Smith: Remember Anast, all who cast off one day in 1930, and be wary

Nick Anast, a man exuberantly alive until something went wrong on a kayak on Tomales Bay last month, will be honored Sunday at what will be a large, bittersweet gathering on a lawn near the front of Santa Rosa Junior College.

Consider taking along a blanket or mat for the memorial celebration, which starts at 11 a.m. and will be followed by a potluck reception. Food can dropped off at Baker Hall Room 1849 starting at 10 a.m.

Expect to laugh and cry for the 55-year-old life-sciences instructor, a unique and delightful explorer whose passions included collecting every sort of dead animal and cleaning them to the bone so that students could study the skeletons.

Tight friend Bob Rubin, a retired JC science instructor, recalls Anast taking an entire summer to clean the deceased 17-foot-tall giraffe whose skeleton now towers within the Herold Mahoney Library at the college’s Petaluma campus. Rubin notes that Anast saw no problem with bringing to school a road-kill skunk for skeletalizing, though the lecture halls adjacent to his lab had to be cleared for three days.

Anast’s colleagues have created a memorial fund that will provide money for the types of educational exploration that would prompt him to open his wallet. He’d pony up to help fly a future nurse to the Dominican Republic to work in a clinic, or to buy the gas that would allow a student to perform lab work at Marin’s Buck Institute.

To contribute to the fund, go to the SRJC Foundation website and click the “Donate” button. In the space marked “Please designate my gift as follows,” type in the Nick Anast Educational Exploration Fund.

Buddy Rubin suggests also that we might adopt Anast’s quest to learn today: “Something, anything, new.”

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THE MARINE ACCIDENT that took Nick Anast was personal and painful to Stan Augustine, a retired educator with deep roots in Sonoma County and an understandable respect for the power of our portion of the Pacific.

Augustine didn’t know Anast, nor was he familiar with the four people who perished off Bodega Head last fall, or the four who were killed or lost just nine days ago, when the wreckage of the boat on which they’d left Bodega Harbor was found beached near Tomales Point.

The tragedies resonate within the 67-year-old Augustine, a resident of Oakmont, because of his blood connection to what may have been the Bodega Bay/Tomales area’s deadliest pleasure-boat disaster ever.

It happened Dec. 18, 1930. Nine people, among them Augustine’s grandparents, Manuel and Carrie Augustine, and three of their 13 children had headed out into Tomales Bay in a friend’s 26-foot launch.

Stan Augustine’s eventual father, Theodore, was 23 then and did not accompany his parents, three of his siblings and four family friends on the boat excursion.

Not one of the nine who went along lived to tell what happened.

News and historical accounts collected by Stan Augustine concluded that the boat was anchored in the bay, off Dillon Beach, and was hit by a wave or waves that swept all nine people aboard into the water.

The boat did not sink or capsize, but its anchor line was ripped away.

Two Central Valley brothers in another boat heard screams and risked their lives rushing through turbulent waters to attempt a rescue. Struggling to keep afloat as their boat swamped, the pair pulled 16-year-old Gertrude Augustine out and set her upon rocks, only to have her washed off.

Nine souls were lost, but only one body was found: that of 26-year-old Augustine family friend Helen Freas, the wife of skipper and boat owner Jack Freas, who was 35.

Eighteen years passed before Stan Augustine was born. He said his dad, who’d lost five members of his family to the waters of Tomales Bay, all his life treated the ocean off of Sonoma and Marin, and its ability to turn quickly from placid to deadly, with great reverence and caution.

And Theodore Augustine never spoke of what happened the week before Christmas of 1930.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.