Educational Tall Ship In Sausalito To Help Kids Set Sail

Educational Tall Ship in Sausalito to help kids set sail Just down the road from Sausalito’s only supermarket, a crew of skilled shipwrights and a couple dozen volunteers are building an oceangoing sailing vessel in a big white tent. When it is complete in a couple of years, the boat will be a two-masted brigantine, 100 feet long. The boat is about 25 percent complete, but the framework is in place now — the wooden bones of the ship are there. The hard work is done’’said Alan Olson, executive director of Educational Tall Ship, the official name of the project. There’s a million kids in the Bay Area, and all of them would like to go out for a cruise and learn something,’’ Olson said. Like a lot of others, he liked to talk about sailing ships, and projects to build and sail them, taking kids and young people out on the salt water. The harbor is built on the bones of the old sailing ship Galilee, a famous old Pacific trading vessel that was laid to rest in the mudflats that line the shores of Richardson’s Bay. [...] the Smithsonian Institution measured the lines of the ship from top to bottom; complete drawings. The nonprofit Conservation Fund donated 80,000 board-feet of Douglas Fir timber from forest it owns in the Big River country in Mendocino County. The key workers are professional shipwrights and carpenters, but there are also a lot of volunteers, many with high levels of boatbuilding skill, and some with nothing more than a willingness to work. Rob McCrimmery, 58, saw the Matthew Turner when he went to the Sausalito Art Festival over the Labor Day weekend and decided to sign up. Martin Falasai, 69, a retired engineer, describes his job on the Turner as master sawdust maker.’’ [...] he has long experience sailing and working on wooden boats. “We are not just building a boat, we are building a program, for kids, for the grandkids and the great-grandkids,” he said. The Matthew Turner project is open to the public during business hours daily in the big tent at 2330 Marinship Way, Sausalito. Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.