DANA POINT : Donation Assures Pilgrim’s Purchase

A four-year effort by a nonprofit group to buy the Pilgrim sailing ship in Dana Point Harbor has succeeded with a $225,000 donation this week from one of its board members.

Claud Sympson, 77, of Anaheim said he donated the money so that the wooden boat could be purchased by Jan. 1. He is a 10-year board member of the Orange County Marine Institute, which operates sailor-training programs on the Pilgrim and a marine life education program.

“We could save money on the total cost by paying it off by the end of the year,” said Sympson, who served for nine years as the institute’s board chairman. “But it was impossible to get the money from the pledges we’ve been collecting, so I donated it.”

The institute has been soliciting donations since 1985 toward the $450,000 price tag to buy the replica of Richard Henry Dana’s vessel from a consortium in Salinas. Dana was a 19th-Century sailor, writer and lawyer who first mapped the cove now containing the pleasure boat harbor.

The Marine Institute was founded in 1979 and is jointly funded by the County Board of Supervisors, the Orange County Department of Education and the county’s four community colleges.