PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — Rule 1 in the world of working wooden boats, since the days of dugout canoes and fishing skiffs, has been that when they are no longer of use or they are lost at sea, people build new ones and move on. Sentimentality and fussy restoration are rarely in the tool kit.

The Western Flyer, a sardine fishing boat made famous by the writer John Steinbeck, is now on a path to breaking that pattern, as it has so many others before. Seventy-five years after Steinbeck and a scientist friend chartered the Flyer and sailed it from California to Mexico — and into literary legend in the book Steinbeck wrote about their adventures — the heavily damaged, derelict vessel is being refitted in a boatyard here with the idea of putting it back to work.

Not for fishing, but for science.

The owner, John Gregg, 54, a geologist and businessman from California, bought the boat this year for $1 million, in a statement of love that he said he knew from the beginning bordered on folly. The boat, built in 1937, sank at least three times in its hard life, and had sections of rot from stem to stern. It was stranded in dry dock when Mr. Gregg took possession, and it will need another $2 million to become a science and education vessel.