A group of volunteers restoring a decommissioned U.S. Navy minesweeper in Stockton has a very ambitious New Year’s resolution following a recent trip to Taiwan.
The team picked over another warship that was being scrapped overseas and salvaged a host of parts that will be used to refurbish the USS Lucid, the Stockton Maritime Museum’s floating flagship.
A shipping container filled with gear is due to arrive around Jan. 1, meaning the new year will be spent bolting, welding and otherwise fitting the parts into the ship.
Ten volunteers spent two weeks in Taiwan stripping items from the former USS Implicit, the last remaining sister ship to the Lucid. The 172-foot Lucid is undergoing restoration while tied up largely out of view on the San Joaquin River next to Louis Park in Stockon.
Its transformation will turn the ship that served for decades as an oceangoing minesweeper, or MSO, into a floating museum. Stockton Maritime Museum leaders envision the Lucid being towed to a permanent display site downtown, near Weber Point.
The invitation for the salvaging expedition came from Taiwan’s navy after the 70-year-old former Implicit — renamed Yung Yang after the ship was purchased from the U.S. in 1994 — reached the end of its life.
The Taiwanese not only supplied a crane to help recover valuable items, but provided some of the manual labor as well.
“They really laid out the red carpet for us,” said David Rajkovich, president of the Stockton Maritime Museum.
Rajkovich said the haul included parts the Stockton team never could have obtained otherwise. Among the top items: the former minesweeper’s anchor and chain, a pilot house console that controls the pitch of the propellers and loads of minesweeping gear.
Working seven hours a day, “we unbolted gear as fast as we could,” Rajkovich said.
Even with all of the additional equipment that was acquired, the Lucid will remain without its own power — and that’s OK. The plan is for the retired warship to become the centerpiece of a complex in downtown Stockton that will attract tourists and school groups.
Both the Lucid and the Implicit have similar backgrounds. Built in the 1950s, the ships’ hulls were made of wood to avoid setting off magnetic mines that explode when they detect ships made of steel. Besides their primary mission of clearing sea lanes to make way for the fleet, the plucky little ships also served as patrol vessels for the U.S. during the Vietnam War.
The Implicit — designated as MSO-455 — stayed in commission in the U.S. Navy until the early 1990s. The Lucid — MSO-458 — was sold in the 1970s and became a houseboat moored in the San Joaquin Delta. Much of the Lucid’s military equipment and valuable bronze, brass and alloy parts were removed. In their place came distinctly civilian touches, including carpeting and a waterbed.
The vessel was later sold again and used as a warehouse for scrap metal on Bradford Island for nearly two decades. And just when it seemed like the Lucid might end her days as another squalid wreck along a quiet Delta 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 work that’s been going on for more than a decade has been able to continue with donations, which total about $60,000 to $80,000 a year, Rajkovich said. The museum also has applied for state grants.
But the replacement parts from the Taiwanese ship, which were free, are invaluable. The haul will eventually fill two shipping containers. The first, loaded with 25 tons of equipment for the Lucid, will arrive around Jan. 1 at the Port of Oakland and be trucked to Stockton, Rajkovich said.
A second shipping container will be sent later. It also will be filled with parts from the former Implicit, but only after they can be retrieved following the full dismantling of the ship.
Once the storage vessels arrive, the next big task begins. Moving all of the gear into the correct position on the Lucid is expected to take months, Rajkovich said, and like all work on the ship, it will be done by volunteers.
“It’s been a labor of love,” Rajkovich told Stocktonia earlier this year. “It has to be. You couldn’t pay someone to do this.”
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