An ordinary working seine boat was an unlikely candidate to become the icon of an awakening in the human relationship with the oceans, but as Steinbeck and Ricketts sailed south to Mexico, both men sensed that something a bit out of the ordinary was afoot in the Flyer. Perhaps it was the way she handled the following sea on that first afternoon, perhaps it was the sound of her rigging, perhaps just the steady, heart-beat thrum of her engine, but they both bonded with their boat.

“Some have said they felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cried when she beached and the surf poured into her,” Steinbeck wrote later. “This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete.”

The Western Flyer put into San Diego for fuel, then into the sleepy port of Cabo San Lucas for a supply of Carta Blanca beer before rounding the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula in stormy spring weather that tested the boat and its crew. Once into the calmer Gulf of California between the peninsula and mainland Mexico, they reveled in long days of collecting, nights ashore and at anchor drinking beer and brandy, story telling, and speculating about the wildly abundant marine life all around them.

“Nights at anchor in the Gulf are quiet and strange,” Steinbeck wrote. “The water is smooth, almost solid, and the dew is so heavy that the decks are soaked. The little waves rasp on the shell beaches with a hissing sound, and all about in the darkness the fishes jump and splash.”