How Bainbridge yoga man sculpture came to be

The man responsible for a sculpture that mysteriously appeared on Blakely Rock rock just off Bainbridge Island is finally talking about his creation.

“I wanted it to look like a person standing on that rock doing yoga and it does,” says sculptor Ethan Currier.

It’s an impressive work of art, a giant, 12-foot man in a yoga pose. And the more I hear about how Currier managed to pull this work off the more impressed I get.

First off, Currier had to figure out how to move 1,300 pounds of sculptured stone through the water just to get it to Blakely Rock. He started with the 700-pound legs.

“I had found this, it was like an old table that I packed it with Styrofoam, then I put more Styrofoam on top of it, and then I put the sculpture on top of that, and I wrapped it all together with some straps. At the boat ramp I rolled it out of the trailer, it went straight into the water and floated.”

The next day he schlepped the 400-pound body section in his inflatable dinghy.

“I risked popping my inflatable boat because it was pretty rough the day I got that out of the boat and I basically had to let it grind up against the rocks as I dragged this boulder out of the dinghy,” says Currier.

That was just getting the materials to the site. Putting up the sculpture was even trickier.

“The arms were lighter, but they had to go so high that literally I had to climb all over the sculpture to get to the 9-foot mark where the shoulder is. So I was basically working on something that was as high as a basketball hoop.”

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Currier had to do all this in the dark, so as not to be spotted. Remember, this was not exactly legal, putting up a sculpture on federal grounds.

And you won’t believe what happened when he tried to attach the head.

“The head I dropped the first time. It got lost in the water. I had to wait until it was low tide to go get it again. And then I went back out there and standing on a step ladder half way up the figure I managed to get this rock between the guys arms and up onto the pin that secured it,” says Currier. “I would loved to have put a bigger head on it, but I couldn’t lift anything bigger than that.”

So the next time you’re on the Bainbridge ferry, appreciate not only Currier’s massive sculpture, appreciate all the work he did to get it there. And especially appreciate that undersized head.