A 302-foot steamship lies beached in the muddy flats of Mexico's Ensenada Harbor, covered with a colony of barking sea lions that now make it their home, serving only to be gawked at by tourists and locals speeding by in fishing boats.
That ship – the SS Catalina – stands as one of the few remaining links to an earlier maritime era in Southern California.
The dissolution of the ship that ferried passengers between San Pedro and Santa Catalina Island disturbs many who remember riding it to summer holidays 26 miles across the sea. And for the hundreds of thousands of World War II servicemen and women who rode the ship through the fog of San Francisco Bay ship en route to service – and possibly death – in the Pacific theater, its predicament is nothing short of an insult.
"It is a terrible situation," said David Engholm, founder and president of the SS Catalina Steamship fund, a fundraising organization bent on saving the ship. "It's something that never should have happened. It's a sin."
DAVID ENGHOLMThe Catalina lays beached on muddy flats.
Derelict vessels can be found all over the country and all over the world, from the Tchefuncte River in Louisiana to the Potomac River in Washington DC. While most are left for dead by their owners, and picked over by salvors, some can be saved – if enough resources are brought to bare.
Unfortunately, these efforts are often left to advocacy groups, which lack the muscle to raise large amounts of cash and cut through the government red tape.
Engholm and many others have been dragged through a decade-long odyssey to save the ship from destruction. But now, following a 2000 attempt to raise the Catalina from the muddy Baja California waters, he has conceded the hull of the ship to the ocean. His hopes are now focused on rescuing pieces of the ship – the pilothouse and possibly the steam stacks.
And while members of other factions refuse to give up the cause of dragging the 83-year-old vessel from a watery grave, there is no argument on one issue: it will take an infusion of $10 million to $20 million for the effort to even be considered.
THE GLORY DAYS
It wasn't always like this for the Catalina.
In 1923, the chewing gum mogul William Wrigley Jr. commissioned the ship built to provide transport to the island, where he bought a controlling interest in 1919.
After nearly a year in the making by the Wilmington Steamship Co. at a cost of roughly $1 million, the Catalina was launched on May 4, 1924. Six hundred people were aboard for the maiden voyage.
Dubbed "The Great White Steamer," the Catalina regularly commuted back and forth between a berth in Los Angeles Harbor and the island for the next 51 years. By the time it was retired in 1975 – that route is now handled by ultra-fast catamarans like the Catalina Flyer, which make it about an hour – the Catalina had carried an estimated 2.9 million passengers, Engholm said.
An exception to that string of service was during World War II, when the ship served as a transport for troops in the San Francisco Bay. From 1942 to 1946, it carried more than 890,000 troops – more than any other troop transport during the war – to ships at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, Engholm said.
Following its retirement from service, in 1976 the Catalina was included in the National Register of Historic Places, as a California State Historical Landmark and as a City of Los Angeles Historical-Cultural Monument.
Engholm's involvement in the ship dates back to its days ferrying to Catalina, when he sat on the deck as a 1-year-old child leaving the docks in Los Angeles Harbor with this family for a weekend on the island. He later worked for the ship's final owner, Hymie Singer, when it was docked in Ensenada as a charter vessel hosting private parties.
"I've had a lifelong passion with the ship," Engholm said. "It's because of that ship that I met my wife. I even married her there."
EFFORTS TO SAVE THE SHIP
When word came to Engholm, now living in Coos Bay, Ore., that the Catalina had fallen into disrepair and begun sinking in December of 1997, he sprang into action. Finding the ship listing to the stern, its hull in the muddy sand, he started the effort to raise it.
