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Making it shipshape

By Denis Cuff

dcuff@bayareanewsgroup.com

SAN FRANCISCO — The schooner C.A. Thayer sailed the West Coast 120 years ago to deliver lumber from the vast forests of the Northwest to fuel the growth of California’s cities.

The era is long gone, but the Thayer — the last of its kind — is making a comeback, with plans for it to sail again on the San Francisco Bay with its giant sheets billowing in the wind.

In the next-to-last phase of its $14 million-plus restoration by the National Park Service, the Thayer was towed Thursday from its national maritime park dock in San Francisco to an Alameda shipyard for installation of three, 120-foottall wooden masts.

The 219-foot wooden ship returns

Workers clear off the deck Tuesday on the 1895 C.A. Thayer at the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. National Park Service workers are getting the ship ready for a trip to the Bay Ship & Yacht Co. in Alameda to have three masts installed.

LAURA A. ODA/STAFF

A 1912 image of the lumber schooner C. A. Thayer.

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, SAN FRANCISCO MARITIME

The C.A. Thayer, a former lumber schooner undergoing a $14 million restoration, arrives at a shipyard in Alameda on Thursday.

KRISTOPHER SKINNER/STAFF

early next year to its San Francisco dock west of Fisherman’s Wharf, where crews will install rigging.

“When we’re finished, we will have a nearly brandnew, 1800s lumber schooner,” said Jeff Morris, the historical ships manager at the San Francisco National Maritime Historical Park. “I would love to take it sailing. But there are many details and issues to be worked out before we can take this national historical landmark out sailing.”

No one, he said, wants to break an 1895 national treasure that will have taken 13 years to restore when the job is complete next year.

“Our main mission is preserving this schooner for future generations,” Morris said. “But I think there is a way — carefully — it can sail again.”

Most of the 500 or so West Coast lumber schooners operating between the 1860s and early 1900s lasted about 20 years before wearing out. Steam-powered ships made them obsolete.

The Thayer, named for a lumber company owner, averted a death by rot or salvage by finding multiple lives as a salmon- and cod-fishing boat after its lumber-hauling career from 1895 to 1912.

The Thayer sailed until 1950, becoming the last commercial sailing schooner on the West Coast.

“It’s the last lumber schooner from its time,” said Lynn Cullivan, a National Park Service spokesman for the maritime historical park. “It’s an important landmark of the history of the West Coast. There are probably many old buildings in San Francisco with lumber that was brought here by the Thayer.”

The second-to-last West Coast lumber schooner, the Wawona, was salvaged in Seattle in 2009 after a campaign to maintain it ran out of money.

Saving the Thayer isn’t easy or cheap. Its hull was rebuilt almost piece by piece from 2003 to 2006, with about 80 percent of the wood replaced with 340,000 board feet of Douglas fir timber.

An original mast for a lumber schooner in the 1800s would have been milled from a single tall straight tree. But finding a tree like it in modern forests would be extremely difficult, Morris said.

Laminated masts for the Thayer were built by Sentinel Structures, a company in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, that has supplied parts for many historic ship restorations.

Crews in the coming weeks will cut three holes in the Thayer’s deck and install the masts with cranes at the Bay Ship and Yacht dry dock in Alameda.

San Francisco Maritime National Park Association, a nonprofit group, donated the money to buy new sails.

“We think the restoration will put her in shape to last another 100 years,” Morris said. “It’s part of history we want to keep.” Contact Denis Cuff at 925943-8267. Follow him at Twitter.com/deniscuff.

Jeff Morris and Lynn Cullivan, of the National Park Service, talk Tuesday below the decks of the C.A. Thayer at the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. The schooner’s rehab, a 13-year job, continues in Alameda, where three masts will be installed.

LAURA A. ODA/STAFF PHOTOS

National Park Service workers clean up from the restoration work on the aft deckhouse on the C.A. Thayer. Officials hope the historic schooner will one day sail again on the bay.

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