Tall Ships Taking Shape at L.A. Harbor

San Pedro craftsmen have reached the midway point in construction of twin tall ships designed to sail as Los Angeles’ floating ambassadors and character builders for youths.

But they are a year behind schedule and low on funds.

Sponsors are counting on philanthropic organizations to donate most of the $2.5 million still needed to complete the 90-foot-long vessels, patterned after classic 19th century windjammers. The construction combines traditional and modern techniques, rare jungle hardwoods and synthetic sails.

“This project is analogous to building the B-2 Stealth bomber, which had cost overruns up the kazoo,” conceded William B. “Pete” Lee, director of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, whose affiliates will operate the ships. “But I’m putting my reputation on the line that these vessels will be in the water by May 2002. If that means we have to work 24 hours a day, we will.”

That deadline is set so that at least one of the vessels can join the Tall Ships Challenge and Festival of Sail in September 2002--the largest cavalcade of classic sailing ships to navigate West Coast ports from Victoria, British Columbia, to San Diego.

The $5.6-million project has served as a “living exhibit” at the foot of 6th Street in San Pedro, where museum visitors study the progress. The skeletal hulls are perched side-by-side on scaffolding teeming with busy shipwrights.

Plans called for completion within one year, and a budget of about $3.5 million. But material prices have escalated since work began 20 months ago, and a series of changes in the design have added more costs.

Grass-roots fund-raising efforts collected about $3.1 million from corporate, individual and such government donors as the Port of Los Angeles. A donation of $20 came from a homeless man who camps out nearby.

Lee is wooing more potential donors, big and small. “We are confident that a good many more supporters will step up to the plate as the brigantines take shape,” he said.

The vessels’ keels were hewn from South American purple heart trees and slathered in fish oil to guard against the elements. The ribs are laminated white oak. The timbers are fastened with silicon-bronze bolts and wooden dowels impervious to termites and worms. The rigging combines Sitka spruce spars and Dacron sailcloth.

Striding through the yard, master shipbuilder Allen Rawl said, “We’re not foolishly wedded to strictly traditional methods.”

“With proper maintenance, these vessels should sail for hundreds of years,” he said. “They’ll go anywhere in the world there’s 12 feet of water.”

The vessels will be named Irving Johnson and Exy Johnson in honor of the Massachusetts couple who married in 1933 and then began a unique way of life: sharing their knowledge of the sea with young amateurs during seven circumnavigations over three decades.

Irving Johnson, who died in 1991, and his wife, Exy, who lives on a farm in Hadley, Mass., raised an extended family of hundreds of shipmates.

Exy, 92, donated a significant amount of money to the San Pedro project, as have some of her surviving shipmates.

Like the Johnsons’ ship, the Yankee, the vessels under construction are of brigantine design, with fore and aft sails, as well as square sails. On big blue water, they will be fast but manageable, which is essential for floating classrooms.

The two will be docked near the Maritime Museum and operated by its nonprofit affiliate, the Los Angeles Maritime Institute. That organization runs the Topsail Program, which takes local at-risk adolescents on character-enhancing voyages in the harbor and to Santa Catalina Island and beyond.

Next month, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who resides in San Pedro and represents the harbor communities, plans to ask the City Council to have the vessels declared the city’s official tall ships.

‘Appropriate Symbols of L.A.’s Waterfront’

Hahn was on vacation and unavailable for comment. Her spokesman Sean Fitzgerald said they would be “appropriate symbols of Los Angeles’ waterfront.”

The vessels’ performance at sea will reflect the skills imbued by the forest people who handpicked and sawed the purple heart tree; the master builder, 16 paid shipwrights and 15 volunteers who shaped the wood; the experience of their skippers; and the tens of thousands of youths who will live and work on them for generations.

For now, work continues under the hawk-eyed vigilance of Rawl, Lee and “Daisy,” a stray dog adopted by one of the shipwrights as the project mascot.

A native of Maryland, Rawl first delved into wooden ship construction as a carpenter on the Pride of Baltimore in 1976. Since then, he has helped build the Maryland Federalist, the Susan Constant in Jamestown, Va., and Delaware’s tall ship, the Kalmar Nyckel.

Rawl, who holds a U.S. Coast Guard master’s license, clambered six feet up an aluminum ladder, then squeezed between two massive wooden ribs to enter a large dusty opening connected to a smaller compartment that will house a 315-horsepower diesel engine.

“This is where the students will gather below deck,” he said, standing precariously on a makeshift floor of wobbly planks. “We’ll sleep 30 passengers and eight crew members. That sounds pretty big. But in a roiling sea, even ships like these get small in a hurry.”

A few yards away, a stream of sawdust gushed skyward as former photographer, pool cleaner and carnival barker John Joseph Sullivan, 55, of San Pedro sliced laminated blocks of white oak with a huge ship saw.

Before he was hired on as a brigantine project carpenter, the highlight of Sullivan’s life was a brief appearance in an early but key scene in the popular motion picture “Titanic.”

“I’m the guy standing on the 20-foot sailboat that gets jostled in the wake of the Titanic as it leaves port with the background music swelling,” he said. “That scene was a lot of fun. But what I’m doing now is even more rewarding.”

“And imagine this,” he added, “I’m helping build ships that’ll be sitting beautiful and proud long after I’m gone; like ancient marble statues in a park.”

Carpenter Ed Fitzpatrick, 54, who lives on a 36-foot wooden boat berthed nearby, has been with the brigantine project since it began in January 2000. His responsibilities have included cutting the keels.

“Today, I’m finishing a deck,” he said. “Next week, I’ll start building the rudders out of purple heart, which is a dense and durable wood with grain running in several directions.”

Obtaining the rare purple heart hardwood--chosen for its density, warmth and dependability--was an adventure in itself, said Capt. Jim Gladson, 71, who leads Topsail and will skipper the vessels.

The project needed two trees from which to cut a pair of 65-foot keels. But the major source, the forest people known as the Arwakans of Guyana, who have a hard-nosed attitude about squandering their natural resources, would agree to cut only one down.

After much haggling, the Arwakans cut both keels from one huge tree. Those were to be hauled by tramp steamer to Houston, then trucked to Los Angeles. But a hurricane came along in the Caribbean, so the steamer stayed put, then it broke down.

The lumber was moved onto another ship that made it to Houston only to have the shipment again held up after U.S. Department of Agriculture officials discovered a potentially worrisome moth on it.

The moth, it was later learned, had come from Texas, not Guyana. The purple heart lumber arrived months late in December 1999, but it was worth the wait.

The vessels will replace the Bill of Rights and the Swift of Ipswitch, two schooners operated by Topsail.

Running his fingers across a keel curved by steam at the work site, Gladson, a retired schoolteacher who founded Topsail in 1991, said, “There’s nothing romantic about what we’re doing here. There’s just no better way to do it.”

“We made a conscious decision early on not to give the kids a couple of white elephants,” he said.

Ironically, he added, although local interest in the project has been minimal, it has triggered excitement among tall ship enthusiasts in the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland and Japan.

“Representatives from some of these nations have asked if we would be interested in building a third vessel for them,” Gladson said. “I just tell them, ‘When we finish our own ships, we’ll sell you the plans.’ ”