Famed Steinbeck boat lives on in guitar and surfboard made of vessel’s reclaimed wood

In 1940, John Steinbeck set off on a six-week voyage with friend and Monterey Bay marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts to collect specimens from the waters off Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. “Of all man’s tools, the boat is a personification of a man’s soul,” Steinbeck wrote in “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” the pair’s nonfiction account of the journey. 

Now, pieces of the 77-foot sardine vessel they traveled aboard, named the Western Flyer, have found an unlikely new home on land. Thanks to a collaboration between Santa Cruz Guitar Company (SCGC) and Ventana Surfboards & Supplies, Steinbeck and Ricketts’ spirits live on in a crafted, one-of-a-kind surfboard and guitar made from portions of the famous boat.

“John Steinbeck is the reason why I wanted to live in Monterey Bay,” says SCGC founder, owner and luthier Richard Hoover. “So the opportunity to use parts from the restoration of the legendary Western Flyer — which [encompassed] all the values that I really enjoyed from Steinbeck — just seemed right.” 

Boat’s new life

The guitar – a custom model H – has an overlay of white oak from the Western Flyer with the Ventana logo on its head underneath a Santa Cruz inscription. For the surfboard, Ventana took Alaskan yellow cedar from the boat. Both the Western Flyer Model H and surfboard combined are available to purchase for the pocket-change amount of $48,500. 

Santa Cruz Guitar Company unveiled the two pieces earlier this year at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the music industry’s largest annual trade show. SCGC placed the eye-catching pieces at the front of its booth, which was the first thing convention goers saw when they entered the room for acoustic companies. 

“It was received so well and people kept saying, ‘What the hell?’” says Brenda Martinez with a laugh. Martinez wears many hats at SCGC, including sales and marketing director, repair manager and general office manager. “It really showed the reach beyond the guitar world that Santa Cruz has. We’re not just a guitar company. We’re trying to promote the thing we most believe in more than anything: to make the world a better place through music, through art and through sustainability.”

Western Flyer’s colorful past

The story of the Western Flyer could come straight out of one of Steinbeck’s novels. 

The 77-foot craft was built in Tacoma, Washington, in 1937, specifically to be used for sardine fishing in Monterey Bay.

In 1940, Steinbeck and Ricketts hired the boat and a four-man crew to travel to the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. While not as historically famous as Steinbeck, Ricketts is well-known as a scientific and philosophical giant within the circles of Monterey Bay and marine biology. He was one of the earliest collectors, catalogers and preservers of marine life from Monterey Bay, shipping his specimens to schools and labs around the country in the early part of the mid-20th century. Along with Steinbeck (who used Ricketts as the prototype for his Doc character in “Cannery Row”), Ricketts inspired authors such Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller. To this day, his lab remains standing on Cannery Row, an unassuming wooden building tucked next to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. 

After its six-week Sea of Cortez adventure – during which Ricketts and Steinbeck collected and identified thousands of known and unknown species (although only several hundred were mentioned in the book) – the boat returned to California’s Central Coast for its original purpose. It remained in local waters until the collapse of the sardine fishery around 1946-47. 

Over the years, the vessel was later renamed as the Gemini, and by 1986 it had found its way back to the coast of Washington. Bob Enea, the nephew of the Flyer’s original captain, Sparky Enea, and Tony Berry – one of the boat’s original builders – tried purchasing it from the new owner, with no luck. When the owner retired, he offered to sell the famed vessel to Enea, though he lacked the funds and started a fundraiser, the Western Flyer Project, to raise the money. However, the boat was bought out from under him in 2010 by real estate developer Gerry Kehoe, who wanted to bring it back to Salinas and use it in a restaurant. 

The restaurant idea never materialized, and by 2012 the boat was falling apart. It had sunk twice in three months and remained underwater for six months on the last occasion before it was raised and moved to dry land in Port Townsend, Washington. 

In 2015, it was purchased for $1 million by marine geologist John Gregg, who was inspired by Steinbeck’s “Sea of Cortez” from the first time he read it at the age of 10. The same year, he founded the Western Flyer Foundation to raise funds to restore the vessel and continue the legacy of the boat and the important history Steinbeck and Ricketts made with it. 

The surfboard connection

Enter Ventana Surfboards. From its origins, the company had committed to always using reclaimed and salvaged materials in its boards, says David Dennis, who, along with his business partner and carpenter Martijn Stiphout, founded Ventana in 2014.

“Partly that’s to keep us sustainable and because it’s a good business decision by keeping costs low,” Dennis said of the approach. “But a large part is because our customers get these amazing rich stories from the products they buy from us.” 

