In 1940 John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts chartered the purse-seiner sardine-fishing boat the Western Flyer for a marine specimen collecting expedition around the Baja Peninsula to the Gulf of California, known on old maps as The Sea of Cortez. A remarkable voyage in the history of science it would also result in the co-authored and genre-defying work Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. Please join PBA Gallery’s Chris Dunlap in conversation with Richard Astro, Donald Kohrs, and Sherry Flumerfelt as they discuss this multi-layered work and the 2025 return of the Western Flyer to the “Sea of Cortez”.

Richard Astro is the author of: John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. 1973. He is also co-author with Donald Kohrs of A Tidal Odyssey: Ed Ricketts and the Making of Between Pacific Tides. 2021. Sherry Flumerfelt is the Executive Director of The Western Flyer Foundation.

This program is in partnership with PBA Galleries and Michael Hemp from The History Company.

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