Maritime buffs work to save last steam schooner- San Francisco Examiner - November 25, 1996- by Donna Horowitz

Maritime buffs work to save last steam schooner
Donna Horowitz, SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER

Monday, November 25, 1996

Private committee will try to keep the Wapama from being demolished

SAUSALITO - Fearing a piece of history will be lost forever, two maritime buffs have come to the aid of the world's last wooden steam schooner.

The 215-foot Wapama, which once carried lumber and passengers along the Pacific Coast, has been slated for demolition by the U.S. Park Service.

Since learning of the ship's fate, Ed Zelinsky, a major downtown Tiburon property owner and history enthusiast, and retired Rear Adm. Thomas Patterson have formed a committee to save the Wapama, which has been sitting on a barge in Sausalito for the last 10 years.

"We're a maritime nation. We're surrounded by water," Paterson said. "We came from the sea. We can't let our ships disappear one by one."

For the last several months the two men have been drumming up support for the ship among sailors' unions, maritime historical groups, politicians - and even royalty.

Zelinsky made his case to Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace in London several weeks ago at a gathering of the World Ship Trust, a preservation group on which Zelinksy serves as vice president.

Zelinsky, who is also a member of the National Maritime Museum Association in San Francisco and vice chairman of the National Maritime Historical Society in New York, is adamant that the Wapama not be destroyed.

"It's the only wooden lumber schooner that's left. If it's gone, all we can show our children and grandchildren is a picture of what a wooden steam schooner used to look like," he said.


Iron men and wooden ships
"I like the fact that it represents an age here on the West Coast of iron men and wooden ships," Patterson said.

"They took these ships up along the Oregon shore and got the trunks of trees down into the ship. Then they brought it down the coast to places like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. A lot of this lumber built the West Coast."

The Sausalito City Council also has taken up the cause. It adopted a resolution Tuesday night that urges Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, to direct the Park Service to use the $1.5 million needed to demolish the ship for its preservation instead.

"All through my childhood the history of the Sausalito waterfront has disappeared because it simply sits there to rot," said Sausalito Vice Mayor George Stratigos.

"What Sausalito needs to do is to take a real proactive stance to preserve its heritage."

The Wapama was part of a fleet of 225 steam schooners built between the 1880s and 1920s to carry lumber and passengers up and down the Pacific Coast. From 1915 to 1930, the Wapama carried more than 1 million board-feet of lumber from the Northwest to San Francisco and points south - lumber that was used to build the cities along the coast.


Carried passengers and cargo
The Wapama later carried passengers between San Francisco and Southern California before being put into service ferrying passengers and cargo between Seattle and Alaska.

She hit a rock in Alaska in 1947, was sold for scrap two years later, and remained in Seattle for almost a decade.

California's Parks Department bought the Wapama in 1957. After extensive renovation, the ship was opened to the public at the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco in 1963. She was transferred to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1977, and put on a barge in 1980, first in Oakland, and then in Sausalito in 1986.

Bill Thomas, superintendent of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, which manages six other historic ships near Fisherman's Wharf, said the Parks Department can't afford the estimated $16 million it would take to renovate the Wapama. But he welcomes the public's support in saving the old schooner.

"If somebody can come by and love that ship and make it well, that's wonderful," he said.

Donations to restore the Wapama can be sent to the National Maritime Historical Society, P.O. Box 68, Peekskill, NY 10566.<