The Center of Buoyancy – Book Review

Long time readers of The Rainshadow Journal will likely remember the wonderful vignettes that Port Townsend’s Diana Talley rolled out in the last two years. Diana detailed small chapters of her life in the wooden boat community from Sausalito to Port Townsend and farther afield with her travels on her fishing boats. Diana has now released her first book, full of her stories, called The Center of Buoyancy, The Life of a Shipwright Sailor Guurl.

Some of the stories you have read here in Rainshadow appear again in the book, but a lot more have been added. In fourteen chapters, Diana starts out at the 1975 Sausalito waterfront, an early version of Port Townsend, before gentrification forced the water squatters out and north to PT and beyond. Her stories are about boats, relationships, family and also about becoming accepted into the fraternity (yes a man’s world) of woodworking. She fell in love with wooden boat construction and repair, and the general bohemian life surrounding the last days of this low rent California waterfront, when there was still a lot of derelict and near derelict vessels and easy moorage to be found. It is a window into a long gone small corner of freedom from a quickly urbanizing and rules based world.

We move with her from California to Eagle Harbor, across the Sound from Seattle, to her first wooden boat and a new romance. But it didn’t take long for her to pull up anchor and fly off to the Caribbean, where her and her partner purchased Isela #72, a 32 foot Belizian fishing boat, eventually sailing it through the Panama Canal and back to Eagle Harbor.

The stories continue: childbirth, building the next boat, fishing and sailing around the Pacific, eventually ending up in Port Townsend, where a group of wooden boat builders were forming a new industry based on the old. Diana joined a couple of shipwrights, as her skills building her boat Ocean had got her started into this revived niche that was relearning the old ways of making boats, by hand. Deciding to become a shipwright is not just something you choose like plumbing or electrical work, it is a calling, it’s own art form and Diana shows those of the outside world why and how one becomes one, and what it means. Along the way, we meet a wide cast of characters, all unique in their own ways, that inhabit the world of wooden boats and the Port Townsend waterfront.

There are “chapters” in the book but each chapter is a collection of loosely aligned and very short stories, such as “Shavings in my Brassiere”, particularly humorous to women, and part of the beauty in the book is just that, a woman’s story of making her way in a man dominated world, one that treated her kindly but also with a bit of condescension. The message seems to be, “do it your own way, have a thick skin, work your ass off, and surround yourself with people who support your dream.” All good lessons no matter who you are or what business one is in.

The book flows on as she is part of the growing community in Port Townsend, and ends up in a relationship with her partner Rick. Rick was a gentle giant but was subjected to a battle with Alzheimer’s, a battle that Diana helped him through to the end. The books final chapters conclude with the happy work of leading and celebrating the “Women of the Working Waterfront” project, which lifted her spirits after Rick’s death, along with her being celebrated for her life’s work by the Wooden Boat Foundation.

If I have any minor criticism at all of Diana’s memoir, it would be that I would have liked to have seen an index of names. The book is all about people, and it would be great to have a quick way to find people’s names in the book. She does include a glossary of nautical terms for the uninitiated. There is also a bit of a push/pull between wanting more depth to the stories and having the volume of stories this book already covers in its wonderful 300+ pages. Like all good tales, one always wants more. But as a first book, Diana brings her unique world and life to the reader much as a quilter putting the small pieces of various fabrics together into a larger tapestry of story. The final “quilt” of this book, is worthy art, and I would recommend it to anyone. It’s a fun read.

Center of Buoyancy is a self published novel, available in Port Townsend at Aldrich’s, The Northwest Maritime Foundation shop and Amazon. The local Jefferson County Library also has copies to check out.