Humboldt County veterans to put last plank on historical boat
3/3/12
Two years after the Golden Rule sank in Humboldt Bay during a storm, the vessel that was once used to protest militarism during the Cold War is now one plank away from being watertight again.
After patching up two large holes on the starboard side, members from local chapters of Veterans For Peace will add the last plank — known in nautical terms as the “whiskey” plank or shutter plank — to the boat’s hull on Sunday. To celebrate this milestone, Veterans For Peace members and Fairhaven boat yard owner Leroy Zerlang will hold a fundraising party to complete the Golden Rule’s restoration.
Golden Rule project volunteers hope to sail the wooden boat, which once carried veterans protesting nuclear testing, to other points in the United States, said Chuck DeWitt of the Eureka Veterans For Peace chapter.
But there is still a lot of work to do, he said.
“We’ve done very little on the deck, nothing on the cabin and nothing on the interior,” he said, adding that Golden Rule project volunteers have been working on the boat for about a year and a half. “We’ve been limited by money, first of all. Sometimes months will go by when the group just doesn’t have enough money to buy material and pay for labor.”
In addition to patching up the holes in the boat’s hull, the group has started work on the craft’s foredeck, using heavy-duty laminated wood, DeWitt said. Much of the material used on the boat’s hull comes from Pierson Building Center and Schmidbauer Building Supply. Figas Construction donated an excavator to pick up the boat from the beach near Fairhaven and move it to Zerlang’s shipyard, DeWitt said. Zerlang donated the space.
“Without really putting out a penny, we got the boat moved up on the beach, leveled out and set out on some beams,” DeWitt said. “Technically, we could put it in the water and it would float again, but we got a lot of work to do.”
In 1958, Albert Bigelow — a former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy who commanded three combat vessels in World War II — sailed the boat with four crewmen from San Pedro, Calif., to protest nuclear testing in the waters off the Marshall Islands, located in the western Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Guam.
The boat was boarded by the U.S. Coast Guard twice in Hawaii, and the Golden Rule crew was arrested before the boat could make it to the testing area. According to Zerlang, who researched the boat’s legacy on the Internet after pulling it out of the bay, the Golden Rule was one of the first boats that started the peace movement.
“It was very much what Greenpeace is today,” he said. “It was so important in trying to stop testing for nuclear bombs back in the Cold War. It’s a tiny little boat with brave men who sailed to Hawaii.”
The Golden Rule showed up in Humboldt Bay 10 years ago as the property of a local doctor, Zerlang said. It sank in a big storm two years ago this month. After he raised the battered 30-foot hull from the bottom of the marina, Zerlang said, the boat nearly became firewood.
“If it wasn’t for her history, her very unique history, the boat would have been destroyed,” he said. “People have come from the East Coast to visit this boat. They come from Canada to visit this boat.”
Once the Golden Rule project finishes restoring the boat, local Veterans For Peace representatives will sail the boat up and down the West Coast, making ports of call wherever there’s a Veterans For Peace chapter, DeWitt said. The group will open the boat to visitors and use it as a platform for educating people about the hazards and dangers of nuclear warfare.
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