Anchors Aweigh for Catalina : Round-Trip Passenger Vessel Voyages Between San Diego and the Island Scheduled to Begin Next Week

Long-awaited ferry service between San Diego and Santa Catalina Island--which appeared scuttled for the year--will be launched after all, starting a week from today.

The voyage will take 3 hours each way with a $39 round-trip fare. Catalina Island is roughly 72 miles from San Diego.

Official announcement of the service is set for Thursday, when local government representatives--including members of the San Diego Cruise Industry Consortium--will join with California Cruisin’ officials in providing details. California Cruisin’ was one of two companies that in September announced plans to begin service between the island and San Diego. However, financial difficulties, caused mostly by unexpected repairs to a vessel, cast California Cruisin’s plans into doubt and moved its owners to sell the company.

As late as last month, negotiations between the firm and prospective buyer Robert Giersdorf, a Seattle-based cruise line owner, were bogged down. But the obstacles were surmounted and Giersdorf bought majority interest in the company, which will retain its name, according to Charles (Chip) Boyd, 46, former president of California Cruisin’ and, under the new ownership, its general manager.

Boyd declined Tuesday to give the purchase price or the worth of the company. Giersdorf was unavailable for comment, as was Pete Donau, a Giersdorf official who is now California Cruisin’ vice president.

“The negotiations were long and hard,” said Boyd as he sat in the company’s offices at 1302 Kettner Blvd., where activity had been dormant for several months. The turnaround came so fast that telephone calls to the office Tuesday were met with an out-of-service recording.

Boyd said that will change by Thursday, when the firm will begin accepting reservations for seats on its 212-passenger Spirit of Alderbrook, a 2-year-old, $1.5 million vessel previously used for trips between Seattle and the Alderbrook Inn on Washington’s Olympic peninsula.

Approvals from the state Public Utilities Commission and the Coast Guard have been obtained and the vessel has undergone sea trials, he said.

Boyd had said in September that he wanted to inaugurate the service by the end of October using a boat named the Klondike. On Tuesday, he explained that unexpected difficulties in repairing that vessel, which needed substantial rewelding, had caused long delays and soaked up much of the company’s money.

“What we thought was going to be a five-day job turned out to take six or eight weeks to complete,” he said.

The Spirit of Adlerbrook will leave San Diego daily at 7 a.m. from the city’s B Street Pier Cruise Terminal and depart on its return trip from Avalon at 6 p.m. Boyd said that sometime in late summer the company hopes to add a larger, 300-plus passenger vessel on the Catalina run and expand service to twice a day.

The Spirit of Alderbrook will have a bar, sell snack foods and probably have television.

By starting service this month, California Cruisin’ gains a year’s head start on competitor Catalina Cruises of San Pedro, the major ferry service operator in Southern California, which carries about 70% of the 1 million tourists who visit Catalina annually. It is also the company that was heavily courted by the San Diego Cruise Industry Consortium.

The company had planned to start San Diego-to-Catalina service this summer but scrapped plans last month because a new high-speed boat capable of making the trip in less than three hours could not be built in time. Catalina Cruises now expects to begin service in June, 1988.

Terry Koenig, general manager of Catalina Cruises, said in an interview with The Times last month that the company was fearful that a 3 1/2- to 4-hour boat ride was too long.

“We were afraid that people wouldn’t like such a long ride,” he said, “and that that would take us out of the market forever.”