A century ago hundreds of schooners sailed the West Coast, hauling lumber and later fish to San Francisco. One of the few schooners still in existence, the CA Thayer, was towed into the Estuary Tuesday to begin a two-year $9.6 million overhaul.

Today, her wood is rotten and damage from woodworms is threatening her ability to float. Her steering gear is rusted and frozen and she doesn’t even have a rudder. She will be stripped, very carefully, to her skeleton, then rebuilt to historical accuracy and sail-ability. Every piece of the 219-foot craft will be carefully documented. Every cleat and bolt will be tagged and photographed from multiple angles to preserve the record of the ship as she is and the restoration project. “At least 80 percent of the ship has to be replaced,” said Eric Balderston, who is doing the documentation for Bay Ship & Yacht, the Alameda shipyard performing the work. He will measure each piece of the wooden boat —the decking, planking and structural members — so the replacement exactly matches the original. It will be a painstaking job, documenting, dismantling and rebuilding the 1895-built ship.

“As we peel back the layers of the onion we will get a good idea of how ships were built 100 years ago,” said Bay Ship & Yacht project manager Steve Baca. “The biggest challenge is that (wooden ship building) is something that hasn’t been done in a generation,” said Lynn Cullivan, spokesman for the San Francisco’s Maritime National Historical Park, where the CA Thayer has been on display since 1963. “We are re-teaching a generation of workmen on how to use old techniques and forcing people to pass them on. It’s fun but hard.” Getting wood of the right size and density for the job is also a challenge, Cullivan said. The Department of Defense has been a good source of contacts, he said. The most difficult pieces are the “knees,” giant L-brackets shaped from the root of a Douglas fir. “Their grain follows the curve (of the knee) and keeps the boat from twisting,” Balderston said. “They cost about $5,000 each to replace.

The CA Thayer will be docked at Bay Ship & Yacht, just east of the Main Street Ferry Terminal for about a month. Then she will be taken by barge around Alameda Point to the Seaplane Lagoon where the remainder of the work will be done inside a hangar. The CA Thayer has been remodeled over the years to serve various purposes. The park service wants her restored to her earliest configuration — for hauling lumber — except the bunks in the forward hold, which date from her fishing years, will be kept for overnight visits by school groups.

She was built by Hans Ditlev Bendixsen, a native of Denmark, in Fairhaven, across the bay from Eureka, Calif. and named for Clarence A. Thayer, a partner in the San Francisco-based E.K. Wood Lumber Company. (An interesting local aside: After Bendixsen died in 1902, his widow Emma married again and settled in Alameda.) The CA Thayer has two hatches on her aft, where lumber was loaded into her hold. She carried a half-million board feet of lumber, half of it in the hold, the remainder chained on the deck. The same eight- or nine-member crew loaded the wood and sailed the ship. The CA Thayer’s captain had it easy compared with the crew. He had two small rooms, paneled in carved wood, a separate galley, a wood-burning stove where all meals were cooked and a head with a door that closed. The crew, one presumes, did their business overboard. The CA Thayer retired from lumber hauling in 1912, a victim of both storm damage and the rise of steam power. That was the start of a new career. Each spring from 1912 to 1924 she took small fishing boats, barrel staves and salt to Alaska and returned with salted salmon at the end of summer. During World War I she made off-season voyages to Australia, hauling lumber outbound and returning with coal or copra. >From 1925 to 1930 she made cod fishing trips from Washington to the Bering Strait.

The US Army purchased the Thayer after a decade-long lay-up during the Depression. The Army removed her masts and used her as an ammunition barge. After the war, her former owner bought her back, restored her masts and returned her to fishing. She made her final voyage in 1950 and entered the history books as the last commercial sailing vessel on the West Coast. She was designated a national historic landmark in 1984.

Reach reporter Susan Fuller at (925) 748-1659 or sfuller@cctimes.com.

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