Beached house (ADN, 11/23/03)

For more than 20 years, the 86-foot wooden-hulled vessel has been hunkered on the Homer Spit, at first looking less like a boat than a barbecued whale. This old power scow -- a World War II supply boat turned fishing vessel turned private residence -- has endured a war, a rigorous working life at sea, numerous fires, several related explosions, a clandestine attempt to sink her and the wrath of those who found her uncomely.

The Cape Lynch, it seems, is immortal. And that really bugs some people.

Forced into retirement by a huge fire in 1981, the Cape entered domestic life a bit of a wreck. Most people would have taken one look at its charred remains and made the sign of the cross. But Carl Satterwhite Sr. saw otherwise, bought it and started working it over. Ten years later, when he sold the boat to Bob and Judy Cousins, they saw otherwise too and started working over his workings over.

No small task for either party.

In recent years, the Cousins family has performed CPR on the place, building an eccentric three-story home for themselves from salvaged this and bartered that. What they've created is a sort of bohemian Noah's Ark, a place some locals see as the Frankenstein of marine architecture and others as a monument to human resourcefulness.

And since Bob Cousins can't say no to an old boat or a good deal, he's landscaped around his home with a small fleet of elderly and/or disabled skiffs, longliners, gillnetters and other vessels, the cheapest of which were free; the next cheapest he got for a buck.

All these boats, some more beat up than others, make an impression. An "area of interest" is how Homer Mayor Jack Cushing refers to spreads of this sort.

"A lot of people tell me they think it has a lot of charm, " Cushing said. "Some other people think it could use some more charm."

The Cape Lynch and the city of Homer have a bit of history. Officials weren't too thrilled when the Cape first took up residence on the outer reaches of the Spit, and they tried to make it go away. Instead, through the years, it's crept closer and closer to Spit Road, pushed by tides, storms and people tenacious enough to love it. In the process it's morphed from burned-out hull into a real home with a basketball hoop, a bunch of kids, a dog named Tucker and an Internet connection.

The Cape Lynch lives because the kind of guys who had put their time and resources -- not to mention their families -- into a home like this aren't the kind of guys who go down without a fight. Anymore than the Cape Lynch is that kind of boat.

Now 63, Satterwhite laughs just thinking about that old thing and his spars with the city.

"The fun part was beating City Hall, " he said from his new home in Quartzsite, Ariz. "It's been a thorn in their side for the past 20 years."

SOLID AS A ROCK

Old power scows like the Cape Lynch, known as sturdy work horses of the sea, were built in the shipyards of Seattle, and they were built to last, according to Dick Wagner, founding director of the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle. "The size of the timbers was phenomenal, " he said.

In Alaska, power scows were used as salmon tenders, then during World War II as supply vessels for the Aleutian campaign, carrying cargo to military installations. After the war, most returned to the fishing industry.

From 1981 on, the most official account of the life and times of the Cape Lynch comes from the Homer Fire Department.

Homer firefighters responded to three fires in three months aboard the Cape that year, while it was still owned by Port Lynch Inc. out of Seattle. And there are stories of previous fires in its fishing history, including one at sea.

As Satterwhite tells it, one of those incidents involved a clumsy caretaker.

"The story I got was he had a space heater in the main cabin for heat and he came in one night a little sauced, kicked the space heater and ..."

The biggest blaze was in October 1981, and it was a doozy, ending the Cape's working career as a crabber.

Homer real estate agent John Calhoun remembers that fire a little too well. Public works foreman at the time, he was at a Halloween party at the Elks Club that night and had to respond to the blaze dressed in a pirate suit.

"It was a long siege, " recalls Robert Purcell, retired Homer fire chief. It took 40 volunteer firefighters from Homer, Anchor Point and Ninilchik working in shifts to contain it. The fire kept flaring up in the bilge and there were several explosions, making it one of the most challenging fires in Homer, Purcell said.

They battled that thing for 38 hours. And when they finally finished, those firefighters got themselves "We Survived The Cape Lynch" T-shirts.

"It was a nasty old boat, " recalls Richard David, who was supervisor of the Homer port back then. "It was fairly well gutted; there wasn't a heck of a lot left. But the basic hull, I believe, the outside hadn't been breached."

At some point thereafter, as Satterwhite tells it, somebody -- and nobody's saying who -- tried to send her to the bottom of Kachemak Bay.

"They took it out ... in some real deep water, and it sat there for nine days, maybe two weeks. Just sat there. They tried to sink it, and it wouldn't sink, " he said.

Sinking a boat like that requires some serious permits. But if a guy takes a boat out and it just happens not to be there the next day, what's he going do?

"It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" is how former Homer Harbor master Gary Daily characterizes such a stunt.

The Cape was towed back to the Spit and beached at high tide about half a mile north of the harbor. Those Homer firefighters swore they were done with it.

