Gyrfalcon returns to Ketchikan! We arrived yesterday (to follow our travels and receive mini-blog updates, go to: Forecast.PredictWind.com/tracking/display/Gyrfalcon).
As the US Coast Survey vessel Patton, our boat traveled to Alaska each year from 1941 to 1967 from April to October, surveying the coastline. Her home base was Seattle, but she stored her smaller launch at the Coast Guard base in Ketchikan. This launch was towed during the summer, and was used as a workboat for tending to tide gauges, conducting low water shoal surveys, and doing hydro work.
In the National Archives in Washington DC, there is a photographic record documenting the 1952 season. The scrapbook contains a few photos of the Patton visiting in Ketchikan. It turns out that both buildings photographed in 1952 are still there today.
Here is a photograph from the National Archives of Ryus Drug Company from 1952, taken by the crew of the Patton. The caption states that Ryus Drug Company supplied nautical charts. At the time, one of the duties of the Coast Survey was to check chart suppliers to make sure their stock was current. Of the 760 charts in stock in April of 1952, only 7 were obsolete.
Today, the building still stands:
Here is another National Archives photo from 1952. This is the Ketchikan Instrument Company building, another nautical chart provider.
That building is also still present today, although the company does not seem to exist. Thanks to Steve R for pointing out the location.
The last season for the Patton as a government boat was in 1967. Dan Twohig has graciously shared his extensive photo collection of this trip. Here is one of his photos of someone skiing behind a motorboat off of Ketchikan. No modern photo matching this one…
USC&GS Patton 1967 Last Field Season
After the Patton was decommissioned, it was owned by several people. One owner was Bob Jacobsen, who ran the DuPont dynamite boat from Puget Sound up to Ketchikan (not sure if it was the MV Otter or Dupont). It’s our understanding that Bob brought the Patton up to Ketchikan and left it there for the summer as a floating house. We’ve also heard that he had a big orange cat, and that sometimes, Lyle Petke, who was a mate on the dynamite boat, would take visitors out to fish. Here’s more about the DuPont dynamite boat from the DuPont museum in the state of Washington.
https://www.dupontmuseum.com/otter-ship
Bob Ellsworth is another previous owner who took the boat (then named the Triton) up to Alaska. We’re not sure where he went. After Bob E, we don’t know of any other trips up here in the Patton/St. Croix/Triton/Gyrfalcon.
We’re hoping that someone from Ketchikan sees the boat this year and recognizes it from one of its former lives.
