Wooden tall ship poised to launch
At high tide late Saturday afternoon in Sausalito, a group of people who love wooden ships and salt water will launch a dream.
It is the Matthew Turner, a 100foot-long tall ship built from scratch by 1,000 volunteers in a tent on the Sausalito waterfront, two blocks south of the town’s only supermarket. The Matthew Turner, named for a noted Bay Area shipbuilder, is the first wooden sailing vessel built in Northern California in more than 85 years.
The last big sailing vessel was a yacht, the Zaca, built for pleasure. But the Matthew Turner will sail for a different purpose, to teach young people and the public about the world of salt water.
The Matthew Turner has been building on dry land for more than four years, and the hull is now complete, caulked and painted and ready to float for the first time. The vessel still needs to have its two masts and rigging installed, and its deck houses and cabin finished. That should take until fall, and then it will be able to sail.
It will be a school ship, capable of
carrying 39 overnight passengers and crew, its purpose “to provide a learning experience in nature for kids and the public,” said Alan Olson, the project manager for Educational Tall Ship, which built the vessel.
“We want them to learn about the powers of nature, like the wind and the sea,” Olson said.
The Matthew Turner will sail on the bay at first, then out in the ocean, and then farther and farther, down the coast to Mexico, maybe out to Hawaii and the far Pacific, the way San Francisco-based sailing ships did years ago.
Olson is a sailor and a boat builder. He is 76 now, lean and gray. Olson and some of his associates have operated educational sailing programs on the bay for years. “Back in the 1980s, we founded The Call of the Sea, using vessels we had acquired,” he said.
But they wanted to expand their horizons. “We thought, ‘Why not build our own tall ship?’ ” Olson said. “It was my idea, I guess.”
For various reasons, the project languished. It was just an idea, a dream of a tall ship. Olson himself drifted away, but came back to the idea 15 or more years ago.
He spent some time in a Buddhist monastery, and one day the head lama asked him a question that changed his life. “He asked, ‘What would I regret if I died today?’ It hit me like a bolt of lightning,” Olson said. “I needed to go back to the tall ship project. I’d started it and I should continue it.”
Olson has been the public face of the project, the organizer, the man with the vision.
Educational Tall Ship had to raise over $6 million, build a constituency, find the proper materials — hundreds of board feet of Douglas fir and oak. A tall ship had to be designed based on old plans, but with modern touches, like an engine and electronics, worked in. Above all, skilled men and women had to be found to construct the vessel.
The organizers had to get permits from the city of Sausalito to build a ship in a vacant lot. The completed vessel would have to meet Coast Guard regulations to carry passengers. There were a thousand problems.
“We needed a community to build that boat,” Olson said. They needed skilled artisans who could work in wood, shipwrights, carpenters, even volunteers just to sweep up the sawdust or make lunch for workers.
At various times, he said, the project had about 1,000 volunteers. “We recorded 170,000 hours of volunteer time,” he said. If they were paid, even minimum wage, it would have cost over $2 million, he said.
Still, the project had to raise the money, more than $6 million — thousands of dollars in cash contributions and in-kind help. The nonprofit Conservation Fund donated Mendocino County timber for the hull planks.
“We transformed whole trees into a work of art,” said Neil Gibbs, who is working on the vessel’s deck houses.
Gibbs, 57, a Marin County real estate man and builder, came upon the Matthew Turner while he was walking his dog and ended up working as a volunteer twice a week. “It’s not every day you can do something like this,” he said.
John Lababie, 69, came to work on the ship after a casual encounter with Franz Baichl, a shipwright who was milling timber for the ship’s planks.
“I like boating and woodworking so I signed up,” Lababie said. He worked on the vessel a couple of times a week for over two years.
He was in the tent as crews were getting ready to move the vessel, and was impressed with how the finished hull looks. “A couple of weeks ago, they took away the staging, and there it was,” he said. “Look at that. That’s a real ship.”
The design is based on the Galilee, a two-masted brigantine, built by Matthew Turner in Benicia 124 years ago. The bones of the Galilee still exist: The stern is at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, the bow is in Benicia, and its ribs are visible at low tide in Sausalito, not far from where the new ship was built.
The Matthew Turner, which weighs 130 tons, will meet the water for the first time about 5 p.m. Saturday. On Friday it was moved out of its tent by Bigge Crane and Rigging Co., using a steel cradle and huge dollies. The distance from the tent to the deep water at the Army Corps of Engineers ramp is about 400 feet.
“It’s like moving a pyramid,” Olson said.
Saturday’s ceremonies will include blessings by a Christian minister, a Muslim imam, a representative of the American Indian community, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk.