Kodiak Maritime Museum

Boat Repair Course Begins

2012-02-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Brian Johnson welcomed six volunteers to the Basic Boat Repair Course at Kodiak College on Saturday, February 18, with a demonstration involving boatbuilding tools and an on site discussion of what the course will involve.

Beginning tomorrow night, Brian will teach a hands-on course on Tuesday and Thursday nights at the College, from 7-10 p.m. The course is free, and will run from now until the boat recinstruction is finished in mid- May. If you'd like to get involved yourself, please contact the museum or come down to the work site at the College to see what's going on.

The Work Begins

2012-02-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

Brian Johnson of Ocean Bay Marine and Don Corwin of West Wind Woodworking began setting things up around the Thelma C this week by building a work bench and access stairs to the deck of the boat. Their next task is to remove the name "Marina D," - the name the last owner gave the boat- and paint its original name back on.

Brian will also be hosting an orientation meeting for interested community volunteers at 10 am on Saturday February 18, in Room 106 at the College. If you've ever wanted to learn about wooden boat construction, from paint chipping to timber shaping and rib construction, come on down and sign up. No previous experience is necessary. The museum anticipates three months of work to get the boat ready for display, but volunteers will be encouraged to work on the project as their schedules allow.

Work Shed Goes Up Over Thelma C

2012-01-21T12:30:00.000-08:00

Work shed going up over the Thelma C at Kodiak College

Despite a snowstorm and temps in the 20s, Cache Seel and his men, Brian Stokes and Brian "Peewee" Dougherty, framed up the workshed over the Thelma C over the past few days at Kodiak College. They're hoping now for a calm day to pull plastic sheathing over the wooden frame and then heat gun it to shrink it to the frame. Once that's done, they'll install some doors on the bow end of the shed and put in a few plexiglass windows on the parking lot side, so visitors can watch as Brian Johnson and his crew do the actual rebuild of the boat.

Brian plans to start work on February 15, with Don Corwin and a crew of volunteers. Brian has four decades of woden boat repair work in his resume, and rebuilt the Thelma once before, in 1994. Don, of North Wind Woodworking is an expert on antique wood construction techniques.He spent the past three summers rebuilding the windows on the Baranov Museum. He's coming over from his hometown of Skagway to help out,

Brian Stokes framking up the work shed on Friday

In the meantime, we're looking for people who want to learn the ins and outs of wooden boat repair by working on the Thelma C. If this is something you've always wanted to learn, now's your chance. We'll supply the tools, the expertise, and the coffee. Please contact the museum for more information, at 486-0384, or info@kodiakmaritimemuseum.org

KMMAnnual Meeting Friday, January 20, 2012

2012-01-20T11:24:00.000-08:00

RV Akademik Sergey Vavilov

KMM’s 2012 Annual Meeting will be held at 7 p.m., Friday, January 20, in Room 106 at Kodiak College. The meeting will feature a slideshow and talk by Linda Freed and Alan Schmidt on their recent trip to Antarctica. Freed and Schmidt sailed from December 14th to January 1st aboard the R/V Akademik Sergey Vavilov, a Russian research vessel chartered by Quark Expeditions. The voyage began in Ushuaia, Terra del Fuego, Argentina, and continued to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island, the South Orkney Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. The ship returned to Argentina via the Drake Passage.

Earnest Shackleton's grave,
Gryytviken, South Georgia Island

Highlights of the trip included skiing on the Antarctic Peninsula, encountering vast penguin and seal colonies, and landings at the Falkland Islands and Elephant Island. Elephant Island was made famous by Earnest Shackleton and his men in 1916 when they sailed there in a small boat after losing their ship, the Endurance, in the Antarctic pack ice and failing in their attempt to reach the South Pole.

The Antarctic talk will be preceded by a brief Kodiak Maritime Museum business meeting including an update on the status of the Thelma C project and the museum’s building plans, an annual report, and election of board officers. Refreshments will be served and museum memberships can be renewed or purchased at the door. Contact KMM at 486-0384 or info@kodiakmaritimemuseum.org for more information.