"Three strikes and it was out, " Purcell said. "Only it wasn't. It went on to have a fourth fire."

The Cape Lynch sat derelict a few years, drawing squatters, shady characters and school-skipping teenagers in need of a place to party. The cops even raided it once, apprehending a criminal hiding out in the bow.

None of this helped the Cape's reputation.

Then in 1985, Satterwhite fell for the boat.

"It was affordable, " he explained.

He said he shelled out $4,000 but made at least that much selling off scrap metal and other salvageable parts.

"So it was more or less a freebie."

Folks told Satterwhite the boat was jinxed. They told him he was crazy. He didn't argue.

"Yup, and I got the papers to prove it, " he'd tell them.

A man known for chronic recycling and practically chain-draining bottles of Dr Pepper, Satterwhite planned to convert the Cape into a houseboat. He's always dreamed of owning a yacht.

"I wanted to find an old paddle wheel, put it on back and cruise around the country on it, " he said.

Satterwhite patched up some holes it had acquired and got it towed a couple of miles farther up the northeast side of the Spit. He bellied it up to the beach in the general vicinity of where it sits now and went to work building a place for himself and his wife, Traci, to live.

He collected wooden pallets -- piles and piles of them -- and nailed them together, making walls, shelves and furniture practically for free. A plywood board here, a sheet of tar paper there. The place stayed dry, mostly. All the while he was filling the thing with his own line of used merchandise.

"I learned a long time ago there isn't anything in this world there isn't a market for, " said Satterwhite, who now sells cactus for a living.

The Cape was quite a sight back then. Locals called it The Pallet Palace.

He didn't care.

"I had a lot of fun with that boat, " he said.

Traci, who has since passed away, didn't have that much fun with it.

"Naw, " Satterwhite said, "she didn't care much for it. It didn't have all the facilities she thought it should have."

His daughter had similar sentiments.

"I was kind of shocked when I first came up and seen where my dad was living, " said Carol Satterwhite, who moved to Homer in 1989. "I seen this big ugly boat. 'Dad, is that where you live?'

"Oh, he was a pack rat, " she said. "He collected everything. I mean from old magazines to old car parts. Driftwood.

"It was a mess, I'll put it that way."

In time, the old scow, especially at sunset, did kind of grow on her.

It never grew on the city of Homer, though. City officials wanted Satterwhite to get it out of there, claiming he was squatting on city property.

The heck he was is how he looked at it. And he set out to prove them wrong.

Satterwhite studied maps and city plats. He even located a survey marker, he claims. According to his calculations, he was 20 feet outside of city limits.

"I was working on a marine vessel in tideland, " he told those city people.

The city still maintains otherwise but never seriously pursued eviction. And so the Cape stayed put, except at high tide, when it bobbed.

Satterwhite lived aboard about six years. Then one day his wife told him to take a "flying leap at the moon." So he did. He left the next morning, went to work with a carnival in California and didn't come back until 1995, when he sold his Pallet Palace to the Cousins family.

DEVILFISH LAGOON

Bob Cousins, his wife, Judy, and their six kids rolled into town in 1991, in their big silver bus, laying eyes on the Cape Lynch for the first time.

"I looked out across the beach and said, 'There's your new home, Judy.' "

"She laughed."

But not for long.

The Cousins family had been living and traveling on their 1966 converted city bus for several years, home-schooling their kids and taking them places most never get the chance to see. They weren't planning to stick around Homer very long. But they parked at the harbor, found odd jobs, put the kids in school. When three acres of mud flats came up for sale farther up the Spit, they couldn't resist.

"We thought, you know, it's a nice place to bring up kids, " said Bob Cousins, 52. "So we bought it."

They parked their bus and various acquisitions on high ground on their land and moved in. When Satterwhite put the Cape Lynch up for sale in 1995, they bought it too. They floated the boat during a high tide from the beach in toward their land. The edge of their property was as far as they could get before it ran aground. So the Cape sat perched on its skegs on an easement, between their land and public land, which caused some tension between the Cousins family and the city -- by now a Cape Lynch tradition.

"It's legal for a boat to be on a section line easement as long as it can be moved" is how Cousins understood it. "They said, 'Well you can't move it, so you have to move it.'

"Wait a minute, I can't move it ... so I have to move it?"

What Satterwhite inherited in soot and singe, the Cousinses inherited in pallets and, well, merchandise.

"It was right to the ceiling with a trail you had to follow to go anywhere, " Bob Cousins said. "I can tell you this: We cleaned 100,000 Dr Pepper bottles out of here."

Some stuff was useful. What wasn't went to the dump. And what didn't go there went into a bonfire that Cousins kept fed all summer long.

Once the family had swamped out the Cape, they designed themselves an enchanting home without equal. They built it board by board, using post-and-beam construction, with hand-sawed timbers and a trove of materials they got for cheap or rescued from the dump.

