Originally published Saturday, October 9, 1999

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

SOMEWHERE OFF ORCAS ISLAND -- They met aboard the seagoing tug Sea Lion when he handed her an old sea line . . . and she bought it.

Hey, it's not easy writing straight lines when the boat is rocking somewhere in the Harney Channel between Orcas and Shaw islands. But a chance encounter with the captain and first-mate of the Eclipse I, pressed into service as an Orcas shuttle vessel, has provided a little romance-on-the-seas story.

Which is a happy diversion, indeed, since that day early last month when the ferry Elwha rammed and took out most of the Orcas ferry landing. In the ensuing weeks, Capt. Dan Wilk and wife-mate, Denise, have been running the passenger-only boat shuttle between Orcas and Shaw. The as-needed operation of the shuttle keeps them wave-skipping, but they have managed to sandwich the shuttle runs into the tail end of the season for their whale-watching boat tour business.

And therein lies our tale, maties.

Dan and Denise are relatively young, look very strong and healthy, and seem to work very well together on the water and at the dock -- which regular boaters assure me is the true test of a marriage. Based on my several rides with them between Orcas and Shaw, I would award Dan and Denise the H.M.S. Pinafore citation for Felicity of Unbounded Domesticity. If you can accept their unique lifestyle as a sort of domesticity.

"We were both in our late 30s and had been very single, but we had similar careers, and we just sort of hit it off," said Dan, a 47-year-old Queen Anne native.

Denise, 46, who came off the ways in Port Townsend, was just as committed to her business as a boat painter and restoration expert before she signed on to be Dan's first mate almost 10 years ago.

This shuttle thing just sort of happened to them. "We'd just been down at the dock earlier and fueled up and were headed to Deer Harbor when a buddy's boat radioed about the ferry hitting the dock," Dan said.

"The (ferry system) agent called us and said they needed boats down there. We were the first to arrive, a half-hour later, and we started ferrying people, no questions asked," he explained. "The agent at Anacortes called and asked if we could continue doing that. We did it until 11:30 that night, and every night since. I contracted for a larger boat, the 72-passenger Glacier Spirit, out of Port Townsend, and the next day we split up the duty and Eclipse went on standby."

They happened to be running Eclipse, their regular whale-watching boat, when I spent part of a morning with them. Their contract with the ferry system runs through next Friday, with possible renegotiation beyond that point, depending on Orcas dock repairs.

Fall and winter is grungy boat-maintenance time -- last year they dropped a new engine in Eclipse -- with maybe some time for a quick vacation trip. In March, it starts all over with whale and sea lion charters -- as in, watching, not carrying).

They can't go too far for too long, Denise explained, because someone's got to take care of their two dogs, two cats and pet chicken. "We're pretty much island people, . . . been living in the islands the last 22 years," she said.

Not long after their whale-watching business was launched, they took on extra-duty as actors. "We were the coastal marine patrol in 'Free Willie II'," Dan said. It was the first time some people in the cast had seen orcas in the wild.

But opportunities like that, or this ferry-passenger shuttling, float by like, well, ships passing in the night. And Dan and Denise might have passed by one another, but for the chance encounter on a job.

Denise already had a well-established boat painting and restoration business when she contracted to refurbish the 130-foot Sea Lion, a former working tug gussied up as a sort of New Age charter vessel complete with hot tub, solarium and all the trimmings. "She's now a fish canner in Alaska," Denise remarked wryly.

"I've always been a total boat person, and I guess I got into the business because it's not the kind of work where you get stuck behind a desk. You can move around a lot," she said as she hefted a hawser at the Shaw dock.

Dan thinks he has been fascinated with boats from the time he was a Seattle school boy walking home along the Montlake Cut toward Ballard. The U.S. Army taught him turbine engine mechanics, and he worked several years in a Rhode Island shipyard owned by a buddy's family, followed by more marine engine schooling in Seattle.

That put him aboard some Seattle-based crabbing boats in Alaska and several seasons fishing Southeast Alaska. Then he worked at a fishing lodge in Yakitat, Alaska, and eventually got his own small boat for halibut sport fishing charters. "I never bothered to get my marine engineer's papers because I thought I was going to be a yacht kind of guy -- not a working boat guy!" he said with a smile.

Well, he was already living at Deer Harbor when he signed aboard the Sea Lion and found himself working alongside Denise. And they have been working alongside one another ever since. "We're both Northwesterners, and we love the water, and the whale-watching thing just sort of evolved out of that," he said. They took naturalist training at the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, and are members of the museum, the Orca Spotting Network and the Whale Watch Operators Association NW.

The cabin on Eclipse is a floating gallery of children's crayon drawings of orcas, taped like Crayola wallpaper on every available square inch of bulkhead. "I keep a book of drawings done by kids on the tours, and it's fun to show how they picture the whales," Denise said.

"We've averaged about 6,500 miles in the San Juans from May through September in each of the last four years," Dan said. "And we enjoy the 'hunt' every day, trying to find them almost anywhere in a 20-mile radius. It's a real thrill to see how the people react when they see their first whale out here. And it's sorta fun to be with them at a time like that."