David Greenberger has lived aboard his boat, the Jeanette, for more than 50 years. The boat now has extensive water damage and he currently cannot live on it.
TACOMA, Wash. — For more than 50 years, fisherman David Greenberger has lived full time aboard his boat, the Jeanette.
But a recent accident left the Jeanette submerged for nearly two days, causing extensive damage and leaving the 80-year-old fisherman without his home.
“Well, basically, I had some misfortune,” Greenberger said.
At the end of August, the boat bottomed out, tipped over and took on water. The engine room flooded, interior spaces were soaked, and electrical systems were destroyed.
“Still drying out all the drawers,” he said, surveying the damage. “I knew I had a lot of work coming.”
Greenberger converted the Jeanette from a fishing vessel to a liveaboard boat decades ago. He bought the boat after working on it in his younger years and has since traveled up and down the West Coast.
“Oh, it’s the freedom,” he said. “You get up, there’s nobody next to you, maybe a whale.”
He grew up in Ballard and has spent most of his life on boats.
“I went down in the boat, starting about six, seven years old,” he said.
With the Jeanette out of commission, Greenberger has been staying with friends. He said he’s spent more time in a car over the past two weeks than in the past decade.
The boating community in Tacoma has since rallied around Greenberger, raising funds and offering support as he faces months of repairs.
“Obviously, the news started coming in that it had sunk,” said Dwight Anderson, a Tacoma waterfront employee who has known Greenberger for years. “What we want to do is get it up running and functional so we can at least get him back into his home.”
Anderson called Greenberger a living link to the region’s fishing history: a man who embodies Seattle and Tacoma’s maritime culture.
“He was up and down the whole entire western coast. So, he’s made chosen families at pretty much every port,” said Lindsay O’Neal, who also works on the Tacoma waterfront. “So, a lot of people know him, and if they don’t know him personally, they know the Jeanette.”
O’Neal said that Greenberger is always helping others, constantly being willing to share his knowledge with people trying to catch fish. She said it’s important to get him back onto the boat he has called home for so long and added it’s even more important to let him know how much people care.
“I think that’s probably the most important part, just getting his spirit back up, because he had lost everything,” said O’Neal. “It’s just so important to get him on his feet again.”
Despite the devastation, Greenberger remains resilient.
“I have a lot more friends than I thought,” he said with a smile.
The restoration of the Jeanette will take time and resources, but Greenberger is determined to return to the water, on the Jeanette.
“Just take one day at a time,” he said. “You just got to keep going forward.”
A fundraising page has been set up to help cover the cost of repairs.