Both Ventana and SCGC have a belief in sustainability and using reclaimed and ethically harvested materials. Because of this, Ventana has used wood scraps from SCGC for its surfboards and products for years, but the two companies have never collaborated on a project until now. 

“Richard has a high bar and doesn’t want to let any of the beautiful wood go to waste,” Stiphout said of Santa Cruz Guitar Company’s Hoover. “So I get the off-cuts and his dumpster is less full.” 

The idea for the Western Flyer surfboard and guitar collaboration stemmed from Dennis’ association with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where both of his parents have been docents for more than 25 years. The aquarium heard about what Ventana was doing with sustainability and in 2017 asked him to speak on a panel about reclaimed wood.

Afterward, a contractor in the audience pulled Dennis aside and offered to give Ventana redwood from the foundation joints of Steinbeck’s family vacation home in Pacific Grove — where he lived during his early days as a struggling writer — that had been taken out during a remodel. 

“Of course I was salivating,” Dennis says. 

“Nothing is wasted, no star is lost.” John Steinbeck, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez“

Stiphout used that redwood paired with Alaskan yellow cedar from old benches gifted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium to create Ventana’s first Steinbeck board. After it was finished, Dennis emailed the Salinas Steinbeck Festival in 2015 about the project, and organizers invited him to bring it and speak. Coincidentally, John Gregg was also speaking at the festival about the Western Flyer Foundation’s restoration mission. 

“And I said, ‘Check out this board we built. If there’s any way we can get even just a tiny little bit of wood from the Western Flyer we’d love it,’” Dennis says. “And he said, ‘I’ll do you one better. I’ll sail you a whole boatload of it down from Port Townsend. We can meet in Moss Landing and you can have as much of it as you want.’”

Since then, Ventana has used pieces of white oak and Alaskan yellow cedar from the vessel in numerous designs. So when the company and SCGC decided to collaborate on the 2025 NAMM project, it only made sense to include the Western Flyer. “[Dennis and Stiphout] mentioned they had white oak from the Western Flyer and I asked if it was possible if we could use some,” Martinez says. 

Along with wood from the Western Flyer, SCGC used koa wood from Hawaii for the guitar to incorporate surf culture, plus California oak and 1,500-year-old, ethically reclaimed redwood that had fallen into the San Lorenzo River, rushed out to sea and then washed back onto the beach. 

“It was really cool to tie in the story of an icon like John Steinbeck with surf culture, the Central Coast and two premier companies who believe and promote responsible harvesting and environmental sustainability,” Martinez says. 

Building the guitar

The surfboard incorporates the same San Lorenzo redwood used by SCGC. Ventana also used Indian rosewood guitar backs rejected by SCGC for the board top, giving it a cool, wave-like look, along with wood from what is known as “The Tree.” 

“It’s this super famous mahogany from Central America,” Dennis says. Hailing from Belize, its wood is some of the rarest, most coveted in the world because of its unique color and grain texture. Standing over 100 feet tall, the ancient mahogany tree was felled by loggers in 1956 and its wood is still being harvested today.

The guitar itself was meticulously designed by Hoover, with help from Martinez. “Richard wanted to take the design full on and he wanted every detail to be particular,” she says. “So I spent a lot of late nights getting him to sit down and work out in his mind what he wanted the design to be, what direction the flame of the top has to go and all these little crazy intricacies.” 

SCGC and Ventana are hoping to continue to promote their shared values through future collaborations. While they currently don’t have any other joint projects, SCGC is preparing to mark its 50th anniversary next year, with what Martinez anticipates will be an all-out celebration of the company, its many famed luthiers and Hoover himself, with a planned exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and a concert with surprise guests at the Rio Theatre. 

Back to sea, and beyond

As for the Western Flyer, after an additional $6 million overhaul, the craft was back to its original name by 2022 and completely restored as a brand new, state-of-the-art research vessel. A year later, it was returned to Monterey Bay and is now docked out of Moss Landing, where it continues to collect valuable data on marine life, climate change and all aspects of oceanography. The Western Flyer Foundation also opens the ship to students of all ages to participate in various aspects of its scholastic mission and hosts tours and events for the public as well. 

“A man builds the best of himself into a boat — builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors,” Steinbeck wrote in “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” In their own ways, the ship, guitar and surfboard each represent the Western Flyer living on as testaments to Steinbeck and Ricketts’ famous adventures.

After all, as Martinez explains, SCGC is creating instruments that will go on to make songs about love, loss and the breadth of human experience that will create memories people carry with them for their entire lives.

“And I see the surfboard as the same thing,” she says. “Surfing takes you outside of your element and pushes you to the limit and takes you to another place.”

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