POINT MAGU : Reservists Give Old Boat New Life

With a blown engine, 40 holes in its hull and a deck that gave way underfoot, the Old Salt was nothing more than an old wreck when reservists at Point Mugu Naval Air Station were assigned to restore the abandoned Coast Guard search-and-rescue boat.

“I didn’t expect it to ever float again, it was in such sorry shape,” said Wayne Hellstrom, 43, a reserve electrician who helped rewire the vessel. “There was some hope for it but not much.”

“It was pretty close to scrap-heap quality,” said Retired Chief Warrant Officer Frank VanLuvanee, 48, who rebuilt the diesel motor. “But we felt confident that we could get the engine overhauled, and it wouldn’t blow up when we tried to start it.”

After a year’s worth of weekend restoration, the 39-year-old vessel was recommissioned this month and docked at the Navy harbor in Port Hueneme.

And with its rebirth, 40 reserve sailors who had no boat to train on at the Navy airfield can now finally take to sea.

“These are sailors who normally would drill on ship, and there was nothing really for them to do,” said Chief Dan Rogers, in charge of surface training at the naval air reserve station. “It had been one of those essentially unsolved problems for quite a while.”

The 40-foot boat, left to rot on a Long Beach pier after a 15-year tour of duty with the Sea Cadets, now makes up a fleet of one for the Naval Air Reserves, Rogers said.

It was restored on a shoestring budget of $6,000 and salvaged parts from the air base and the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme. Rogers estimated its present value at $125,000.

“We’ve completed much of the initial training as far as maintenance and overhaul,” Rogers said. “Now we’ll get on to navigation, small-boat piloting and rules of the road.”

The reservists’ maintenance and overhaul training, however, is not finished. A 30-foot Coast Guard patrol boat that has been landlocked near a Quonset hut at the air base for more than five years--salvaged for the same type of project as the Old Salt and then abandoned--will be undergoing a similar overhaul.

And while the 30-year-old boat has already been disassembled, its restoration awaits procurement of a critical missing link. Said VanLuvanee: “We haven’t gotten hold of any (repair) manuals on it yet.”