Salty Tales :: Naturally Salty

What the reviewers say about Naturally Salty:

“Marianne Scott’s personal warmth and natural interest in others shines through her new book, Naturally Salty… Marianne has painted her portraits in colorful words and descriptive phrases, portraying her subjects accurately while using her genuine interest to show the best side of each. She is an artist who captures each ray of sunlight as it warms her subjects.”

Karen Larson, editor, Good Old Boat

“Scott lets her characters tell their own stories and in doing so, they come alive on the page. These are stories to entertain, inspire and even change the reader’s life.”

Peter Robson, editor, Pacific Yachting

“This would be a fine book to have aboard during your next cruise. Each chapter is interesting enough to divert your attention from that anchor you suspect is dragging, and short enough that you can finish reading it before you have to get dressed and do something about it. Interesting people whose stories and style have been so well captured and recorded by one of our finest NW nautical writers. Give it a read.”

Steve Bunnell, Northwest Yachting

“Scott’s profiles let her subjects’ own voice come out….The stories they tell are by turns entertaining, awe-inspiring, mind-boggling and emotionally moving.”

Simon Hill, editor, Mariner Life

“Naturally Salty is briny indeed. Much like a salty snack, once a reader gets underway and a few chapters are consumed, it becomes difficult to put the volume down. The reader’s resolution,‘Just one more chapter and then I’ll get back to work,’ will be oft repeated when perusing Scott’s excellent prose.”

Richard Hazelton, editor,
Nor’westing Magazine

“Fascinating profiles of people who make the [Pacific] Northwest waterfront such a vibrant place to explore.”

Robert Hale, Waggoner Cruising Guide

“[Naturally Salty] is written in an informal style…. [that] allows each person to flare brightly for a short spell, telling (and showing) those of their psyche that make them and their connection with the sea special.”

Cherie Thiessen, Focus on Women

In Naturally Salty, Marianne Scott, herself a pretty salty character, has profiled thirty adventurers, eccentrics, innovators, stoics and other interesting individuals who all, at some point in their lives, washed up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, and who are bound together by a love of boats and things nautical. The combined adventures and accomplishments of these coastal characters will fascinate anyone who shares that love, and may even inspire some to follow dreams of adventure.

Scott uses her considerable journalistic skill to tell these in-progress life stories (young and old, these individuals are still actively engaged in continuing their adventures). Her style is engaging and she obviously has become acquainted with the central core of each person she interviews, finding a way to let us get to know them too.

Diana Mumford, WaveLength Magazine

	About Naturally Salty
	During my water-linked travels around the world, I’ve met dozens of salt-soaked characters, cautious and adventurous, rich, poor and in-between—all folks whose lives were deeply influenced by the sea. Their stories are beguiling, frequently spell-binding. Those who populate Naturally Salty range from an eccentric semi-hermit like Bob Stewart to a serious scientist, Verena Tunnicliffe, who has discovered more than 70 sea creatures thriving on hydrogen sulphide five miles below sea level. They include offshore sailing record-setters like Karen Thorndike, Amazon-rafter Colin Angus, shipwreck-hunter James Delgado, renowned offshore sailmaker Carol Hasse, fisherman par-excellence Charlie White, mountaineer-cum-sailor Jim Whittaker, and gruff, yet softhearted and music-loving yacht-designer Bob Perry. They feature Edith Iglauer who went fishing with John, tugboat-captain turned marine-pilot Martin Higgs and orca-specialist Paul Spong, With ages ranging from 30 to 88, these portraits depict adventurers, curmudgeons, writers, highly-capable artisans, oddballs, boat designers and builders, sailors and powerboaters. Their salty interests may diverge, but their love of the sea binds them together. They exhibit many of the same characteristics: curiosity, the ability to make do, hard work. If I were to choose one trait they all share, it would be “self-reliance.”


	The People in Naturally Salty
	THE SEA AS CALLING
	The Deliverer — Bruce Taylor
	Life on a Rock — Flo Anderson
	Seven Ways to Tie a Bowline — Brion Toss
	The Ship Handler — Martin Higgs
	Messing about with Machines — Keith Sternberg
	The Patriot on the St. Roch II — Ken Burton
	The Artist of Canvas — Carol Hasse
	Father to a Thousand Kids — Martyn Clark
	TEAK, BRASS and GLASS
	The Perfectionist — Bob Perry
	Like Father Like Son — Bent and Eric Jespersen
	Bred in the Bone —Ted Brewer
	ADVENTURERS and ECCENTRICS
	The River Runner — Colin Angus
	The Hermit — Bob Stewart
	In the Teeth of the Wind —Ron Dick
	Salt of all Trades — Sven Johansson
	Into Thick Air — Jim Whittaker
	THE SEA AS MUSE
	Rampant Curiosity — Edith Iglauer
	Putting the Colour in Water — Marshall Perrow
	The Shipwreck Hunter — James Delgado
	Charlie’s Choice — Margo Wood
	The Boating Publisher — Tom Kincaid
	Doppelganger — Joan Austen-Leigh
	RACERS and CRUISERS
	South of the Five Capes — Karen Thorndike
	Around and Around Vancouver Island — Dick Pattinson
	From Busted Skiffs to Paper Boats — Ole Hansen
	No Time to Waste — Dave Cook
	HOT VENTS, WHALES and FISH
	Explorer of the Hot, Deep Sea — Verena Tunnicliffe
	Rock Solid — Frank Brown
	The Eavesdropper — Paul Spong
	The Evangelist of Fishing — Charlie White

	Excerpts from three Coastal Characters…
	THE PERFECTIONIST — YACHT DESIGNER ROBERT PERRY
	Robert Perry first sniffed out his interest in boats during a junior-high “show-and-tell.” Although he’d never sailed, for some unfathomable reason he chose sailing as his topic using “a bunch of books” as background. This talk (“I wish I could hear it now,” he chuckles) kindled a fever — a fever that has burned unabated since his teenage years: to design cruising yachts that are original, fast and comfortable.