Marine Architect Bill Garden’s Thelma C Ship’s Plans at Mystic Seaport

2012-01-12T16:40:00.000-08:00

Bill Garden Boats,
Image: Mystic Seaport

After some research, we’ve learned that the Thelma C was designed by legendary marine architect Bill Garden in the early 1960s. Bill began his career just before World War II, designing sailboats, which his friend Dave LeClerq built at his Commercial Marine boatyard on Seattle’s Portage Bay, between Lake Union and Lake Washington. In 1942, Bill was drafted and sent to the U.S. Navy Base at Adak Island in the Aleutians, where the U.S. Navy put him to work in their shipyard, a job he evidently enjoyed. After the war, Bill and Dave collaborated again on hundreds of boat projects for more than fifty years, including sailboats, yachts, work boats and fishing boats. More information about Bill Garden can be found here: http://library.mysticseaport.org/manuscripts/Garden.cfm

Bill Garden
Photo: Mystic Seaport

Bill Garden "Seine Boat Plan, November 1961"
Bill Garden Collection, Mystic Seaport

If we have it right, the Thelma C was constructed from Bill Garden's “Seine Boat,” design of November 1961, labeled “Commercial Marine Construction Company Stock 1962 Model.” Online research found this plan at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, where a friend of KMM was able to go in December and, with the help of staff researchers there, look at their collection of Bill Garden ship’s plans. This photo is of the likeliest Thelma plan, but we are waiting for digital or paper copies to make a definitive determination.

The ship’s plans will be used by a graphic artist to render a computer drawing of the finished exhibit on the harbor site, and the project engineers may also use them to design the exhibit cradle for the boat. Eventually, the plans will be displayed on a permanent interpretive panel near the boat, or in the multi-media cell phone tour which will accompany the exhibit.

Thelma C At Kodiak College

2012-01-04T18:15:00.000-08:00

Cache Seel checking out the boat.

Cache Seel stopped by the Thelma C this morning to scope out the site for a temporary building around the boat. Cache will be putting up the building in a week or two so we can do the restoration work inside a covered and heated workspace. The structure will be a simple wood frame box with a peaked roof and sheathed with plastic shrink wrapping- the same material that’s presently shrunk around the boat itself. You may have seen other similar temporary structures around boats down at Fuller’s Boatyard.

The Thelma C at Kodiak College

In the meantime, we’re looking for a few good men and women who’d like to volunteer to help put it up- it should only take a day or two. If you think you might be one of those people, please give the museum a call at 486-0384 or email info@kodiakmaritimemuseum.org.

Thelma C update 12-30-2011

2011-12-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

Undated photo of the Thelma C

We are gearing up to restore a 36 foot wooden salmon seine vessel, the Thelma C, which the museum acquired from Mark Thomas, its last fisherman owner, in 2006. KMM received a $298,000 grant earlier this year from the Alaska Legislature to restore the boat and build an exhibit around it.

The Thelma C was designed by famed marine architect Bill Garden and built in 1965 at Commercial Marine in Seattle for fisherman Ken Christoffersen. Ken lost his original boat in the tsunami in Valdez following the Great Alaskan Earthquake of March 27, 1964, but he took advantage of a Federal low interest disaster relief loan program to build the Thelma C, named after his wife, to get back on the water. As we understand it here at the museum, Ken fished the boat for decades, mostly out of Valdez, but also in Chignik and occasionally out of Kodiak. One of the aims of the project is to get a more detailed history of the boat, hopefully from Ken’s family and people who fished on the boat. Ken himself passed away in 2005.

Proposed location of Thelma C Interpretive Exhibit

The project involves restoring the boat to its 1965 rigging and wheelhouse configuration, and installing it as a permanent interpretive exhibit near Oscar’s Dock in Kodiak’s St. Paul Harbor. When the project is complete visitors will be able to view the deck from one side of the boat and into the hull through Plexiglasss panels on the other side. A series of all-weather interpretive panels will explain what it’s like to live and work aboard a salmon fishing boat, how the salmon fishery is vital to the people of Kodiak Island, and the effects of the 1964 earthquake on the Kodiak’s waterfront and fishing industry. A cell phone accessible multi-media exhibit will feature oral histories, images and text to augment those stories. A roof will keep rain and snow off the boat, but the exhibit will otherwise be an open air exhibit.

The boat was moved in November to Kodiak College, which has graciously granted workspace to accomplish the boat work. At the moment, the boat is sheathed in white shrink wrap plastic, but in the next few weeks we’ll be constructing a temporary work space over the boat. In February, shipwright Brian Johnson and master woodworker Don Corwin will begin leading a team of volunteers and students in reconstructing the boat. If all goes well, the boat should be completely refurbished by June of 2012 and ready to be moved to the exhibit site in the harbor sometime after that.

The Thelma C moving from storage, November, 2010

We’ll be looking for volunteers to help with the work shelter in early January, and the boat rebuilding in February, so please get in touch with us if you’d like to participate.

Welcome to the KMM Blog

2011-12-30T02:03:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Kodiak Maritime Museum’s new blog. When I started thinking about this space this past fall, the thought was simply to keep folks updated on the Thelma C Project with posts that were too long for Facebook and too immediate and fleeting for the museum webpage. The Thelma C will probably remain the focus of this blog for the time being, but we will try to post other items of maritime historical interest as they come up.
Thanks for reading!

Toby Sullivan, Executive Director