Members of the Harbor Patrol and staff from the Marine Mammal Center celebrate the successful release of three dolphins that were rescued form the Back Bay mud at Cuesta Inlet last week. Submitted photo
The Morro Bay Harbor Patrol and a non-profit support group are raising money to give their main workhorse patrol boat an extensive overhaul and, hopefully, keep it saving lives and property for decades to come.
The department’s Patrol Boat No. 3864, or just “Boat 64,” is in need of an extensive refurbishing, including new inboard diesel engines and a total re-wiring, and while they’ve been able to piece together much of the money they need, they still need to raise some $100,000 to get over the finish line.
Boat 64 is a 28-foot fiberglass-hulled Radon surf rescue and firefighting boat and the first-out response vessel for the Harbor Patrol.
Its main use is as an emergency response and rescue vessel, often racing out the harbor mouth for emergencies involving surfers, swimmers, and vessels in distress from Estero Point north of Cayucos to Point Buchon at Montaña de Oro to the south.
She’s a 2013 model Radon that officially went into service in March 2014. It was equipped to be both a water rescue and firefighting boat with a water cannon mounted on the wheelhouse. The vessel also pulls double or perhaps triple duty as a tow boat for disabled vessels, and a rescue vessel for medical emergencies, human or otherwise.
Just last week, Boat 64 was used to transport three common dolphins that were rescued after being stuck overnight in the Back Bay mud at Cuesta Inlet. Boat 64 carried the animals, Harbor Patrol and two staffers with The Marine Mammal Center to a spot a mile north of Morro Rock and about a mile offshore, where the dolphins were released near a huge bait ball amidst a large pod of their brethren dolphins.
The boat serves as diverse a list of purposes as the Harbor Patrol performs daily duties.
How important is Boat 64? The Friends of the Morro Bay Harbor Department listed the many duties it has performed: surf rescues, vessel assists, marine fires, marine law enforcement, wildlife rescues, drowning responses, pollution spill responses, and sinking vessels.
The boat cost some $410,000 when they ordered it from D.R. Radon Boat Builders in Goleta, a figure that some old timers on the waterfront scoffed about at the time.
The vessel now needs some $450,000 worth of work. If that sounds like a lot, it really isn’t once you break down all the work listed in the work program.
Harbor Patrolman Dana Stein, who is spearheading the refurbishing project, said a new boat outfitted the same as Boat 64 would now run about $950,000.
Stein was able to secure a $170,000 grant from the State Department of Boating and Waterways, and they have $187,000 that the Harbor Department has socked away over several years. And if the Friends group can successfully raise the remaining $100,000, ‘We’re golden,” Stein said.
The Friends group, which was started largely by Councilman Bill Luffee when he was on the Harbor Advisory Board, has done some amazing work supporting the department and buying specialty gear and vehicles to aid them in their public safety mission.
The biggest single expense with the refurbishing is going to be the engines.
“The engines,” Stein said, “have 8,000 hours on them. There’s no real standard [expected life span] on them, but the manufacturer said we’ve got the highest number of hours that anyone has ever put on them. It’s time to replace the engines.”
The twin diesel engines are made by Yanmar, which is the marine division of Toyota. They are Toyota’s diesel engines made especially for marine use, and the pair is going to cost $108,000, add in labor and Stein said replacing the old engines with the same model power plants will total about $187,000 installed.
They anticipate spending $25,000 to work on the out drives, another $25,000 for new lighting and electronics, plus what Stein called minor layout changes.
They are also having the fiberglass hull stripped of paint and inspected for weakened spots, hoping to avoid the fate of their last workhorse boat, No. 3868.
Boat 68 was in service for over 30 years but on an emergency call to Montaña de Oro a few years ago, a large piece of the hull was ripped away, “delaminated” as it’s called. That boat eventually was sold at auction, after Morro Bay bought a used Radon, smaller than Boat 64 (28-feet vs. 24-feet), from the Port San Luis Harbor District. The proceeds from the sale of Boat 68 were used to equip the boat they got from PSL.
Called Boat 69, that one is the department’s second-out response vessel and becomes first out when Boat 64 is hauled out for maintenance or otherwise busy on another call.
The department also recently purchased a “Pacific Skiff,” an aluminum hulled outboard motorboat they got surplus from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department.
That boat is used as a backup for whenever one of the Radon’s is out of service and mostly for responses within the harbor. It doesn’t have firefighting equipment, like both of the Radons do.
The department also has two Kawasaki personal watercraft or PWCs that Stein said they refer to as “Rescue Watercraft.” Each has a sled tied to it to tow rescue swimmers out and victims in. The Harbor Patrol and fire department do specialized training with the RWCs.
What needs to be done to Boat 64 that costs nearly half a million dollars and that Stein estimates will take a full year to finish? The refurbishing list includes:
• replacing both inboard diesel engines;
• a comprehensive inspection of the fiberglass hull and repairs as needed;
• modernizing the electronics, navigation gear, and communications systems;
• replacing the firefighting system’s piping and hoses;
• replacing the deck hardware and exterior equipment including lighting, antennas and the rub rail;
• modifications to the layout to improve crew safety and operational efficiency; and,
• a complete cosmetic refurbishing, including repainting the high-wear areas of the hull.
Inspecting the hull to check for cracking or tearing of the fiberglass layers and repairing them before repainting the hull could extend the boat’s life by decades.
Stein said they do regular maintenance on all their boats and haul out Boat 64 every other year to scrape sea life off the bottom and re-paint the hull. They also regularly change the filters and oil and other regular maintenance items.
But big stuff like changing out inboard engines, that takes a specialty shop and the only one nearby that sells or works on Yanmar diesels is Radon down in Goleta, the same people that built it in the first place.
Stein said they know that $450,000 is a lot of money but they hope that by spending money now, they can keep Boat 64 in service for a long time to come.
“The idea is that if we do this every 10 or 15 years,” Stein said, “we could run this boat for another 40 years, maybe 50.”
For information about the Friends of the Morro Bay Harbor Department’s fundraising efforts see the website at: www.friendsoftheMBHD.org. As a non-profit organization, all donations are tax deductible.
