Landmark Newport Beach vessel finds new home at ocean bottom

Landmark Newport Beach vessel finds new home at ocean bottom Last week, the final remains of the riverboat replica Pride of Newport, stripped by dismantlers to little more than a barge-like hull, slipped beneath the waves off the Southern California Coast on its way to form an artificial habitat 2,400 feet below the surface.
   After being tugged to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-approved location halfway between Catalina Island and the mainland Thursday, two vessels from San Diego-based Pacific Tugboat Service began pumping water into the hull. The flooding, plus a shove from the tugboat, sent the 190-foot-long hull on its way. In less than a minute, the rusting shape disappeared beneath the calm water with little more than a splash.
   Built in 1963, the three-story-tall riverboat replica spent more than 20 years as the quayside home for several Newport Beach restaurants and eateries. The vessel was renamed the Pride of Newport in honor of its 1995 reopening as the home of the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum. Last year, after the museum lost the lease to its parking lot adjacent to the dock last year and moved to the Balboa Peninsula, the boat was dismantled. While most of the vessel's multistory superstructure was recycled, the U.S. Coast Guard deemed the remaining hull too unsafe to tow to a Port of Los Angeles scrap yard, for fear it would sink in the harbor, the busiest container port complex in the nation.
   Newport Maritime Museum Executive Director David Muller, who sipped champagne as he watched the hull slip beneath the water Thursday, told dailypilot.com that he had no tears to shed at the vessel's end.
   'To me the sad part was seeing it dismantled,' he told the news Web site. 'Watching it go down now, it's a barge.'