The USS Lucid, a plucky retired warship that served during the Vietnam War with missions as dangerous as any in the Navy, has a new lease on life.
After rescuing the vessel from the backwaters of the Delta, where so many once-splendid ships go to die, volunteers have spent more than a decade restoring the minesweeper.
For now, the 172-foot Lucid is tied up largely out of view on the San Joaquin River next to Louis Park, where its next open house is slated for April. The new mission: return the ship to its former glory so it can serve as a floating museum, a permanent icon that could help revive downtown Stockton.
Thousands of hours of work have gone into the painstaking restoration effort. Volunteers have scraped flaking paint, welded new railings, fixed obsolete radio gear — whatever it takes.
“It’s been a labor of love,” said David Rajkovich, president of the Stockton Maritime Museum. “It has to be. You couldn’t pay someone to do this.”
The Lucid’s journey began in 1953 when construction began in a New Orleans boatyard. Three sister ships were built at the Colberg Boat Works in Stockton in the early 1950s.
The ships were among the numerous “Aggressive Class,” designated ocean minesweepers, or MSOs; their long range is what distinguished them from coastal minesweepers. They were designed to plow ahead of the fleet, detecting and deactivating underwater explosives that could sink larger warships — aircraft carriers, destroyers or support vessels.
To make sure the ship did not set off any mines that used magnets to detect steel-hulled ships, the Lucid and its sister ships were built of wood. The hull has four inches of Douglas fir and an inch of oak, Rajkovich said.
The Lucid was commissioned as MSO-458 on May 4, 1955, in Louisiana before setting sail three months later for Long Beach, its new home port. In operation through 1970, the ship sailed on five Western Pacific cruises and served four tours during the Vietnam War, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.
The Lucid — the name means luminous or clear-headed — had accommodations for eight officers and 70 enlisted men. But the present-day crew has a very different task. They are working toward that magic day when the vessel will be fully restored. Rajkovich said the rehab work is about 80% complete.
Half the battle has been rounding up original equipment — or fashioning new components that can be substituted.
“If it wasn’t for eBay, we wouldn’t have half the stuff in here,” Rajkovich said recently while peering into one of the restored cabins.
Besides searching for parts online, volunteers were given permission to scour the Navy’s mothballed fleets, including at nearby Suisun Bay, which for decades has served as a watery waiting room for ships headed either back into commission or to the scrap heap.
The 775-ton Lucid now has a helm salvaged from the 56,000-ton USS Ranger before the supercarrier was towed to be broken up in Texas in 2015.
The Lucid escaped the same fate — barely.
At the end of its service, the Lucid was sold for scrap and stripped of valuable brass, stainless steel and other metal fittings. Gone, too, were many of the critical, basic elements, including the deck gun, which made the ship a viable naval combatant. (One upside when it came to the restoration work: The asbestos had also been removed.)
With its Navy days ended, the Lucid was repurposed as a floating home in the tidal marsh of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Deprived of its original military decor, the ship took on such touches as carpeting and a hot tub in its new life as a houseboat in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The vessel would be sold again and used as a warehouse for scrap metal on Bradford Island for nearly two decades.
Just when it seemed like the Lucid might end her days as another squalid wreck along a quiet waterway, along came a group of volunteers — including some Navy veterans — to save the ship. The Stockton Maritime Museum acquired the vessel in 2010 and towed it into Stockton late the following year.
The new crew includes men like Donald Reinhart, 84, who leaped at the chance to help.
“I don’t like sitting on my a—,” said the octogenarian, who is at the site as many as five days a week.
For 70-year-old Jack Frost, another volunteer, the restoration work is a bit of a homecoming. Frost was a medic — or in Navy parlance, a corpsman — on another minesweeper during his 26-year military career. On the day Stocktonia visited the Lucid, he was fitting a new piece of wood on the ship’s transom.
Why all the work?
“The satisfaction is sailors coming aboard and reminiscing,” Frost said.
There’s certainly a lot of looking back aboard the Lucid. But there’s also a future to look forward to.
The ship needs to be hauled out so the bottom can be inspected and, if needed, repaired, Rajkovich said. The decade-plus work has been able to continue with donations, which total about $60,000 to $80,000 a year, he said. The museum also has applied for state grants.
If all goes well, the plan is for the fully restored Lucid to be towed to a new berth on west Weber Avenue on Stockton’s historic downtown waterfront near north Madison Street. There, families, veterans, seafarers and landlubbers alike will be able to come aboard to see what life was like for Navy sailors during the Cold War and Vietnam eras.
After all this hard work, it has to happen.
“This is the last one,” Rajkovich said of what he believes is the last of her class in the U.S. “It has to be maintained.”
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