Old wooden nameplates of retired ferries adorn the walls of the Washington State Ferries' carpentry shop on Bainbridge Island, where James Eldringhoff was hard at work on a recent morning.
Hyak. Elwha. Klahowya.
The air was sweet with the earthy smell of sawdust, a visceral clue that — historical nameplates notwithstanding — the activity in this shop is very much concerned with the present work of keeping a new generation of ferries up to snuff.
Wearing safety goggles and wielding a track saw equipped with a vacuum, Eldringhoff tinkered with part of the base of the Colman Clock, which has been through a lot since it arrived in Seattle in 1908, including an overnight dip in Puget Sound after an errant boat crashed into the dock, and a decadeslong disappearance.
Eldringhoff has been working on the clock for about two months, but he's been pulled away for other, more pressing projects. The clock will be returned to its longtime home at the Seattle Ferry Terminal by the end of the year.
I think I may have gotten one full week on it," he said. "There really aren't typical days here."
From the uncelebrated work of replacing acoustical tiles to the more obvious craftsmanship of making the nameplates, the carpentry shop and its 13 workers are part of a larger team of tradespeople who keep Washington's fleet of 21 ferries and 20 terminals humming with as little disruption to the state's marine highway system as possible.
It's a tough ask, especially considering the years of canceled and delayed sailings caused, in part, by a lack of boats. Even a shattered window can disrupt service, leaving millions of commuters and tourists who rely on dependable ferry service, in turn, depending on the nine shops at the state's ferry maintenance facility to keep things in working order.
On another workbench not far from Eldringhoff, Ryan Brush was building a set of cabinets for the engine room crew of the ferry Tillikum, a project he's been chipping away at, on and off, for some time.
Earlier in the day, two of their co-workers had to hit the road to measure a broken window on the Salish, docked in Port Townsend, which they'll replace with — you guessed it — wood, before a new glass pane comes in.
The ferries' carpenters do a lot. They replace the ferry floors, sometimes the ceilings, and the windows and mirrors in the boats and terminals. When boat cables cross, fray, loosen or tighten under constant tautening and slackening, the carpenters come running, with a special splicing tool they made in-house. From wood.
"We’re always doing something," said Rick Northon, the shop's vessel lead who has worked there for 13 years. "Wherever we're needed, we're going to get it done and keep things moving. It makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something."
The long-lost Colman Clock
The biggest project in the wood shop — or maybe just the oldest — is the Colman Clock.
While Eldringhoff builds the base, which is nearly twice his height, the clock itself is in the Suquamish workspace of George Pease. He is the region's master clock doctor who recently helped Ben Bridge Jewelers refurbish a street clock built in 1928 for the company’s original downtown store in Seattle.
This plethora of timekeeping machines came when Seattle was known as the "City of Clocks," a reputation surely burnished when the Colman Clock arrived in 1908.
Built in Boston by E. Howard & Co., the clock was first put on top of a 72-foot tower at the end of the rebuilt and expanded Colman Dock. It was the headquarters of the region's network of passenger ferries called the Mosquito Fleet, but had recently burned down, according to a 1936 article in The Seattle Times.
The clock’s four 54-inch faces — which aligned with the four directions of a compass — "could be seen from the water or land, and its lighted glass faces were visible at night," according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article.
Just four years after the clock was installed, on April 25, 1912, the steamship Alameda rammed the dock.
"The stately tower sheared off, fell onto the Alameda, and then into Puget Sound," according to an article on HistoryLink. "The clock drifted off into the darkness. It was recovered the next day with its hands stopped at 10:23, the exact time of the accident."
It was quickly reinstalled, but by 1936, the ornate clock seemed old-fashioned, especially in contrast to the new art deco-styled ferry Kalakala that had begun service a year before. So the clock was taken down, taken apart and forgotten.
Forty years passed. In that time, the state took over the Mosquito Fleet and made it into the car-bearing system it is today, and renamed Colman Dock the Seattle Ferry Terminal. Meanwhile, the clock collected dust and cobwebs in a warehouse near 12th Avenue and Jackson Street.
In 1976, an owner of that warehouse discovered it among some old chicken coops. It had appeared in countless photos of the old waterfront, but it was rusty and in pieces, its glass shattered, and difficult to recognize. Researchers from the Museum of History & Industry were called in, and soon enough they knew what they had — the long-lost Colman Clock.
After restoration, the clock was returned in 1985 to the terminal, which the state renamed, once again, Colman Dock. And that's where the clock remained until 2018, when crews began demolishing Colman Dock to make way for today's seismically improved terminal.
And that's where the carpentry shop comes in again, taking the baton in a long line of clock caretakers who have kept the clock ticking across a century.
Eldringhoff is still building what he calls the clock mock-up. The welded steel frame is sound, but he put in temporary plexiglass plates where the glass will be, to ensure the glass is cut to fit. Some day soon, they’ll truck the clock from Pease's Suquamish workshop to the Bainbridge carpentry shop, put the whole thing together to make sure the puzzle fits, take it apart, ferry it to the mainland and build it again at Colman, where it will once again let commuters know whether they're late, or the ferry is.
"It's going to be a real dandy showpiece," Eldringhoff said.
Building tree forts
Wearing a shirt emblazoned with the logo for the thrash metal band Slayer and listening to Led Zeppelin, The Offspring and Metallica at a surprisingly low volume, Brush works on the Tillikum's cabinets surrounded by the usual tools of his trade. Band saws, planers, table saws, a chop saw, a drum sander, a lathe.
While the other shops on Bainbridge — electrician, machine, pipe, sheet metal and weld among them — have their perks, Brush likes where he is.
"Boredom. I’ve never had that feeling," he said. He worked in commercial construction before WSF and didn't know how to build cabinets when he started, but he has learned from more experienced co-workers.
"We had an old Englishman here named James when I started. The other guys said, 'Just so you know, he's already forgotten more than you will ever know,'" Brush said, agreeing.
The ferries' immaculate wood shop — which may smell like sawdust, but good luck finding it anywhere — has inspired his own clean workspace. "I've been given a hard time how good my garage looks at home," he said.
And he has a fixer-upper home in Cle Elum, where he’s worked on everything "from the breaker to the faucet. Everything."
In a few years, Brush, Eldringhoff or one of their co-workers will embark on a simpler, if much more noticeable project: a new nameplate — Wishkah — when the state's first new hybrid-electric ferry is delivered around 2030.
It'll be just another project of many, and whatever those projects are, the carpenters will figure it out.
"We do some things that aren’t technically carpentry work," Brush said. "We’d really be master tree-fort builders.
© 2025 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
