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Joel Kawahara sailed out of a harbor in the Puget Sound one August morning, and no one ever saw him again. 

His boat, the fishing vessel the Karolee, sailed south at four knots for days after he was last heard from on Aug. 8, eventually winding up 100 miles off of the California Coast. The Coast Guard, after calling off a search that covered over 2,000 square miles and hundreds of miles of coastline, towed it into the Eureka marina last week, where it’s still moored. 

But it’s not doomed to sit there until the harsh, unrelenting sea air and salt turn it into a rusted hulk, a ravaged memorial to a man well-known and well-liked to the fishing community on the West Coast. Kawahara had friends up and down the Western Seaboard, and one of them lives in Eureka. 

Dave Bitts, a 77-year-old fisherman who’s been trawling the sea for salmon and crab for five decades, is planning to sail the Karolee up to Seattle when the weather gets nicer and the wind stops blowing south. Bitts and Kawahara met some 25 years ago or so, and Bitts once crewed on the Karolee up near Sitka, Alaska on a fishing voyage. They didn’t catch all that much except for an incredible photo of a lingcod gnawing on a Chinook salmon Kawahara had pulled out of the depths, sea spray floating around the frame and Kawahara holding the whole debacle. Kawahara got a print of the shot; Bitts later dropped his phone in the bay and hasn’t seen the photo since.

When Kawahara stopped answering phone calls and text messages, Bitts learned from a mutual acquaintance that he’d gone silent and was believed to be missing. Bitts decided that he’d call and text him too. No response. 

A few days later, Bitts went to the marina and to his boat, the Elmarue, tied up on A dock — and there was the Karolee, on the same dock. He didn’t know the Coast Guard would be towing it in and storing it at the marina. 

“I thought, okay, I was a friend of Joel’s,” Bitts said in an interview with the Outpost. “I fished a couple trips with him on the boat, and I’m right here handy with not that much on my plate right now with no salmon season. So I volunteered to take the boat home.”

It’ll take around 75 hours to sail it all the way up to Seattle, where Bitts will fly down to Redding and then drive back. Another one of Kawahara’s old fisherman friends will join him for the trip up. There’s some mechanical work to be done on the Karolee before they depart: deck water must be drained, the autopilot isn’t receiving power. 

It’s uncommon to have a boat to return at all. When most people go missing at sea, the boats usually go with them. There’s not much of a precedent for what Bitts is doing, but he feels it’s the best way he has to show his respect for a man he knew for so long.

“Every time I look around on the boat, it makes me think of Joel and remember something about him, you know?” Bitts said. “So there’s definitely an element of sadness to it.”