in 1948. “But it’s never been done.”

Until now.

On March 11, 64 years to the day after Steinbeck and Ricketts set off in a chartered fishing vessel, four men and one woman plan to board a remarkably similar wooden fishing boat in Monterey and trace the same 4,000-mile route to the Sea of Cortes and back again.

The two-month trip will be chronicled by a Steinbeck Fellow, an academic position at San Jose State University held by freelance writer Jon Christensen. He plans to write a book about the expedition and create a daily Web log on the Internet for schoolchildren and others to follow.

The chief scientist will be William F. Gilly, a Stanford professor of marine science based at the Hopkins Marine Laboratory in Monterey.

As in the first expedition, Gilly and other scientists plan to survey the shallows for the 550 types of marine life listed by Ricketts in the original book he co-wrote with Steinbeck: “Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research.”

Using a recently rediscovered copy of Ricketts’ notes from the trip, the scientists plan to trace the precise route and make the same stops.

The idea is to compare their observations and freshly collected species of marine life with those plucked from the sea and logged 64 years ago.

They want to measure what has happened to the body of water -- once so rich in marine life that explorer Jacques Cousteau called it the “aquarium of the world,” but one that has suffered from decades of excessive fishing and pressure from unchecked tourist development around Cabo San Lucas.

“What do I hope to get out of it?” Gilly asked. “I hope we will learn what has stayed the same, what has been lost.

“I also hope it will be an odyssey,” he said, explaining his yearning to get out of the lab and into the field for exploration and discovery.

“Everything down there is mysterious and has many truths to reveal,” Gilly said. “I don’t know exactly where to look, so I want to look everywhere, especially around that next rocky point.”

The scientific survey will be more systematic than Ricketts’ original investigation and is to include two extra weeks to look for species, such as the jumbo Humboldt squid, not mentioned by Ricketts or Steinbeck. The squid, which can reach 100 pounds and 6 to 9 feet in length, now are the target of a major fishery in the Gulf of California, the formal name of the Sea of Cortes.

Gilly, a neurobiologist who has been studying squid, plans to go to spots in the Gulf of California where sperm whales congregate to feed on those mysterious tentacled creatures, which can change colors from white to deep red.

Unlike most modern-day scientific expeditions, this one will be operated on a shoestring budget. Yet like many adventures, it was conceived “over some beers” one evening, Gilly said.

He has been thinking about duplicating the voyage since the mid-1980s, but the idea took shape only after he linked up with Frank Donahue, a semiretired shrimp fishermen with a boat and, as he puts it, “nothing better to do.”

The boat, docked in Morro Bay, is more functional than fancy. “It’s like going to a picnic in a dump truck,” Donahue said, greeting all comers with a barrage of jokes. He lives aboard the 73-foot Gus D, named after his late father, and is proud of the sturdy vessel he has taken all over the Pacific. “She can go 12,000 miles on a tank of gas. That would get you to Indonesia.”

Donahue has the diesel engine torn apart, pieces scattered everywhere in the midst of an overhaul. Other members of the expedition have been making regular trips to Morro Bay to help out, cleaning, painting and organizing. The boat needs to be hauled out of the water to have barnacles and algae scraped from its bottom before it motors up to Monterey to begin the trip.

Donahue expects everything to be ship-shape by the departure date. He also predicts the cruise will be easy for him -- at least easier than fishing. “I don’t have to catch fish or sell ‘em. Or try to make a living. All I have to do is keep the ship running.”

With the trip’s $90,000 basic costs covered by grants from private donors and nonprofit groups, Gilly is trying to line up sponsors for food and amenities. North Coast Brewing Co. in Mendocino has pledged 50 to 70 cases of beer in keeping with the spirit of the original trip. The log mentions considerable sampling of cerveza, or beer, in Spanish.

Christensen, meanwhile, is working with the San Diego Natural History Museum’s binational education program to design a guide for teachers to help their students understand the significance of the trip and follow along. Christensen plans to produce a daily log of the trip and use a satellite hookup to post it in English and in Spanish on www.seaofcortez.org or www.mardecortes.org.

The scientists also plan to bring groups of schoolchildren from La Paz, Loreto and Santa Rosalia on the Baja Peninsula to help them collect specimens, and perhaps learn a greater appreciation for marine life and the ocean.

Again, the idea is modeled after an experience by Ricketts and Steinbeck. In a passage from the log, Steinbeck wrote about boys who danced around them, quizzing them about what they were searching for in the tidal flats near La Paz.

“Once they know you are generally curious, they bring amazing things,” Steinbeck wrote. “Small boys were the best collectors in the world.”

With sharp eyes, the boys came up with ingenious ways to collect shrimp and other creatures without having their fingers pinched, he wrote. “[T]hen ten-centavo pieces began running out, and an increasing cloud of little boys brought us specimens.”

The expedition’s regular members plan to pick up visiting scientists for portions of the trip. But joining Gilly, Christensen and Donahue for the entire voyage will be Chuck Baxter, a retired Stanford University lecturer of marine science, and Nancy Burnett, a photographer and video documentary maker who co-founded the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Although the expedition would be the first to follow in the historic wake of Steinbeck and Ricketts, the idea of another Sea of Cortes adventure surfaced in the original log.

“We have concluded,” Steinbeck wrote, “that all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice: once to make mistakes and once to correct them.”