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.”

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 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.

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.

They’re going to be doing some sails with us to keep our summer camp programs going. It’s nice to have great partners in the community, to be able to still meet our mission, support another organization who is coming out of the pandemic too, and be able to give these kids the experience, because that’s the goal. And then our goal is to get our boat back to where she needs to be.

MS: It was just over a year ago that you lost the Pilgrim. I’m guessing that there are going to be people in the media, certainly on social media, who are going to conflate those two instances and make unkind inferences about whether the ships are a priority at Ocean Institute… or whether you guys know what you’re doing… or whether Ocean Institute just lacks the funds to maintain their ships.

Dan: Yeah. It’s unfortunate. We didn’t want Pilgrim to happen. We were trying to fundraise, we were planning on getting to the yard with Pilgrim in January, and we got bumped. That was really sad, but now the opportunity that we’re looking at, we’re going to take the boat to the yard, do all of the restoration that needs to happen to make sure that we have Spirit for years to come. It’s just unfortunate that the insurance company is forcing our hand a little bit quicker than we were anticipating.

MS: Is there a lesson here for the decision-makers at Ocean Institute, that it would behoove them to be more proactive with ship maintenance?

Spirit of Dana Point

Dan: To be honest, I think it’s a lesson for everybody. You know what I mean? It’s not going to get easier to insure wooden boats. It’s not going to get easier to maintain wooden boats. Being on top of all of your maintenance is really important as you move forward. I think for everybody that operates one of these boats, you need to have every one of your ducks in a row, because the Coast Guard is watching closer after all the things that have happened over the last couple of years.

Insurance companies are looking closer at everything. If you’re an operation that isn’t paying attention ... I think future planning is really important. It’s something I know we’re going to be looking at. What are we going to do, every single year, to make sure that this boat is well maintained? Having plans for every year, every five years, every 10 years: what are we expecting?

MS: Are you in the same Coast Guard inspection region as the Conception, the boat that burned two years ago?

Dan: Yeah, I’m pretty sure they go from Santa Barbara to basically us.

MS: They’ve got to be very sensitive at this point, that office.

Dan: Yeah. The Conception is definitely still on everybody’s mind down here. We partner with Santa Barbara Maritime. We go up there and do school programs with them. When we go up there, we berth right next to where the Conception used to dock.

We know the Coast Guard is still sensitive to it, still learning from what happened there. So, that’s definitely a part of it as well. It’s not going to get easier to maintain, insure, and manage these boats. The more prepared we are, the better off we’re going to be. I mean, like we talked about, with the Pilgrim? We’re still fighting that. I think about that boat every single day. But I’m excited that we get to look towards the future. We got a little bump here, but that bump is getting the boat restored.

We’re looking forward to seeing the community that talked about how they want to support the Pilgrim, want to support these boats… We’re looking forward to seeing them step up to help us be able to do it. Cause we can’t do it without our community. If communities want these boats, they have to support them.

MS: We talk again and again in the magazine about how much easier it is to raise money for a new build than it is to raise money for programming or maintenance. But if the Pilgrim showed us anything, it’s that you cannot defer maintenance on boats indefinitely.

Dan: We always say “Time or treasure, whatever you can give.” If they want to see these really amazing ships and keep these programs going, the entire community needs to be involved. ❂