Boats Anchored In Eagle Harbor, Some Of Them Housing Live-Aboards, Get A Stunning View Of The Seattle Skyline. -- On The Hook -- Eagle Harbor's Eclectic Dwellers Commute By Skiff And Try To Roll With The Seas Of Change

THE MOUTH OF Eagle Harbor opens wide, giving Washington State ferries an easy left turn past the creosote-soaked Wyckoff Superfund site and into Bainbridge Island's bustling terminal.

The harbor steadily narrows from there, past the ferry repair plant, gravel barges, a city waterfront park, forests of sailing masts in a string of marinas and yacht clubs, private docks, upscale homes on one shore and new condos with joltingly new architecture on the other. It snakes right, then left, then right again over private oyster lands before dwindling to mudflats about two miles up.

Paul Svornich kneels on a life preserver and maneuvers his small wooden skiff so slowly his oars barely cause a splash. He circles the heart of the harbor amid a menagerie of about 70 vessels, two-thirds of which are unoccupied and moored by owners as far away as Eastern Washington.

This is home to him and another two dozen or so people, tethered to the harbor's deep water by the strength of their anchors' grip on the muddy bottom, their self-reliant bent and a century of mariner tradition.

They call themselves anchor-out live-aboards and they hole up in functional tugs, sleek sailing sloops, working fishing vessels, vintage schooner-masted scows, funky house barges and classic wooden boats. The biggest is a 97-foot black-and-green New England dragger. The oddest is a bastardized two-toned Boeing test vessel so in need of repair and heaped with junk that it looks as though it drifted in from "Waterworld."

Svornich grew up along the north shore in a home his father built in 1955. He spent his youth rowing the harbor and learning the fishing trade handed down through his father and grandfather, who emigrated from Yugoslavia to the harbor early in the century.

He has sailed more than 70,000 ocean miles and spends each summer deep in the Pacific fishing for tuna on his 38-foot sailing sloop Ocean, the smallest deep-sea tuna boat in the American fleet. The rest of the year he and his wife, Lorraine, live on her junk-rigged schooner Wu-Li in Eagle Harbor.

Their live-aboard neighbors are merchant seamen, store clerks, shipwrights, missionaries, artists, would-be authors, parents, an apprentice to a Native American medicine man, a researcher, a stubborn constitutionalist, a drug and alcohol counselor, a high-school student, a couple of drunks and a musician who drives a cab at night and still collects an occasional royalty check.

There are four young children, one born in a floating house barge. One is named Oceana, another River. There are also plenty of dogs, three chickens and a couple of sets of pet goldfish.

Their homes are protected by the harbor's geology, but they pivot and roll at the whim of the wind and wakes from passing boats. They have gone several steps beyond live-aboards who fit neatly into marina slips, commuting the hundred yards to and from shore in little wooden skiffs, hauling water, food, supplies, laundry and sewage.

Anchoring out here has been tradition, but this is not the blue-collar harbor it used to be. There is a storm blowing through. It involves environmental regulations and views and the sheer volume of boats and competing uses and the steady gentrification of the harbor and the island that surrounds it.

Bainbridge Island is studying whether the anchor-outs still fit. Even if allowed to stay, they almost assuredly will face conditions, be charged fees, maybe confined to certain spots. Committees are wrangling over regulations and enforcement and definitions.

It sounds like an awful lot of detail for people who swing on the hook because it feels like freedom.

THE POPULATION varies with the season, but several of them stay year-round. One anchor-out has bought, refurbished and sold seven boats while roosting in the same spot for two decades. One little houseboat has been home to about 20 different people over the years.

A gray-bearded salt named Alan Cangiamila sits below deck in his runt of a sailboat, puffing his pipe and sending up plumes of London Fog tobacco. He holds a paperback copy of "The Federalist Papers," his bible.

"This is supposed to be the supreme law of the land, and it's probably not worth the paper it is printed on anymore," he says.

His copy of the Constitution is so frayed and grimy and highlighted and underlined and stuffed full of bookmarks that you can just see him reading by his wind-generated lamp, gritting his teeth and cursing how modern government has been messing with the Founding Fathers.

Novelist and screenwriter Don Berry used to live on the hook out here and fondly called Cangiamila "The Absolute Anarchist." Cangiamila finds this a compliment, but says he is more a practicing libertarian. He built his snub-nosed winter-sky gray boat an inch or two short of 16 feet just so he wouldn't have to comply with Coast Guard regulations and register or name it.

A retired NASA field engineer from Alaska, Cangiamila sailed into Eagle Harbor 13 years ago with a companion and plans to build a classic scow schooner. The boat, called Oblio, got built, but the companion ran off with a guitar player and was replaced by a more loyal dog. Cangiamila, still known as Oblio Dale by his neighbors, now lives on his boxy gray boat with no name about 30 yards from the city dock.

Each day he rows to shore with his dog, Rascal, to forage wood and collect vegetables from a social-service agency.

