Remembering Marsha Million: boat captain, bootmaker

• One of Kachemak Bay’s first

by Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

Marsha (Million) Hopkins, one of the first water taxi operators in Kachemak Bay, died Friday, Jan. 8 at The Ark of Homer after battling Frontotemporal Dementia and breast cancer.
Marsha’s ashes will be spread later this summer on the waters of Kachemak Bay, where she made her living. A gathering of friends and family will be held at 3 p.m., Feb. 6, at Land’s End.
Hopkins was an artist, a bootmaker and a licensed boat captain. She built much of her own house at Little Jakolof Bay and managed an otter facility for oiled otters during the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
Local friends and customers will remember Hopkins’ famed water taxis: the Harlequin, the Nautical Son, the Mainstay, and finally, the Beowulf. All boats are still in use, though the Jakolof Ferry Service is now operating as the Red Mountain Marine Ferry Service.
The 24-foot Harlequin was built to Marsha’s specifications by local boatwright Dave Seaman, constructed from Douglas fir planking and plywood. He also built the Mainstay, another wooden boat, this one from Sitka spruce planking and frame, with a plywood house and bottom.
“She started (in 1990) to serve the summer people in that neck of the woods,” Seaman recalled. “She knew so many of the people who had a need for that.”
The Nautical Son was the first ferry. It was originally a trawler belonging to Tom Hopkins. She approached him with plans for not only buying his boat, but refitting it to function as a ferry carrying passengers to sites across the Bay.
“The Nautical Son wasn’t built to passenger standards,” husband Tom Hopkins recalled. “She said, ‘Well, I’ll draw up a set of plans then.’ We then spent several days crawling through my boat taking measurements.”
Dave Seaman modified the Nautical Son for the ferry work.
A year later, the two of them were married. Together, they operated the Jakolof Ferry Service until Marsha became ill in 2003.
Born March 6, 1949 in Logansport, Indiana, Marsha traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, ultimately becoming a trained illustrator in Aix en Provence, France.
Marsha moved to Alaska in 1970, living in Anchorage and Toksook Bay. She was hired by a University of Alaska outreach program to help Yup’ik speakers in Toksook Bay learn to speak English. She used giant flash cards of English words, often holding the sessions in people’s homes. The elderly women were sewing parkas and boots while learning English in these make-do classrooms.
“Pretty soon, she also was learning from them how to do skin sewing,” Hopkins said. “They were teaching her and that sustained her — it became her way of making a living.”
In the mid-’70s, Marsha moved to Homer and worked briefly at Land’s End as a waitress. There, she met a circle of young friends whom she would know for the next few decades. Seaman, at that time a cook at Land’s End, recalled that he, Marsha and several friends had decided they wanted to live in the remote areas across the Bay rather than in the more civilized Homer. Soon, she located land at Little Jakolof and built her own home.
She was always self-employed, either as a boot maker, leather worker, artist, or commercial fisherwoman. 
Dan Coyle, whose family had a summer cabin at Jakolof Bay when he was growing up, recalled Marsha when she set to work building her own cabin.
“She was amazing as an artist, combined with being an outdoor woman, combined with being an entrepreneur,” Coyle said. “And all of it was in her own unique and energetic style. By then, all traces of Indiana had been washed away.”
With no running water at her cabin, Marsha’s routine was to capture water from a natural spring drizzling from a cliff. One day, while en route to get water in her skiff, she ran into an ice floe that punched a hole in her hull. Coyle recalled how she got out of the boat on the ice, and pushed herself off.
“There she was, a hundred or so pounds and five-foot-nothing,” he said. “I was dazzled by her toughness and her guts.”
Marsha was a fine artist, friends recalled. But when she got into a task, “you had to get out of her way because she became happily obsessed with it.”
As otter coordinator during the 1989 Valdez Oil Spill, those character traits came in handy. It was Marsha’s job to coordinate the efforts of a dozen people working in a harried, chaotic, emotional environment that involved not yet knowing how much damage was happening to the eco-system. One task was to pick up flown-in seafood to be transported to the otters’ pens where they could be fed.
Marsha managed to operate two hand-held VHS radios and drive the boat, often ferrying visitors to Little Jakolof where the otters were penned.
It was during that point that Coyle — then a young man and established writer — wrote a piece on Marsha that landed her on the front of the Lifestyle section of the Washington Post.
The work on the oil spill convinced her of the need for a water taxi service. She launched the business within a year.
Yet, Marsha’s main interest was always in art. Her favorite time of year was Christmas, so she could give away presents that she would make, her family said.
“Marsha was a courageous, independent, self-made woman who garnered the respect and admiration of all who knew her,” her family recalled in her obituary. “She chose to live across Kachemak Bay from Homer to be as close to the natural world as she could. She loved her neighbors and all the life that forms that world and she strived to protect it and lend a helping hand to any in need. Marsha was dearly loved and will be missed by all.”
Marsha was preceded in death by her parents, Adeline “Tudie” and Robert Million.
She is survived by husband, Tom Hopkins of Homer; and numerous cousins in the Lower 48 and many friends in Anchorage, Homer and Toksook Bay.
Memorial donations may be given to Hospice of Homer.
Arrangements were made by Peninsula Memorial Chapel.

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Posted by Newsroom on Jan 27th, 2010 and filed under Headline News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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