The first 4 inches of bend were straightened out of the hull as she settled onto the blocks. This was the first real bit of restoration. The blocks were set to accommodate 12 inches of hog, 4 inches fewer than the 16 inches actually measured in her keel. Divers helped to spot the keel directly on the centerline blocking, and locate it precisely fore and aft. With the cradle finished and sitting in the dry dock, the dock was flooded and the hull was towed in. This massive pallet of steel I-beams would hold the hull, braced with steel struts, throughout the rebuilding process. A steel cradle was welded together on the floor of the Bay Ship dry dock. While the Thayer was being stripped and lightened, preparations for hauling her out began. Our assumption was that she was best presented as a representative of the West Coast lumber fleet, seen as her designer and builder had intended. One of our objectives in the rebuild was to return the vessel to her as-built configuration, reversing changes made to her deck, cargo hatches, and deckhouse over the years. The Thayer was profoundly hogged, and something had to be done.

Designed with relatively shallow hulls to cope with the offshore sandbars of West Coast ports, the schooners had less effective longitudinal girder strength than the deeper, narrower hulls of the East Coast square-riggers. Any large wooden hull will hog to some extent, but West Coast schooners like the Thayer are particularly prone to hog. Over the years, the weight differential takes its toll and the bow and stern sag. The ends, as they narrow at the bow and stern, have less buoyancy than the wider midbody, and are effectively heavier. Hogging occurs when the ends of the hull droop down in relation to its midpoint, bending the keel into an arc. The softening of the Thayer’s frame timbers left her ever more susceptible to hogging, another killer of traditional wooden vessels. When rainwater finally seeps into the structure, the frames stay wet and rot takes hold.

The traditional structure of a wooden ship, with the frames encased between the outer hull planking and the inner ceiling planking, is an ideal breeding ground for rot. Douglas fir is a lovely shipbuilding timber, but it is a softwood and is famously susceptible to rot. The end-point is not a new vessel duplicating the original, but rather the original renewed, with the strength to float for another century.Īs early as the late 1970s, when the National Park Service took over the Thayer, her hull was fatally weakened with dry rot in the upper frame timbers. This is easily the largest wooden merchant shipbuilding project completed in the United States since the 1920s. The Thayer, 168 feet long on deck and registered at 452 gross tons, will emerge with more than 85 percent of her hull fabric replaced. Thayer is without precedent in the history of maritime preservation. The scale of the work on the West Coast lumber schooner C.A.

Fatally missing blocks and items