That Sinking Feeling : Rotting Schooner Symbolizes San Francisco’s Old Ship Collection, Beset by Lack of Funds and Neglect

Its massive wooden hull warped and rotting, the 1915 steam schooner Wapama lies in lonely exile here, across the bay from its half a dozen sister ships in the only national floating museum.

The 217-foot-long Wapama was once the centerpiece of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park on Fisherman’s Wharf. But years of neglect have reduced the Wapama to a battered symbol of all that has gone wrong since the ships came under the purview of the National Parks Service.

Charged by Congress in 1977 with caring for the Wapama and its sister ships, which include the three-masted, square-rigged Balclutha, the park service now says the steam schooner is too far gone to save and concedes that it has failed in its mission of preserving the ships.

“We’re going to have to abandon her,” acknowledged Bill Thomas, superintendent of the maritime park.

The park service is recommending that the Wapama be allowed to disintegrate until it becomes too dangerous for the public to visit, then destroyed.

To restore the ship, Thomas said, would cost about $17 million, “more than the cost of fixing everything else we have.” He warns that some of the park’s other ships may go the way of the Wapama unless Congress pumps about $15 million into restoring them in the next five years.

“I think you should save something,” Thomas said. “Nowhere else in the world could you find what we have here.”

“We’re dealing basically in triage at this point,” said Jamie White, acting historic ships manager at the maritime park. White, who specializes in rigging the tall-masted ships, said he hates giving up on any of them, even one as far gone as the Wapama. “I like to say that if I had wanted to sink ships, I would have joined the Navy,” he said. “But we have to be practical.”

The Wapama, White said, may have to be the ship the park sacrifices in order to save its sisters. Depending on whom you ask, the Wapama and the maritime park are victims of an insensitive Congress, an incompetent park service, or a nation too tightly squeezed for cash these days to care enough about preserving a priceless part of its heritage.

Karl Kortum, the retired sailor and historian credited with being the driving force behind collecting the ships in the 1950s, blames the park service. Bureaucrats and ships, Kortum says bitterly, just don’t mix.

Back in the 1970s “we had to turn to the feds, because they were the only source for the big money that had to support the ships if they were to stay alive down the years,” Kortum said. “But with the money came the National Park Service.”

Kortum has waged war against the park service and Thomas for years, and though the decision to abandon the Wapama sickens him, it is not surprising.

Some argue that saving the ships was the wrong-headed dream of a group of sailors, led by Kortum, whose passion for the vessels outweighed their common sense.

“Ships are funny things. People fall in love with them,” said George Flagherty, president of the board of directors of the National Maritime Museum Assn., the nonprofit group that founded the maritime park and continues to raise funds to support the ships.

“I think this idea of collecting the ships came from an emotional attachment to ships that didn’t have a spreadsheet involved in it,” Flagherty said. “Heck, there are some people who still insist we should be buying more ships.”

The park service readily admits that the ships are in bad shape, but says the fault lies with budget constraints, not its management.

“Did we fail? Yes,” said Denis Galvin, deputy director of the park service in Washington. “Not because of lack of expertise. You can buy expertise. We just don’t have the money. Give us the money and we’ll keep the ships alive.”

Back in 1950, when a group of San Francisco ship lovers founded what began as a city-run maritime museum, spreadsheets didn’t count as much. America, just done defeating the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II, was in an expansive mood. By 1959, the maritime association and the state of California had acquired five historic ships and opened them to the public at Hyde Street Pier on Fisherman’s Wharf.

For 20 years the maritime museum was run as a state park. But the state found upkeep of the ships too expensive, and in 1977 the museum became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a vast federal preserve that now includes the Presidio and the Marin County headlands. By then, two more ships had been added to the collection.

In 1988, in another effort to get more money flowing to the ships, they were broken off from the national recreation area and made a separate national historical park. But the tens of millions of dollars needed to renovate and maintain the huge, aging vessels never materialized.

“Congress seems to feel that California gets too much money,” Thomas said. He said the maritime park’s position was further weakened in 1994, when the Presidio became a separate national park and started claiming $25 million a year in park service funds for operating expenses.

Thomas said the top priorities now are saving the C.A. Thayer, a 100-year-old, three-masted schooner suffering from extensive rot, and finishing the restoration of the ferry Eureka, a steam-powered, paddle wheel vessel that is longer than the Wapama.

Although they are in bad shape, the Eureka and the Thayer are still floating, which is more than can be said of the Wapama.

In 1980, the Wapama, only survivor of a fleet of 225 steam schooners that served California between the 1880s and 1930s, became so unseaworthy that it was hauled out and bolted to a barge at a government pier in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

For years, tourists have been able to view the Wapama once a week, when rangers would open it up to no more than 10 visitors at a time, with no children allowed. But even those limited tours have been discontinued.

Today, the planks of the Wapama’s decks are so warped that the park service has stretched unsightly yellow tarps across the stern and bow in an effort to protect the ship from the ravages of rainwater seeping below decks.

The tarps, and strategically placed nets, have been unable to keep thousands of pigeons from infesting the ship. They flap eerily along the tarp-roofed main deck, filling the silence with their coos. The birds have so scarred the ship with their droppings that the park service has been forced to cancel tours of the vessel until it finds a way to get rid of the pigeons and clean up the Wapama.

“Could things have been done better?” Flagherty asks rhetorically. “Undoubtedly. Mistakes were made. This park has always been a kind of an orphan.”

Flagherty says the only option now is to save what can be saved.

“We have to concentrate our efforts on the Thayer and the Balclutha and the Eureka,” he said. The work of hundreds of volunteers has beautifully restored the scow schooner Alma and the tugboat Hercules, he noted.

If the Wapama is let go and another home can be found for the English steel tug Eppleton Hall, Flagherty said, he believes the park can find a way to preserve its remaining vessels.

“If we are going to be real about having a representative collection of historic vessels in that park, we are going to have to be real about what we can afford,” he said.