His home is the size of a camper, with a tiny kitchenette and a woodstove that heats his home and cooks his food. He uses the same pot of water to rinse his dishes and to shower. He's got a small table where he reads math books and John Stuart Mill. He sleeps on a bunk with a handgun hanging on a nearby post just in case.

Many of the live-aboards are willing to look for compromise, like paying fees for a sewage receptacle they use at the city dock, and have complied with the city's requirement that they register their vessels. Cangiamila, 59, refuses.

"The only people expected to register these days are sex offenders and live-aboards," he says. "I'm not going to register. They did that to Gypsies and Jews in Germany, and we know where that led to."

Where will he go if the city forces him to register his boat? "To jail, I guess."

Dave Ullin lives all the way across the harbor, tucked behind a gravel barge and far removed from his neighbors in a gray tug called Spruce. He is a hulking, raw-boned man who wears a functional crew cut.

He is considered an island treasure and has no use for reporters from Seattle. He is a master shipwright, a perfectionist who toils only with handmade tools. He loves work for work's sake and is an environmentalist and volunteer in the purest sense. If he finds a spider aboard his tug, the story goes, he will make sure it is comfortable.

Ullin, in his late 50s, grew up in West Seattle and has lived on boats for more than 30 years, moving to Eagle Harbor from the Duwamish in 1983. He learned all his values - volunteerism, craftsmanship, respect for nature, "purposeful work" - from his parents and grandparents. He shuns the mainstream and considered being a hermit, but decided he couldn't help people see the beauty of a simple living if he did that.

"Living on a boat is a way to step out of this flow (of materialism) and practice independence," he told The Bainbridge Voice. "Independent thinking weeds out the frills."

Between the two men sits an eclectic neighborhood complete with cliques, conflict, camaraderie. The residents range from a young couple raising a red-headed chubby-cheeked 7-month-old girl to a mother who commutes four hours round trip to and from Kent each workday to a woman who quit using an alarm clock because a mallard she calls Lunchy taps on her skylight at 7 each morning, begging for food.

Some go by nicknames like Good Jerry, Preacher Dale and Mad Mike. Each has a story on how they drifted in here.

Jerry Wagner has lived here longer than anyone but Svornich, moving to the harbor in 1978 after spending time in a Himalayan monastery and a Colorado mine. He made exactly $1 a day his first year in the harbor and lived on fish he caught. He now rebuilds and sells boats, paints houses, makes prayer flutes and serves as an apprentice of Nootka medicine man Johnny Moses, performing blessings and healings.

He sits below deck, surrounded by books on Native American culture and tapes of oral histories and healing stories and plays a chanting, mournful tune on one of his hand-carved flutes.

His current boat is a 32-foot sailing sloop called Hych Ka. It's for sale and he plans to buy another one and start all over.

Dale and Peggy Brown, high school sweethearts from the Tri-Cities, were Christian missionaries in Valdez when they say they got a sign from God that they should buy a sailboat, even though they had never sailed before.

They traveled to various ports, spreading the word, before winding up on Bainbridge, where he was the pastor of a church for three years. Now he holds Bible class on their 47-foot sailboat each Thursday. They hang signs on the boat and on its sails with messages like: "Repent Or You're Going To Hell."

They are eager to argue religion and sued Bainbridge Island a few years ago when the city tried to prevent them from picketing a pro-gay cause. The Browns won and the city had to pay $10,000 in attorney fees.

Mike and Anthea Martin were married on the harbor about seven years ago and are raising two young sons in the unfinished hull of a 50-foot wooden ketch called Buckets. They also own a dog, chickens and goldfish and use an oversized skiff to come to shore each day to retrieve food, water and other supplies and give their two sons a chance to play at the city park.

Their 5-year-old son just learned how to ride a bicycle, but he could row at 2.

They talk about setting sail out of Eagle Harbor in a few years after their boat is made sea-worthy. It will not be too soon for Anthea, a New Zealander who loves sailing and her children, but finds raising a family on a bare-bones boat with no running water a tough life - "dark, dirty and depressing," she says.

ISLAND HISTORIAN JERRY Elfendahl says live-aboards have populated the harbor for 100 years. They included shipwrights, fishing crews, mill workers and entrepreneurs. One group of workers known as the "The Fisher's Gang" built several houseboats. E.L Franks, an Englishman who became a founding partner in the Eagle Harbor Transportation Company, the first Seattle-to-Bainbridge steamship company, was a live-aboard.

In 1928, Capt. James Hersey and his wife sailed from South Africa into Eagle Harbor on his four-masted ship, the Conqueror. Moviemakers came to the harbor and used the ship to film "Tugboat Annie." Children would roller skate on the long decks of ships because they were the longest flat surfaces they could find.

A local character and former live-aboarder, Al Davenport, whose 1938 houseboat named Dreamboat is on the island's historical preservation survey, used to row a canoe across the Sound to sell clams in Magnolia.

