By Wes Starratt, Senior Editor

A prized treasure of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park and one of the last of the wooden schooners that carried lumber to build San Francisco,including many of its original structures and historic Victorian homes. Following the great earthquake of 1906, it was one of the schooners that brought the lumber needed to rebuild the city.

So great is the historic value of this magnificent old schooner that House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco was able to secure a total of $9.8 million for its restoration. Said Pelosi, “Renovation of this historic treasure, which has taught thousands of school children about our seafaring heritage, can finally begin–and not a moment too soon.”

Built in 1895 in Humboldt Bay (Eureka), California, of Douglas fir and named for Clarence A. Thayer, a lumber company executive, the C. A. Thayer is a three-masted sailing ship, 156 feet in deck length, with a beam of 36 feet, and a depth of 11 feet. In her first life, she carried some 575,000 board feet of lumber below deck and stacked up to 10 ft high on deck. By 1912, damage from a heavy storm and competition from steam power pushed her into her second career, hauling boats and salt to Alaska and returning with salted salmon. World War I also saw her carrying wood to Australia and returning to the West Coast with coal. During the ship’s next life, from 1925 to 1930, she was involved in cod fishing in the Bering Sea. Later, a victim of the depression, she was layedup in Lake Union, Seattle, for several years before the U.S. Army put her to work as an ammunition barge during World War II. Later, she returned to cod fishing. She made her final voyage in 1950, as the last commercial sailing ship to operate on the Pacific Coast, after a career that ranged from a lumber schooner, to the salt-salmon trade, to cod fishing, and an ammo carrier along the way.

The C. A. Thayer was purchased by the State of California in 1957. After extensive repairs, she was moored at the Hyde Street Pier of San Francisco Maritime Museum and opened to the public in 1963. The museum has since become the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. The park, with its historic ships and museum, draws almost a half-million visitors every year from throughout the world and is a key landmark of San Francisco.

Lynn Cullivan of the National Park Service noted, “We have an environmental living program whereby kids stay over night on the Thayer, pretend that it is the day after the 1906 Earthquake, and determine how they can sail up the coast and get timber to help rebuild the city. And that is really what happened to the Thayer and makes her so special.

“This ship represents the way that California was built. Our pioneers received very little wood and building material from the East Coast. So, San Francisco wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the lumber that was brought down the coast on the Thayer and the other schooners.”

In 1984, the Thayer was designated a National Historic Landmark. And by 1993, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the Thayer on the list of the “Most Endangered Historic Places,” since it had suffered “massive deterioration through rot in its structural timbers and advanced decay of its fastenings.”

The Restoration
The C. A. Thayer’s restoration had to be done within the confines of the greater San Francisco Bay, since the ship was not sufficiently seaworthy to face the open seas. The Bay Area has a number of boat yards for maintaining pleasure craft that are too small to be considered for the Thayer. There is also the massive San Francisco Drydock, which provides repair and maintenance services for the largest cruise liners operating on the coast.

Bay Ship & Yacht was founded by Bill Elliott, who developed a specialty in the construction and repair of wooden ships. That was exactly the kind of expertise needed for the restoration the C. A. Thayer, and last year the National Park Service awarded them restoration contract of the Thayer.

We were able to talk with Bill Elliott, who was obviously elated at receiving the contract for the Thayer. He explained, “Our firm started back about 1977, maintaining wooden fishing boats. We moved into overhauling Navy minesweepers that were made of wood, and even built a replica of a War of 1812 brig for the town of Erie, PA, where she now serves as a training ship, sailing around the Great Lakes.

“We have been at our present location in Alameda for about ten years where we are drydocking commercial vessels and tour boats, as well as small exploration-type cruise ships. We maintain just about all of the ferry boats on the bay. We have also dry-docked and worked on all of the vessels of the National Park Service’s fleet at the Hyde Street Pier, including a major rebuilding of the “Alma” about 12 years ago and an overhaul of the big steel-hulled, square-rigger, the “Balclutha.”
Turning to the Thayer, Elliott explained that, “Early last December, we gently nudged the Thayer by tug from San Francisco and docked her at one of our piers where we removed the mast, pulled the ballast out of her hull, and removed most of her equipment and gear.”

That was the easy part. The two-year rebuilding of the ship will take place in a nearby seaplane hangar at the former Alameda Naval Air Station. The first major problem was getting the ship onto dollies that could be rolled into the hangar. The problem was not unlike moving a building from one location to another, only a little more complex, since the ship was in the water.

The shipyard’s floating drydock provided the solution by serving as an elevator to put the vessel onto a specially built steel platform that could be carried on 18 dollies, each resting on eight wheels, and forming a hydraulically-connected unit with 144 wheels. This unit would be rolled from the drydock onto a barge that would be towed to the seaplane lagoon of the former Air Base and then rolled up the tarmac into the hangar. It sounds complicated; so, we approached the shipyard’s naval architect Joel Welter for a further explanation:

Basically, we first erected a steel platform cradle in our drydock. It was designed so that a unit of 18 eight-wheel dollies with hydraulic jacks could be rolled under it. Next, we lowered the drydock in the water, floated the ship into the drydock, and sent divers down to center the keel on the platform. Then, we raised the drydock. When it was out of the water, we secured the barge to the drydock, and rolled in hydraulic jacks on eighteen 50-ton dollies, each on eight wheels. The dollies were securely fitted under the platform. Then, we used the jacks on the dollies to raise the platform with the attached ship so that the full weight of the ship rested on the eighteen dollies, which were connected together by a central hydraulic system so that they functioned as a single unit. Next, the ship was very carefully rolled from the drydock onto the barge on the 144-wheel dolly propelled by motors on several of the dollies.

The delicate movement of the cradled Thayer from the drydock to the barge took place early in January in a condition of zero wake as ship movement in the estuary came to a standstill. At hightide on Tuesday morning, January 13th, the barge with the Thayer aboard was delicately towed around Alameda Point to the seaplane lagoon. Then, the unit was rolled up the tarmac and into the seaplane hangar as photographers flashed pictures.

Now that the ship is in the hangar, Elliott explained that, “We will first have to do a lot of documentation. Within two weeks, we will start some of the disassembly of the deck, then we will move down the sides, and by the end of March, we think that we will have most of the planking removed from the hull. Next, we will do a complete survey of the structure, and determine how much has to be replaced. At that point, we will start replacing the framing and rebuilding the centerline timbers, as needed. Then, we will ‘replank’ her from top to bottom and on the sides and the deck. We expect that there will be quite a bit left from the old ship, since we think that there is a lot of good planking on the bottom, but we are expecting something like an 80 percent replacement. It is a slow process, and the entire project is expected to take about two years.”