Maritime Museum Near Completion

Picture a warm summer day at Channel Islands Harbor. In the square at Fisherman’s Wharf, in front of the Maritime Museum in Oxnard, a young boat builder is splitting planks for a Chumash canoe. Another is readying tar to seal the hull.

Inside, visitors peek into glass cases housing replicas of the H.M.S. Bounty, the Mayflower, famous galleons and well-armed frigates. Others study the brush lines of 19th-Century maritime art. Still others punch into museum computers, playing with ship-design programs.

“Dynamic,” says Frank Crane, Maritime Museum executive director. The new museum, scheduled to open this summer, will be ever-changing. Outdoors, it will host shipbuilding demonstrations; indoors, it will house maritime art, ship models, computers, a library and video displays.

Twenty-five years after it was conceived, the museum, at Channel Islands Boulevard and Victoria Avenue, is nearing reality. It will be housed in a 5,000-square-foot building donated by Martin V. (Bud) Smith, the owner of Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, on a site leased at $1 a year for 50 years by the county.

The ballast of the museum’s collection is already on board, including a $500,000 historical ship model collection, a maritime art collection valued at $5 million and a 1,000-book library, all on loan from Harry L. Nelson Jr., owner of Almar Ltd., whose assets include eight West Coast marinas.

The Ventura County Parks and Harbor Foundation, a nonprofit corporation formed in 1979, was selected by Ventura County to oversee the museum. Fund raising is in progress toward a projected 1989-92 budget of $4 million, with more than $250,000 now in hand.

What will make the museum unique is its “ability not to be weighed down by the past,” said Michael Koutnik, owner of the Whale’s Tail Restaurant and a museum board member. The museum’s mission statement spells out its commitment to sailing “past, present and future.”

“We will use computers to show how boats are designed,” Crane said. Today’s designers use computer images to “build” new concepts. The Killer Wasp, a futuristic vessel that is now only an image on a computer screen, although an exciting one, incorporates hydrofoil capabilities with a revolutionary seven-winged sailing device, Crane said. It’s expected to run at 63 knots in a 25-knot wind.

The Maritime Museum will also display photographs and papers from the latest Stanford University meeting of Sail Tech, a think tank that meets biannually to compare research on the latest developments in sailing.

And for sailing buffs, the museum will feature videos of sailboat races, with special emphasis on those races in season, focusing on the America’s Cup, for example, when that race is running.

“We see possibilities of getting involved with the Ventura County Ocean Racing Circuit too,” Crane said. “One of our charges is to show what is going on today, what it is like to go cruising, what it’s like to race, to get a feeling of what you can do.”