Eagle Harbor was one of the busiest industrial harbors on the West Coast, with major industries that included shipbuilding, cement-making, logging and strawberry plants. It was home to the 4,000-ton-capacity Marine Railway.

But both the harbor and its lifestyle have changed dramatically. It now holds about 500 boats, but no commercial boatyard to work on them. The creosote plant that once proudly churned out treated pilings and lumber - used to help build the Panama Canal, among other things - is now just a bare Superfund site where more than 400,000 gallons of toxins have contaminated land and water. The harbor accommodates tourists and float planes and kiddie raft lessons.

While Svornich and a few merchant marines spend months away at sea, many anchor-outs live there year-round and couldn't sail off if they wanted to.

Kari Wright stands inside her well-tended home atop a bluff on the south shore and stares outside the sliding glass door. Her view is chocked with water, mountains, the ferry terminal, condos, Madrona trees, the Olympics, the Seattle skyline.

What she sees are anchored-out live-aboards clustered across the harbor's deep water and as prominent as fish in a fishbowl.

Boats were down there when she and her husband moved in nine years ago. They seemed quaint at the time. They are a constant irritant now. She complains they are hogging public waters and taking space from visiting boaters. She complains about loud and drunken behavior and how ratty some of the vessels are.

It galls her and other residents who overlook the harbor, and who pay huge property tax bills to do so, that anchor-outs pay no fees for moorage or for using garbage and sewage disposal facilities on shore. They see live-aboards as freeloaders - freefloaters.

"I was always taught that there is no such thing as a free lunch," she says, flicking her hand at the water below. "But Bainbridge Island sure has proved me wrong. They give a free lunch, free rent, free sewer service and hey, bring a friend!"

Live-aboards say they have a right to the harbor and there is still room to navigate. Yes, they pay no rent to live on the water with views of Seattle and the mountains, but in conditions not many people would or could hack, especially in the winter.

Even some of the live-aboards, however, complain about the drinking and bad behavior of some of their newer members. Bainbridge Island Marine Officer Dale Johnson says he has cited recent residents, some of whom seem to be street people from Seattle, for drinking in the public park. He arrested two on outstanding warrants.

The live-aboard population has stayed relatively constant, according to a committee studying the harbor, but the number of unoccupied boats, sometimes left for years or simply abandoned, have increased and made the clutter far more dramatic.

The harbor itself is cluttered with big issues: what to do with the Superfund site that is also one of Puget Sound's most dramatic properties, how and when EPA is going to clean up the toxic mess, how to accommodate the ever-growing ferry traffic, how to get a boat yard, who is going to take control and operate the harbor's mish-mash in orderly fashion. Still, it is the live-aboard issue, say veteran harbor-area residents, that gets people emotional.

Forces on the island have been trying to get rid of the anchored-out live-aboards, off and on, since the early '80s, but this appears to be the most serious threat yet.

Bainbridge Island passed an ordinance in late 1996 banning anchor-out live-aboards from the harbor as of next month, after believing the state departments of Ecology and Natural Resources wouldn't allow them. Then the agencies said they would listen to proposals on how to keep the live-aboards if environmental assurances - like how to handle sewage - are met.

Live-aboards have been given a reprieve at least until Oct. 1, while a citizens committee studies the issue. They have their share of land-dwelling supporters who say the community represents diversity, history and some of the most interesting people on the island. But Mayor Dwight Sutton, who engineered the extension, says he doesn't see how their lifestyle can stay unregulated in an evolving harbor that depends on regulation.

As Dan Hornick, manager of Eagle Harbor Marina, puts it: "I hate to see anyone lose their freedom, but this isn't 1890 anymore."

SVORNICH SAYS his favorite part of the day is when he's rowing from shore to his boat. The trip is like a massage, rubbing out stress and centering him. He fell in love with the ocean when he sailed the South Pacific for a year as an 18-year-old. He returned home so he could make enough money to head back out, but life caught up to him. He has a daughter in high school, an ill father he needs to help care for, a wife who runs an art business.

He hopes, someday soon, that he and Lorraine will sail out of Eagle Harbor to explore the Indian Ocean and maybe re-visit the South Pacific. She has lived on the water for 19 years, and they met in a northern Canadian port when she helped fix his crippled sails.

He stops rowing, letting the skiff drift while he thinks about the debate and how it all got like this. He points out a fancy home erected on pilings right over the water along the south shore. It used to be the net shed where his father and grandfather hung and dried their equipment.

The resident is one of the most dogged critics of Svornich's neighborhood and lifestyle.

Svornich is a soft-spoken, thoughtful man, perhaps a product of drifting at sea for months at a time. He is eager to find compromise, but the irony is not lost on him.

"A lot of this seems to be about aesthetics," he says. "But you know, aesthetics work both ways. I would prefer to look at that shore and see forest and deer and yurts. But that's just not the way it is."

Richard Seven is a writer for Pacific Northwest magazine. His e-mail address is rseven@seattletimes.com Harley Soltes is the magazine's photographer.