Discover Bellingham Bay history on a guided cruise

BELLINGHAM — Quick: Can you identify the birds with the pointy red beaks making all that noise as they dive head-first into the water?

Any idea what a cold-storage company chills, or how much toilet tissue a paper mill produces?

Richard Vanderway, curator of education at the Whatcom Museum of History & Art, supplies the answers as he digs into his 30-year collection of Northwest maritime trivia each Thursday evening aboard the museum's Bellingham Bay History Cruises.

Twenty dollars (half-price if you're a museum member) buys a relaxing 2 ½ hours aboard the 110-foot Island Caper tour boat as it travels along the waterways that drew European settlers to the area more than 150 years ago.

"Bellingham Bay's size means there's a scale here that we can talk about and people can relate to as compared to Seattle," says Vanderway, who's been narrating the sunset cruises for more than 15 years.

Ninety miles north of Seattle and 25 miles south of the Canadian border, Bellingham began in the 1800s as four separate towns, each centered on the bay, with settlers seeking their fortunes during the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858 and jobs in coal mining, shipping, lumber, fishing and canning.

The four towns — Bellingham, Whatcom, Fairhaven and Sehome — were consolidated in 1903 into the city of Bellingham, named after Sir William Bellingham, the Navy storekeeper who provisioned English explorer George Vancouver's expedition to Puget Sound in 1792.

Bellingham today is a college town, home to Western Washington University. With its waterside parks and a marina filled with yachts and sailboats, the bay yields few clues to its industrial past. But with Vanderway's prompting, it's easy to turn back the clock and imagine what life was like on a bustling working waterfront.

A fishing history

The tour begins in Squalicum Harbor, once a homeport for one of the Northwest's largest commercial fishing fleets. At its peak in 1913, the Puget Sound fishery brought in 235 million pounds of salmon compared with only a few million pounds per year today.

In 1901, two-thirds of the state's canned salmon was packed in Bellingham and nearby Blaine. Now, salmon boats such as the "Excellar," a purse seiner docked in the berth next to the Island Caper, fish for sardines off the Oregon coast. The marina mostly moors sailboats, powerboats and kayaks — 1,250 recreational boats in all — compared with just 150 commercial vessels, half the number of a decade ago.

With most of the heavy industry gone, nature-lovers can spend hours spotting a variety of wildlife in and around Bellingham's waterways: harbor seals, Caspian terns (the birds with the pointy beaks) and green herons near the shoreline; eagles' nests on Chuckanut Island, a five-acre nature preserve in Chuckanut Bay; and black oystercatchers on nearby Lion Rock.

As the Island Caper pulls away from the dock, Vanderway points out the location of the former Bellingham Bay Shipyards at the mouth of Squalicum waterway.

"This was home to the largest maker of minesweepers in the world in World War II," he says. The shipyard closed in the mid-1950s. In its place now is Mt. Baker Products, a plywood producer, and Bellingham Cold Storage.

"If you look right into the bluff, you will see what was the Bellingham coal mine," he says. The smoke stack that's still standing? A relic from a sugar-beet processing plant, closed in the mid-1930s after the crop failed and the plant was moved to Toppenish, Yakima County, in Eastern Washington.

Other waterfront industries came and went. Some are still around. Bellingham Cold Storage, founded in 1946 by A.W. Talbot, the owner of Bellingham Bay Shipyards, sends blocks of ice to cruise ships in Vancouver and to Eastern Washington to chill corn before it's sent to market.

Georgia Pacific closed its pulp mill on the southeast Whatcom Creek waterway in 1971, but still operates a paper mill that churns out toilet tissue at the rate of 40 miles per hour, according to Vanderway's calculations.

"I did the math new this year," he says. "If rolled out end to end, there would be enough (in a year) to stretch to the moon and back 32 times, and that's two-ply."

Waterfront recreation

Heading toward Fairhaven, the boat passes what was Unionville, the location of a failed coal mine and the original Bellingham town site. This is Boulevard Park, a busy waterfront-recreation area where residents picnic and play volleyball on the site of a former lumber mill. To the south were salmon canneries and the Pacific Can Co.

The large, reddish-brown object in the park that looks like rock? It's a sculpture made of solid tin collected from the can company.

Around the bend is Chuckanut Bay. As the setting sun lights the sky, the boat circles close enough to Chuckanut Island for Vanderway to point out an eagle's nest.

For Carol Smith, 73, who grew up in Bellingham, the cruise isn't only about spending time with her fellow members of the "Red Hat Club," a group of women she says is dedicated to "going out and having fun." It's about rediscovering parts of a city she hasn't seen from the water since she was a child, when catching a salmon was as easy as jumping into a dinghy and tossing out a line.

"It looks different from anything I remember," she says. "When you drive along the road, you don't have a clue of all that's here."

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com