By day Curtis Bronson is a jovial contractor liaison in WSDOT’s Urban Corridors Office, but when he’s not working this bearded seafarer goes by the name Capt. Edward Rayns or "SharkByte" to his shipmates.

Bronson isn’t your typical pirate. His idea of pillage and plunder is an afternoon at a street fair performing for children and families with his fellow seadogs, Pirates of the Black Diamond, aboard their road-worthy vessel.

“Most people have the movie idea

In March, Bronson helped 76 year-old Bessie Montgomery restore her home in New Orleans after it was nearly destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Katrina.

of what a pirate was like,” said Bronson, a scholar of both lore and history of infamous pirates, such as Blackbeard. “The reality was a lot different.”

Pirates of the 1600s were mostly illiterate, untrained in swordsmanship and limited in their navigation capabilities because they preceded the sextant, an astronomical navigation tool that revolutionized sea travel in the late-1700s, he said.

Father to an adult son and daughter, Bronson started working for WSDOT almost 25 years ago when he helped dig a hole through Seattle’s Mount Baker. No, he wasn’t searching for treasure; he was building the world’s largest soft-bore tunnel for I-90. He went on to work with motorist information signs and then utilities. He didn’t begin pirating until about seven years ago.

Bronson said he appreciates the interest in pirates that movie personalities, such as Capt. Jack Sparrow, revived. But he finds more fascinating tales in the histories of real pirates. Blackbeard, for example, was feared not just for the 28 ships he hijacked but also for his halo of smoke from burning fuses that he wore in his hair and beard.

Lesser known, but perhaps even more ruthless than Blackbeard was Black Bart Roberts who plundered a staggering 400 ships in three years. Bronson loves reliving the history in full pirate garb and sharing his collection of flintlock pistols whenever he gets a chance.

Later this month, June 26-28, Bronson and his hardies will invade the seaside town of Westport on the Olympic Peninsula for Rusty Scupper’s Pirate Daze, a weekend-long street festival celebrating everything pirate.

In March, Bronson traveled to New Orleans for the annual NOLA Pyrate Week. Amid the debauchery, he, together with pirates from Los Angeles and Toronto, helped a family whose lives had been turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina.

The pirates spent two days setting drywall and remodeling the Lower Ninth Ward home of Bessie Montgomery, where flood waters stranded her and her developmentally disabled nephew in the attic during Katrina.

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