By Jan Hersey
In 1937, as ships combed the Pacific for Amelia Earhart, a 22-year-old Anacortes daredevil was launching her own mental and physical challenge. But rowing from Anacortes to Ketchikan, Alaska, was just the next adventure for this 22-year-old Anacortes high school valedictorian and University of Washington grad—at age 14, she'd become the youngest person and first female to swim the mile-wide Guemes Channel in frigid 50-degree waters (and started a local tradition!).
Against her father's wishes, Beatrice Annette (Betty) Lowman set on June 18, 1937, in a restored, 13-foot traditional dugout canoe refitted for oars. She traveled with only a sleeping bag, cooking kit, horsehide gloves to prevent blisters, hunting knife, and waterproof container of matches. Her journey was made without compass, watch, or money. She capsized, losing everything but her canoe and her life. But Betty tells of everyday encountering likeminded, independent, and welcoming people in villages and homesteads along the Northwest coast.
Her boat, an Alaskan Native dugout canoe, had been found by the US Coast Guard floating in San Juan waters in the 1920s and given to her father. Presenting it to Betty for her 18th birthday, he admonished, "Be sure that your seamanship takes nothing away from the seaworthiness of this native canoe." She named the boat Bijaboji, after her four brothers who helped her restore it, using the first two letters of their names (Bill, Jack, Bob, and Jim).
"There were millions of stars overhead and a familiar constellation or two," Betty writes of a night row to Cortes Island. "I was alone, ecstatic, free of self-consciousness about my muscular 160 pounds, free of know-it-alls trying to tell me what equipment I would have bought for the trip if I weren't crazy. If I weren't so broke and loving it!"
On August 19, 1937, some 66 days and almost 1,300 miles (including detours) later, "Barnacle Betty," as she had become known, steered her red dugout canoe into Ketchikan, her solo journey making her the first woman to row the Inside Passage.
Betty's experience launched a career of speaking engagements and adventure. In 1963, at age 49—now Betty Lowman Carey—she repeated her trip in the opposite direction, rowing from Ketchikan to Anacortes, and becoming the only woman known to have twice rowed a dugout between Washington and Alaska. Betty Lowman Carey died March 16, 2011, at age 96.
See the original Bijaboji and learn more about the audacious life of Betty Lowman Carey at the Anacortes History Museum, 1305 8th St.; open Tues.-Sat., 10am-4pm and Sun., 1-4pm. And read Barnacle Betty's full story in her book, Bijaboji: North to Alaska by Oar