Plug Pulled! After a June inspection of their schooner Spirit of Dana Point, Ocean Institute got a rude awakening — not from the Coast Guard, but from their insurance company Dan Goldbacher, Director of the Maritime and Campus Facilities for Ocean Institute, spoke to Marlinspike in June. Marlinspike: Dan, my understanding is that the Coast Guard gave you a work list with some hard deadlines, but left Spirit of Dana Point operational for the season. You then shared that work list with your insurer, which sounds like a prudent thing to do. And your insurer turned around and said, “If you don’t fix these things in 30 days, you’re uninsured.”
without insurance. And our plan is to get the work done. So, we’ve been working with Marine Group down in San Diego to get the decks repaired. And we’re going to do an overall restoration of the boat. We’re going to go through all the systems. We’re going to do a restoration of the boat so we can have her for the next 20, 30 years. MS: Is your insurance company the same firm that insured the Pilgrim? Dan: No, it’s a different firm.
Dan Goldbacher: Basically. MS: And these are not 30-day projects. You don’t replace a deck in 30 days. Dan: No, you don’t. Basically what happened is we’ve been working with our insurance on Spirit. We got our work list from the Coast Guard. They gave us one year, so we planned on pulling the mast in December. And we had two years to replace the decks. So, we were looking at a couple of different options for 2022. We finally were able to get back to our mission, and that was our focus. We were like, “Okay, we can start teaching kids about sailing we can start doing our school programs. We can start doing all of these things with the boat. And we can start fundraising.” We planned on doing that to coincide with our Tall Ships Festival in September, and raise the money to get the decks done starting about September of 2022, which is what the Coast Guard wanted. I shared all that with our broker, told them about our plan, approved by the Coast Guard. And they said, “You know what? We’re going to drop you, because it’s not getting done. You’ve got 30 days.” MS: Otherwise, the boat is not going to sail this summer. And the programming that you have lined up is not going to happen — at least not on the Spirit. Dan: At this point, we’re accelerating the process to make it all happen now. We can’t have the boat at our dock 26
MS: Still, it’s hard to imagine that loss is not playing a role here. Dan: It’s not like that’s not known. You know what I mean? The decks definitely weren’t a surprise. We knew it was something that we had to do within the next couple of years. The Coast Guard gave us a deadline. We said, “All right, we’re going to move forward and make these plans to do this.” And they gave us till 2022 and then yeah, our insurance said that’s not fast enough for them. So we’re going down to the shipyard in the next two weeks. MS: Is the money there? I saw that some of your hardcore funders immediately came forward, but not with enough for the scope of work you have to do. Dan: We’ve got enough to get going, which is absolutely amazing. With any project, you don’t know what you’re going to find until you start uncovering. So we’re preparing for what we could find. We’re hopeful that it’s going to be just the decks, the mast, the rigging repair, but we’re ready to fix whatever needs to be fixed, to make sure the boat is 100% ready to go. I’m bummed that we’re in this situation that we’ve had to rush this so quickly. We’ve made alternate plans for all of our camp programs. We’re partnering with the Curlew, who’s also in Dana Point Harbor here.
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