Rare California cargo schooner returns home

Rare California cargo schooner returns home After a $14-million, three-year rebuilding job, the 112-year-old sailing schooner 'C.A. Thayer' received a welcome home party Thursday at the Maritime National Park in San Francisco.
   As a cargo hauler, the 'Thayer' plied the trade routes along the West Coast at the turn of the 20th century, carrying lumber that helped build San Francisco, Oakland and other California cities.
   Between the end of the Civil War and the World War I, the shipyards of San Francisco Bay, Humboldt Bay, Coos Bay, Grays Harbor and Puget Sound had launched some 80 barkentines, 300 three- and four-masted schooners, and upwards of 500 two-masted schooners. The 'Thayer' is one of only two known survivors from this massive fleet, the other being the 'Wawona,' now docked in Seattle's Northwest Seaport and under long-term restoration.
   The 'Thayer,' like the 'Wawona,' was built at Fairhaven, a small town near Eureka in Humboldt County. The 'Thayer' and 'Wawona' were two of the 123 three-masted sailing schooners built by the famed master shipbuilder Hans Bendixsen. After years as a lumber ship and a later career as a cod-fishing vessel in Alaska, the 'Thayer' became a museum ship in 1957.
   The National Parks Service restoration of the 'Thayer,' at an airplane hangar in Alameda, began in 2004 and required replacement of nearly 80 percent of the vessel's timbers with matching wood.