The Lives
I ordered her abstract of title from the Coast Guard, which is the official list of every hand she has passed through, and it came back five pages long. Almost a hundred years of ink, starting with a typewritten ledger stamped in Aberdeen and ending with a digital filing in 2025 that has my name on it.
Her first owner was Seattle Transfer Co., Inc. Not a person. Not even a maritime company. A freight and storage outfit. Why a company that moved other people’s furniture commissioned a 43 foot pleasure yacht from a working boatyard is a question the paperwork does not answer, and I haven’t been able to answer it either. In 1936, at the bottom of the Depression, a King County Superior Court decree moved her over to Seattle Storage Company, which tells you something went wrong but not what.
From there she went to Marie Michelsen Jameson in 1938, and to W.C. Bickford in 1940, the first actual people to own her. By late 1944 she belonged to D.W. Borg, who kept her a full decade, the longest single stretch of her first fifty years. Richard D. Hoyt had her for sixteen quiet years after that. Then Robert Kitzinger took her down to Aberdeen, the first time in the official record she left Seattle, and left her in his will split three ways. Somewhere in those years a Cat diesel went in, and the Puget Sound boat became a Southern California boat.
Twenty-six years with his Mistress.
Richard owned this boat longer than anyone else has, and he wrote down what happened to him on her, which is the single luckiest thing about her paper trail.
In February 1985 he was going through a hard stretch of life and needed a project. He found one in Huntington Beach Harbor. He and his brother Jeff spared nothing: a third of the hull planks refastened with bronze screws, every seam re-caulked, every leak found and fixed. At two in the morning on May 5th, tanks topped off and a bottle of good bourbon aboard, they left the dock and headed north. Six nights pinned down in Santa Barbara by weather. Waves breaking over the top of the boat. A line wrapped around the prop off Point Conception, a Coast Guard call, a commercial diver, two hundred dollars cash.
From 1988 she lived on the Columbia. Rose Festival, Navy Day, the Christmas ships, the Fourth of July. One winter the river froze hard enough that Richard walked a full circle around his own boat on the ice.
Wherever she tied up, people came down the dock to look at her, and he waved them aboard. That part matters to me more than the rest of it. He was never precious about her. If you admired her, you were welcome on her, and I intend to keep it that way.
In July 1996 she came to Jarrels Cove on Harstine Island, and the Shelton years are also Andrew’s years. Richard’s son was sanding at ten, running her out of Hamersley Inlet at twelve, and in 2009 came back to live aboard for three months and refinish every piece of brightwork on her.
September 18th, 2011. One last night at Longbranch Marina, his favorite place. Then home. Horn blaring, Amazing Grace on the stereo, running her alone. “If I had known I was going to be moving back to Shelton I would not have sold her.”
James Poirson kept her in Shelton for twelve years. Richard taught him to run her that October and he took careful notes. In 2023 she passed to Torry and Erica Adams, a short chapter of about eighteen months before they passed her along.
And in August of 2025 she came to us. Home to the Salish Sea, to Vashon Island, a short run of water from the yard where her keel was laid ninety-nine years ago.
Sixteen entries on that abstract and not one of them changed her name. Somebody named her before anyone alive today was born and never wrote down why. She has always been El Mistico.