San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Saga of 2 ships — 1 that sank, 1 about to sail
This is the first Sunday of summer, a good time for a sea story. This is about an old sailing vessel that nearly died twice, and a brand-new one that is almost ready for its maiden voyage.
The link between the two is the town of Sausalito, which beneath its T-shirt and souvenir shop exterior has a saltwater heart. Sausalito people saved one famous old ship and built another.
The old ship is the German pilot schooner Elbe No. 5, once called the Wander Bird, which spent nearly 60 years tied up in Sausalito. The new one is the schooner Matthew Turner, the first big wooden vessel built in the Bay Area in more than 85 years. The Matthew Turner, which is 132 feet long and has two masts, is expected to go into service by the first days of fall. It will be an educational ship designed to take children and the public out to learn about sailing and salt water.
Both vessels owe their lives to volunteers from Sausalito. Back in the 1970s and early ’80s, a couple of hundred Sausalito people got together to restore the Wander Bird, which had been rotting away on the Sausalito waterfront, and turned it back into a handsome sailing vessel, good as new.
Years later, another generation of volunteers built the Matthew Turner in a tent just south of Sausalito’s only supermarket. It took more than 150,000 hours of volunteer work to build the ship out of wood and outfit it, a true labor of love.
“There’s a parallel between these two vessels here,” said Alan Olson, who came up with the idea of building a tall ship. “Eighty percent of the volunteer work and volunteer money came from Sausalito,” he said. “That’s a big deal. This is a Sausalito vessel.”
That’s the same thing Harold Sommer, who once owned the Wander Bird, said on a June day in 1981, when a volunteer crew took the schooner out for its first sail in 40 years. “She is a Sausalito ship,” he said.
So it was a shock at a party this month to celebrate the Matthew Turner when word went around from table to table: The Wander Bird had sunk on the Elbe River in Germany that very day.
It’s a long story, and it is not quite over. The Wander Bird had at least four lives. It had been a pilot schooner in Germany, sailed to California, wasted away on the Sausalito waterfront, was restored to sail again, was shipped back to Germany, and sailed on the Elbe River again.
The ship began life in 1883 as a pilot schooner named Elbe No. 5.
It was in that service for over more than 40 years until it was replaced by more modern vessels.
The schooner — old even then — was purchased by an American sailor named Warwick “Skipper” Tomkins in 1929, renamed Wander Bird, and sailed on the Atlantic. In 1937, Tomkins and his family, including his 4-year-old son, Warwick Jr., sailed the Wander Bird around Cape Horn to California.
Tomkins did a lot of charter trips on the Pacific. When World War II broke out, the Wander Bird was laid up in Sausalito, rented out like a houseboat, like a floating apartment. The vessel was sadly neglected. When Sommer, a San Francisco Bay tugboat skipper, wanted to buy it and bring it back to life, he consulted his friend Karl Kortum, an expert in ship restoration. Kortum told him the truth. The Wander Bird, Kortum said, was “a wreck, a ship without hope.”
But Sommer thought the vessel had good bones and good prospects. And he had a lot of friends, who helped restore the ship. The crew was a who’s who of the Sausalito of another time — John Linderman, a deepwater sailor and master of the art of rigging ships; Ernest Gann, the author; Sterling Hayden, the actor; Spike Africa, who called himself the president of the Pacific Ocean; and hundreds of others.
The years went by. Sommer sold the ship and the Wander Bird sailed from Sausalito for the last time in 1998.
It spent some time in the Pacific Northwest, and in 2002, a German group called the Hamburg Maritime Foundation bought the vessel, restored its original name, and sailed it on the Elbe.
The Elbe No. 5 was heading back to Hamburg about noon on the first Saturday of June when it encountered the container ship Astrosprinter. Both vessels were on a collision course. The Astrosprinter sounded warning signals. But for some reason — it’s not clear why — the sailing schooner changed course directly in front of the bigger ship.
Badly damaged, the Elbe made it to shallow water, then sank. Several of the 43 aboard were hurt.
But that’s not the end of the story. Early last week, salvage operators pumped out the water and raised the old schooner from the bottom. There is still hope it may sail again after major repairs.
As the old Sausalito ship may be reborn once again, the new Sausalito ship — the Matthew Turner — is about to begin its seagoing life. It made a trial trip under power on Thursday, down Richardson Bay and up Raccoon Strait. “It was exciting to be aboard and feel the ship come alive,” Olson said.
Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: Twitter: @carlnoltesf