	I meet Bob in the unassuming two-room Seattle office he shares with fellow designer Ben Souquet and two canines, Piper, a 13-year-old Portuguese Water Dog, and Freda, a two-year-old German Shepherd mix. A pipe rack with 20 well-used pipes hangs among several dozen half-hull models covering the walls. A guitar case leans against a corner. Does he play? “Yeah, a bit of cowboy music.” We perch on high stools at the drafting tables, which also support a computer on whose keyboard he types with two fingers, “damn fast, and damn inaccurate too.”

	“I was a lousy student,” begins Bob in his outspoken style. “I was just too busy drawing boats. That’s all I did, draw boats.” From age 14 he knew he wanted to be a yacht designer. He shows me some of the drawing equipment he’s had since that time — three curved plastic tools marked with painted white dots to distinguish them from those of others. During those years, he “memorized” Basil Lubbock’s books on clipper ships, which included such romantic titles as The Opium Clippers and The Last of the Windjammers. He joined the Sea Scouts and learned mechanical drawing. He considered enrolling in the U.S. Coast Guard so he’d be able to sail on its training vessel, the barque Eagle. Although he never signed up for military service, he studied and drew ships and yachts until their lines became second nature. That’s why he is among the world’s best known yacht designers, with more than 5,000 boats of Perry design afloat today….
	EXPLORER OF THE HOT, DARK SEA — VERENA TUNNICLIFFE
	“There’s nothing like the bottom of the ocean to make you feel completely insignificant and totally maladapted.” So begins University of Victoria marine biologist Verena Tunnicliffe, who has first-hand experience with some of the world’s most submarine sites. The energetic forty-something scientist spends a good part of her life studying the unusual life forms thriving in the oceans at depths of five kilometres. Using an unmanned submersible directed by fibre-optic cable from a research ship, Verena has discovered some 70 animal species never identified before — species, moreover, that contradict all our previous understanding of what life needs to survive.

	Unlike people who were awestruck by the sea in childhood, Verena grew up in land-locked central Ontario. Then one day her mother, returning from a Florida trip, brought her daughter a gift: a small wooden box encrusted with shells. Verena was only seven but this insignificant present piqued her interest in ocean life — the shells’ pretty, varied shapes excited her curiosity and offered a glimpse of a world far away from the interior Ontario landscape (Verena still has the box in her office). She began looking up the names of the animals that created those shells, and reading about their origins in various books, vowed to become a marine biologist. “Mum collected other shells for me, “Verena says, “and I watched Jacques Cousteau’s programs. He showed me what was underwater….”

	HERMIT BOB — BOB STEWART
	“Poverty.” That’s how Bob Stewart explains his hermit lifestyle in a red-painted, floating shack at the edge of Potts Lagoon on British Columbia’s West Cracroft Island. “Sheer poverty.”

	I scrutinize the slim 70-year old with his youngish face wreathed in Santa Claus hair and beard. The collar of his vivid, tie-died shirt is frayed. But he’s already told me he’s itching to buy a wooden schooner. “Really?” I ask a bit skeptically.

	Bob’s startlingly blue eyes twinkle. “Well,” he drawls, “for five years now I have lived on this tiny island, isolated, in ridiculous poverty by Canadian and U.S. standards. Why? So I could pay tuition for my son Josh. He wanted to study the trumpet at a private music college in Seattle.” The man who calls himself “Hermit Bob” leans back in his chair. “So I say to myself, ‘Hey, forget all the rubbish that went wrong. Never mind. Something finally went right. Josh got his degree.’”

	Hermit Bob hasn’t always lived away from civilization. He’s fathered four children and divorced two wives. For 38 years, he taught math and persuaded youngsters on the verge of failure into more productive paths. And throughout all these years, boats played a primary role.

	He once installed a boat in a classroom in a Vancouver suburb. The tale brings a gleam to his eye. “I got this old, 20-foot wooden sailboat up at Indian Arm, seven feet wide, with portholes and bunks. But how to get it into the classroom? Well, I sawed the boat into two chunks along one of the planks. I waited for the principal to go home, and with the help of my 30 special-ed kids, we snuck the top and the bottom into the schoolroom. We glued some plywood onto the ripped plank and painted it white. It was like putting the boat in a bottle. The kids used to sit in there. Gave them a safe spot. A place to be alone….”

	To Order
	Naturally Salty — Coastal Characters of the Pacific Northwest, Touchwood Editions (Heritage Group, Vancouver). ISBN 1-894898-03-6, $18.95 CDN, $14.95 U.S., available in bookstores or at:
	www.bcbooks.com
	www.chapters.indigo.ca
	amazon.com
	amazon.ca
	or email distribution@heritagehouse.ca