By Marc J. Elzenbeck
How do you become a pirate ship? One suspects it’s always been a tricky process, what with obtaining pesky letters of marque, patiently hiding in keys to ambush passing merchant ships, and the risks of your crew swinging by their necks from a yardarm.
Paul Freeman of the good ship Sara takes care to say he’s not her owner. Technically speaking, he is. But to him, the tall wooden schooner is more a responsibility, a personified calling that found him in 2024, while she was plotting her eventual course to Vashon.
Captain Freeman describes himself as Sara’s supervisor, and circumstances support that perspective and his destination.
If you were a 122-year-old vessel that had plied the Baltic, and were scrolling through LinkedIn resumes over your morning coffee, Freeman is exactly who would stand out as your Captain. An engineer by formal education, he’s an industrial diver, world adventurer, welder, constructor of canals and monolithic domes, and dad of a recent Pirate Camp attendee.
From its moorage near Portland, Sara seems to have dialed up whatever karmic broadband ships commune with and said, “He’ll do. Bring him to me for an interview.”
Captain Freeman had just decided to retire from hazardous underwater construction work, and was looking for a sailboat he could stand up in without hitting his head. From that reasonable start, he wound up with a 70-foot long, 80-ton blue water traveler.
Oregonian millionaires bought Sara in the 1970s and commissioned a carpenter crew from Denmark to sail her across two oceans to a berth on the Columbia. The crew stayed on to convert the decks below into living quarters on par with a luxury yacht.
By the early 2000s, Sara found another caretaker ready to invest in her future. In 2004, a family undertook a remarkable restoration, reinforcing the hull with steel and encasing it in a new 4- to 5-inch shell of 6,800 psi concrete. These costly restorations ensured stout integrity for another 100 years or so.
Still, there are significant milestones to clear before Sara reaches a waiting moorage that has been secured on Quartermaster Harbor. Paul first moved Sara downriver to Astoria on the Oregon coast (the location for the movie “Goonies”), where this year she hopes to serve as an attraction and Halloween venue.
Interestingly, the ship was stolen by nighttime thieves along the way and had to be chased down and recovered, but that is another story. Long story short, there is strong local interest in not losing the ship.
The next big step for Sara is to seal the top deck and prepare her for the winter rains. After that, the goal is a tow to Port Townsend, the Wooden Boat Capital of the world, where a replacement will be fitted for her cut main mast to allow for self-propulsion.
In this, Captain Freeman is open to ideas and solutions. The cost of keeping Sara stationary is significantly less than making her fully functional again, and the biggest expense isn’t materials, but labor.
The final leg will be to put Sara down the Sound to her rightful home on Vashon for day sails and night stays. We’ll be eagerly tracking Sara’s progress and reporting on it. In the meantime, your views and investment are encouraged; visit the ship’s web site at https://www.sarapirateship.com/.