A plank now leads from the ground to the main deck, where there's enough room to bounce a basketball around and shoot hoops. An entryway leads to the lower level, which functions as storage and a workshop, though it can flood at extreme high tide. A circular metal stairway winds up to the main living quarters, a homey room of curves and arched windows and nooks and crannies, with a kitchen counter top and carved-out sink crafted from a beautifully finished slab of driftwood.

Off the galley, beyond a paned-glass door, is a deck with a table and chairs for taking in those sea breezes, seabird songs and stunning Kachemak Bay sunsets.

A disabled veteran with post traumatic stress (he was a medic in Vietnam and had a "horrendous time"), Cousins always has something going, from artwork to inventions, like the kayak he's building out of recycled milk-jug plastic that will double as a snowmachine sled and sell for $99.

Ideas are one thing Cousins doesn't lack, and that includes what to do with his unique piece of land.

One of the first things he did was secure permits to dig a lagoon on his wetland property. He now calls the place Devilfish Lagoon and hopes to build a marine park someday. That explains all those other boats scattered about.

How many other boats?

"You know what? I lose track. I get 'em and move 'em, they float away, they float back, depends on the tide, " he joked. "Approximately 19, I think."

Tourists aren't waiting for the marine park; they're already snapping away with their cameras. Some stroll on up to the house and look right in the windows.

"Hey, they come right up on our deck and take pictures of us while we're eating breakfast, " Cousins said.

Through the years the Cousinses have talked about opening a restaurant and an art gallery, about renting canoes and paddle boats, about creating some kind of underwater tube so people can look at fish. They've talked of converting part of their boat collection into "bunk 'n' dunks, " bed-and-breakfast units with hot tubs in the holds.

In the meantime, Bob Cousins can't resist an old boat in need of a home. But it's not just boats, which explains the castle.

This polyurethane form-insulated structure sculpted to look like a castle sat for years on East End Road. The structure was built by Steve Chandler, who was experimenting with ways to create cheap, dry housing for the homeless. But then he got busted for growing marijuana in its two towers and went to jail, so that didn't work out.

Cousins bought the castle for $1,000, and it's now sitting on his property in about a dozen pieces. But someday it will rise again.

"We'll make a big island mountain right there with a moat and a bridge, " he said, pointing to the center of Devilfish Lagoon. "We'll put the castle there as the centerpiece."

The ideas just keep coming, but then so do the official roadblocks, Cousins said. Unlike Satterwhite, he owns the property beneath the Cape Lynch. But he has plenty to say about how local, state and federal agencies have gotten in the way of his plans for the place. Putting in sewer and septic, which would cost a fortune, has been a sore spot. He's also butted heads with the city and his neighbor, English Bay Corp., over land use, beach access and a slew of other issues.

To say Cousins has a distrust of government is putting it in tiptoe language. He's run for the Homer City Council three times, hoping to root out corruption he sees pretty much all around. The last time he ran, in 2001, he got 198 votes.

When it comes to asserting his property rights and other topics he cares about, Cousins' plate overflows. But the problem with the Cape Lynch sitting on an easement? Mother Nature took care of that.

RIDER OF THE STORM

The Cape's latest surge came a year ago when a storm on top of an extreme high tide uprooted it, spun it and planted it 150 feet closer to the road.

The boat is now about 75 feet from traffic.

"If it gets any closer, we're going to abandon ship, " Bob Cousins jokes.

He was aboard at the time and called it "a great ride." But he and his family lost about half of what they owned that day, including Bob's pickup, to the floodwaters. The Cape's whole bottom floor was submerged. And the tidal surge gathered up his boat collection, as well as other various lawn ornaments, depositing them in one big bashed-up heap near the road.

When the tide went out, the Cape was left with such a severe list, the Cousinses feared it would roll over on its side. Everything that wasn't tied down hit the floor.

"All of our stuff -- boom. Everything, " Cousins said. "The whole boat, devastated."

An astounding number of people showed up to help the family save what they could.

"It was amazing, " Cousins said. "And it's not like I'm a good old boy in Homer, because I've had my battles here."

It took a whole lot of bulldozing and backhoeing to get the Cape right. A year later, the Cousinses are still cleaning up the mess and sorting things out. On the upside, they said, the flood was an opportunity to get rid of stuff that wasn't worth hanging on to in the first place, a way of cleaning out the gene pool of possessions.

"We lost so much, " Bob Cousins said. "But, you know, I don't care. No big deal. Hey, what a lesson for my kids, you know. It strengthened them up a whole bunch."

To say the Cousinses love the Cape Lynch wouldn't be quite right. The amount of work it has required makes it more of a love-hate thing.

"Some of it's boat heaven, some of it's boat hell, " Bob Cousins said. "So we're kind of like between purgatory and heaven here."

With the Cape Lynch having such a notorious past, that means this tough old boat could be around a long, long time.