Nobody knows exactly when Victory’s adventure began.

The handmade wooden rowboat — with two oars fastened with leather ties and the name “VICTORY” painted on the stern — slipped away silently as the tide came in on the Marrowstone Island beach where she was left one evening after a day of play.

Victory headed north, into the salty waters of Kilisut Harbor and into Port Townsend Bay under starlight.

After a few days at sea, the boat landed at Point Wilson. Bobbing up and down in the early morning waves, an anonymous beach walker waded into the surf and pulled Victory onto the beach.

This was just the beginning of the small boat’s lengthy journey, which involved several beachwalkers, a group of Facebook posts and shares, and a community-wide search to bring the boat back to its family.

“I just keep thinking about the solo journey Victory made across the water from my parents’ house to Point Wilson,” said Amy Goetz, whose 7-year-old son Mikah is Victory’s skipper. “I picture seagulls landing on it, seals popping up next to it.”

Her kids, Mikah and Camilla, were playing with the boat at the beach by her parent’s home on Marrowstone Island, Goetz said.

“At the end of the day, nobody put the boat away,” she said. “A couple of days later, we noticed Victory wasn’t on the beach anymore.”

She thought it was a good lesson for the kids to learn, but Goetz was also sad to have lost the boat.

“It was built by our friend Henry and his dad, back when Henry was a little boy,” she said.

Henry Veitenhans, now a young adult, gave the boat to Mikah for his 4th birthday, for a pirate-themed birthday party.

Veitenhans didn’t even know the boat was missing when he saw a post on Instagram with two dogs posing inside the Victory.

“He didn’t know who posted it or anything,” Goetz said. “But right away, he saw the Point Wilson lighthouse in the background.”

Veitenhans and his father were on their way to Alaska for the fishing season. But he passed the information along to Goetz, and the next day she and her kids jumped in the car and drove to Fort Worden to search for their boat.

Staring at the long, rocky beach, Goetz didn’t even know where to begin until she saw a man looking for beach glass nearby.

“These days we’re not really approaching people a lot, but I figured we needed a starting place,” she said. “I approached him and asked him about it. And he said, ‘Oh, are you talking about the Victory?’”

The stars aligned: Goetz had approached the same man who saw the boat on the beach three days earlier and pulled Victory out of the waves.

“This was the moment when I knew I needed to keep looking,” she said. “All these little coincidences kept popping up.”

But when the man led Goetz and her kids down to where he had left the boat, it was gone.

There was no way the tide had been high enough to pull the boat back out to sea, he said. Someone must have pulled it off the beach and taken it home.

“I don’t really do social media,” Goetz said. “But he encouraged me. He said, if you make a post, it will get spread around and get found.”

So she posted a couple photos on Facebook in the hopes that someone might have seen it and could point her in the right direction.

“If you know me, you know it’s important to us because look, I’m making a Facebook post,” she wrote on the May 18 post. “Thanks for sharing.”

That post was shared 132 times — enough times that eventually Port Townsend resident Mark McCready saw it.

He immediately recognized the boat in the photos — he had snapped a few pictures of Victory three days earlier when he saw it on the beach.

“My buddy and I walk to the Fort Worden beach a couple of times during the week,” he said. “It was around 8 or 8:30 a.m. and here the Victory was sitting there, just as if someone had rowed it to the beach.”

McCready jumped on Facebook and began posting.

“I am asking for your help FB friends,” he wrote, asking for any information on the location of the boat. His post, with a photo of the Victory at the beach, was shared nearly 500 times.

“I was shocked,” he said. “But I love the fact that the community got that emotionally invested in it because it made me feel like at some point this story was going to end well.”

There were a couple false leads, Goetz said. People had seen the Victory, or thought they had seen it.

“I was just very surprised at how many times it had been shared and how many comments I was getting from people I had never met,” she said.

For a community of people all stuck at home in the middle of a pandemic, the mystery of Victory’s location and the sweet story behind the boat’s origins was the perfect distraction from more distressing world events.

Comments from friends and community members flew in, sharing hopes for the boat’s safe recovery.

“I think it was an interesting and sweet enough story, and also lighthearted enough, it was what everybody had been waiting for,” Goetz said.

A few weeks after Victory’s disappearance, a young woman commented on McCready’s post. She and a friend had been walking to a viewpoint off Monroe Street and seen the boat in someone’s yard.

It was in the yard of Nancy Lucas Williams, a local artist whose work McCready had just seen days before in Elevated Ice Cream. He had even bought one of her pieces — a painting of a starfish.

He met with Williams the next day, and texted Goetz to let her know the boat had finally been found.

“I said, ‘Half the town’s looking for that boat,’” McCready said.

Williams worried the boat would be taken away by the tide, so she and a friend dragged it up from the beach and placed it in her front yard, where it was visible for those who might be looking for it.

After several weeks and much searching, Victory was returned home.

“It was just one coincidence after another,” Goetz said. “We’re glad to have it back. There’s a couple of kids playing in it right now.”