July / August 2025

Currents

One Good Story Deserves Another

Tom Jackson

Man in a white canoe with reflection off the water.

JAN VAN SICLE

A 16′ George Lawley & Sons tender was recovered from a hayloft on Shaw Island, Washington, in 2019. She had been there for some 80 years. Jan Van Sickle, a marine surveyor of Sonoma, California, bought the tender from the San Juan Preservation Trust, which received her in a land conservation donation. He says he has done "just enough repairs to make the boat functional."

Good boats have a way of lingering in the imagination, and hold on to them, treasure them, and keep them safe. Harry Bryan wrote about such a boat in WB No. 303 in his close examination of a 12' 2" yacht tender built in 1925 by the George F. Lawley & Son yard in Massachusetts. That article caught the eye of Elizabeth Becker a continent away in Port Townsend, Washington, and triggered some warm memories of another boat—one that had been even longer out of view and then suddenly reappeared at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival in 2019.

“The 16' boat was found only weeks before that year’s fes-tival in the loft of a barn at the Marilyn & Fred Ellis Preserve on Shaw Island, likely stashed there about 80 years ago,” she wrote. The Ellis extended family was deeply committed to land conservation in the San Juan Islands, of which Shaw Island is one. They donated land and conservation easements totaling some 1,400 acres on Shaw and its neighbor to the east, Lopez. This boat was also a Lawley tender, rediscovered where the family had stored her for decades.

Along with the Ellis property, the boat passed to the non-profit San Juan Preservation Trust (SJPT). The trust took her to the festival that year hoping to find a buyer who would be a capable caretaker, with the sale proceeds supporting their land-conservation work.