The  Sand Man  Cometh

Nestled safely at Percival Landing harbor in Olympia, this venerable wooden tugboat hardly shows her age of 104 years. Originally built by Crawford & Reid shipbuilders in Tacoma Washington during the years from 1908 to 1910, for Arthur Weston, owner of Olympia Sand & Gravel Company, the Sand Man is the last of its kind. Back in 1910 she was one of many privately owned freight vessels swarming Puget Sound doing "hard time" pulling sand barges up and down the waterway.  But now all from that era are gone, forever. She earned her name from towing those cumbersome sand barges. From 1925 to 1987 she had a succession of three commercial owners, yet doing the same kind of hard labor. Then in 1987 she was rescue purchased by a private individual who began restoring the old tugboat. However, ten years later the task proved too much for one individual to undertake and she was sold to the non-profit  Sand Man Foundation  which owns it to this day.

During its restoration process, the vessel has survived two sinkings. At one point the hull was so decayed it leaked over a gallon of water per minute and when the bilge pump ceased working in 1998, it sank. It has had three engines in its lifetime, the last of which had been on board since 1944. It cruises at a speed of up to 9 1/2 knots, is just under 60 feet in length, holds 1280 gallons of diesel, and when fully fuelled weighs in at 37 tons.

In this photo, the Sand Man is safely moored in Budd Inlet, Olympia Washington during a July squall that ripped through Olympia in 2012. This photo was taken with a Nikon Coolpix S8200 point and shoot pocket camera because it was all I had at the time. Despite having only a point and shoot camera for this moment in time, I could not let this image escape me.