A Fisherman Artist’s Perspective
By Tom Crestodina
From the Editor: Tom Crestodina is a Puget Sound-based commercial fisherman and maritime artist. In addition to his many maritime renderings, he has published books, notably the popular Working Boats (2022) and its color book companion title that illustrate and educate readers on various types of vessel encountered on the water. He’s active online under the name The Scow, especially on Facebook. Check out his website if you’re interested and want to see what the buzz is all about.
I have been drawing all my life but got a late start in boats. The beginning actually came by way of my sketchbook. On a summer evening in my late twenties, I found myself sitting with a new acquaintance at Targy’s Tavern on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. He told me he was a marine engineer, and I was curious about his work, which involved a huge mechanical sailing rig on a cruise ship. When I asked how a ship could sail into the wind, he borrowed my sketchbook and made a rough drawing of the rig, with little arrows showing laminar flow and turbulence and pressure differences.
A drawing of my boat ALSEK. Mine but not really. Fishermen in my neck of the woods usually don’t usually say “I own such-and-such boat”. You “have” a boat rather than own it. I think this is because saying that you own a vessel is like trying to lay claim to all the work done over time by all the people that made it what it is. For a boat the age of the ALSEK, that’s too much history for any one person to try to own.
I get asked a lot whether my drawings are inspired by the cutaway scene in Wes Anderson’s movie The Life Aquatic. I love that scene but it wasn’t what I had in mind when I started making these. I shamelessly took the idea from a page in Richard Scarry’s kids book What Do People Do All Day that shows a ship cutaway with a crew of mice. After being asked this question, I started to notice themes and images in Anderson’s films that suggest to me that he might be stealing from Richard Scarry, too. If I ever see Anderson in-person, I’ll corner him and see if I can get him to admit to it.
This is my favorite of my fishing boat cutaways. It is loosely based on the LADY JANE of Ketchikan, Alaska. I made it shortly after my second son was born in 2015, so I made a secret dedication to him by making the Alaska Department of Fish & Game numbers a code for his birthday.
This picture started as a design for a sticker and logo for the wonderful little boat chandlery in Poulsbo, Longship Marine. I was supposed to make a design that they could use on their stationery and their sign, so I cast around for ideas for an image of a Viking ship that wouldn’t look like it was from the funny pages. I found that a real Viking ship had been found buried at a funeral site in Sweden, so I used photos of it as my reference. I spent three days drawing this sketch, and then about fifteen minutes making the much smaller final version.
A drawing I made for my kids, inspired by the 1970s kids book The Book of the Dun Cow. I really enjoyed making the pig and crow talking at the center of the picture. Once those two characters were on the paper, for the rest of the process I was just trying to make the rest of the picture worthy of them. At some point in the process of drawing I start to feel that it doesn’t belong to me anymore—that I am here to serve the picture and to do my best to live up to its potential.
I had more questions about sailing and machines, and my new friend made more sketches. There were beers, and more sketches, and more beers until the bar was closing and my sketchbook had no empty pages—just scribbled drawings of sails, keels, blocks and tackles, winches, pumps, motors, and propellers. I was fascinated. It was all so complex, and so full of discovery and invention.
This moment came at the right time for me. I was still in my vagabond days, bouncing around between jobs and selling the occasional drawing for cash. I was in dire need of direction and down to my last few dollars. My conversation that night left me with so many questions, and it occurred to me that there was so much more to learn about ships, boats, maritime traditions, and history that I could never run out of things to learn. The living, breathing maritime culture and trades were right there at the bottom of the hill; daunting, mysterious, and full of gritty promise. I marched down and got my first waterfront job painting boat bottoms in a noisy, smelly, wonderful boatyard.
After a while I moved to the yard’s tool room and started school at the Seattle Maritime Academy, but for years I didn’t draw much. I loved my new world of work, crawling in bilges and crouching in puddles, and it was enough. I fell in love again, this time with a wooden purse seiner built in 1946. We had a significant age gap but I didn’t let that get in the way of my passion. I went to Alaska and have been fishing these twenty-five years since.
We broke up briefly. When I met my wife and then my first son was born in 2008, my priorities shifted. I stayed home with my new family for the next two years and began drawing again. Now I was making things for my boy and adding new color and whimsey to my pallet. But we struggled to get by, and when we heard that the price of salmon had suddenly tripled, and that the prediction for the run in Southeast Alaska was strong, my wife and I decided that I should go back.
While I was away that summer I made my first fishing boat cutaway drawing. I made it to fill the emptiness left by my routines and duties as a father, and to cope with the guilt of being absent during that important and irrecoverable time in my boy’s childhood. The response from other fishermen when they saw it took me by surprise. People asked me to make drawing of their boats, to draw their lives at sea, to make one of these for their kids. So I have tried. In the same way that I found purpose by throwing myself into my work in the yards and on boat decks, I found that making something that spoke to others in the industry was deeply gratifying.
Even better, I found these pictures could speak for those seafarers in their humble way. I aspire with my pictures to provide a way for us to share our world with others. With each drawing I make, I hope that someone will lean in close to it with a relative or friend who has never worked on the water and point out the details, telling stories about their lives. I hope that my drawings will open up people’s curiosity and become a tool for mariners to share about their work. I hope that they can do the same thing for others that happened for me in the pages of my sketchbook years ago, when that fellow at the bar took the time to share a little slice of his knowledge with me, filling page after page, and making me wonder what more there was to learn.
In the end I bought that boat, the lovely ALSEK, and the boy is in his teens. He just bought his first car with the money he earned fishing with me. But the challenges and the adventures are not over. They never end for seafarers. There is always so much more to learn. Which is just what I had hoped for.
A version of this piece was originally published in Winter 2024 volume of The Sea Chest, the journal of the Puget Sound Maritime (PSM) historical society. You can learn more about PSM, their youth scholarship opportunities, and The Sea Chest on their website.
