By Neil Farrell
There’s been more activity in the past couple of years than the previous 23 years he’s been working on it, said Larry Newland, president of the Central Coast Maritime Museum Association. And thanks to a big check from the Morro Bay Harbor Festival, that forward momentum can continue.
Harbor Fest board members met with CCMMA members Dec. 5 at the Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle Avalon, which the Museum Association has on display in the Front Street parking lot, to swap stories, give updates on the progress and to accept a $10,000 donation.
That money was culled from the 2015 Harbor Festival, which was held Oct. 3 on the Embarcadero. The festival had a new look, new location and new emphasis. Instead of relying on hundreds of volunteers representing numerous non profits, and then paying each a small amount in compensation, the festival used very few volunteers and focused its charitable giving on just one organization — the Maritime Museum. Out-going president John Solu said, “Thank you for all you do in this town,” summing up the feelings of the board.
Newland explained that work on establishing a small, temporary museum is well underway with CCMMA now working to raise an estimated $30,000 to pay for a portable building (about the size of a 2-car garage), to be erected in the City’s so-called Triangle lot at the end of Front Street.
The City already moved and rebuilt the entrance to the gravel parking lot, which it acquired from Dynegy, and poured a couple of slabs. One will have the building on it and the other the Avalon, which will be set to rest on a specially made trailer.
The CCMMA also is working on a steel cradle for the historic tugboat Alma, which has been painstakingly refurbished, painted and looks almost new, as she sits on a cradle in the Harbor Department’s storage yard awaiting her debut in public.
The Alma played a key role in the rescue of the crew of the doomed oil tanker Montebello. That ship, which had just filled its tanks at Port San Luis and was motoring north to refineries in the Bay Area, was struck by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine on Dec. 23, 1941 and sank, just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in the first Japanese attack on the U.S. mainland. (See: www.cambriahistoricalsociety.com/history_montebello for more on the incident.)
It was donated to the Museum by the Sylvester Family, which operated it for decades as a tanker escort for Chevron’s Estero Marine Terminal, helping tankers into position to load oil. The Alma had pretty much been put out to pasture for many years, replaced by two much larger tugs, the Richard and Clive, in the final years of the terminal’s operations, which ceased in 1999.
The Museum has the Avalon, the Alma and a Coast Guard rollover boat for static displays, as well as numerous other marine artifacts to display inside the new building.
In the photo are members of the CCMMA’s board of directors and Harbor Festival Board members. Photo by Neil Farrell
