California Coast & Ocean

The University of Chicago, and that was such a broad educational experience, and to me such an overwhelming experience, that the only focus I maintained was the one I always had, which was an interest in biology. I took a lot of courses in different fields and could have graduated in several, but when it was time to graduate I had to pick one, so I picked biopsychology. I came to Berkeley partly to study with Peter Marler [who was researching animal communications, particularly birdsong]. But he went off to a hugely wonderful job at Rockefeller University in New York. With him gone and myself just getting started, I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was the ocean though. I went into marine biology and spent a couple of summers at the Bodega Marine Laboratory, and I loved it.

At some point I realized I had been spending half of a year on boats one way or the other, in South America, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and California. So in 1981 I got this boat. It was built 53 years ago, with a tried and true design that’s several hundred years old. It had been a workboat in the Seattle area, then a private yacht. [It can comfortably carry 30 passengers.] I spent a year getting it Coast Guard-certified for passenger-for-hire, and this is what I’ve been doing ever since.

So when you say retired, you mean you left teaching at U.C. and started your own floating classroom?

I tell my friends I retired so I could work eight days a week doing what I like to do, which is a combination of natural history and cultural history. I have exciting people from all over the world, though mostly Americans, as my guests, and about half are returning. One couple has been for 22 years, two trips per year. You ask do I get tired of it? Well, they don’t get tired of it. We operate without an itinerary. We agree where we’re going to meet and where we’re going to end, and let it all happen.

On the website of his enterprise, Dolphin Charters, Patterson describes himself as “a naturalist by profession, a marine biologist by training, a student of whales by practice, a professional photographer by habit, a teacher by inclination, and a writer by requirement.”

He has created for himself something that most people only dream of: a way to make a living doing what he loves. Yet of course it’s not all as simple as it might appear. Besides navigating channels, he has to navigate through bureaucracy. His preference for traveling without itinerary, for instance, doesn’t necessarily fit well with the rule books of agencies whose job is to protect wilderness environments. In Alaska his trips go only to national wilderness areas established by Act of Congress.