Philadelphia's own tall ship heads back into service

Some of sailing's charm is its unpredictability.

The wind dies, or blows too hard, or in the wrong direction. You surrender to nature and drop anchor, or tack, or change plans.

But a five-year diversion has been just too long for devotees of Philadelphia's resident tall ship, Gazela.

Hindered by a damaged rudder, the 175-foot square-rigger - built for high seas in 1883 - has confined its sailing adventures to the protected waters of the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay.

On Sunday morning, however, the city's floating ambassador will hoist the sails on all three masts and, for the first time since 2005, leap into the waves of the blue Atlantic.

Just last month, after years of costly and frustrating delays, Gazela's professional shipwright, Patrick Flynn, installed a new, handmade rudder, 26 feet long and copper-clad.

"We're back in business," said Eric Lorgus, president of the nonprofit Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild, which owns and operates the white-hulled barkentine. "I'm elated."

After turning north at Cape May, Gazela will steer for the historic whaling town of New Bedford, Mass., about 250 miles away. It is due to return Aug. 7 and depart a week later for New York Harbor.

In October it will head out again for an oyster festival on Long Island before returning home and closing up for winter.

Built of oak as a Portuguese cod-fishing vessel, it is one of the world's oldest continually sailed wooden square-riggers. With a deep, 16-foot draft, "she's really not designed for protected waters," said Lorgus, also president of a ship supply company.

But the Preservation Guild, whose 250 volunteer members sail and maintain it, had little choice after ship surveyors discovered rot in the rudder post late in 2004. The surveyors cautioned against any ocean voyages until a new rudder could be put in place.

Next year's sailing season is still being planned, but Lorgus hopes to see a few high-seas adventures like those of years past, when Gazela - Portuguese for gazelle - made way for such far-flung destinations as Maine, Quebec, and the Bahamas.

It carries no passengers on these trips. Its crews consist of Preservation Guild volunteers who earn the right to sail after donating 50 hours of maintenance.

Part workhorse, part thoroughbred, Gazela spent its first 86 years sailing from Portugal to the fishing banks off New England. For three months at a time, its crew of about 30 would fish cod by day, sitting in 10-foot rowboats with mile-long lines, each armed with 1,000 hooks.

By night they would gut and salt their catch, and return home at the end of the season with 350 tons of dried fish.

"She probably crossed the ocean more than 150 times," said Lorgus. At least half those voyages were without an engine; Gazela was not powered until 1938.

But mechanization would also end Gazela's days as a fishing vessel. Factory ships, some able to process in a few weeks what Gazela caught in a season, began to appear. By the late 1960s the overfished New England cod population was nearly depleted.

In 1969, Gazela's owners quit the business and put it on the market. Two years later, oil executive, yachtsman, and philanthropist William Wikoff Smith bought it and donated it to what was then the Philadelphia Maritime Museum.

When Smith died, at 53, in 1976, the maritime museum was uncertain what do with its costly white elephant - or "white whale," as Lorgus jokes.

Gazela represented Philadelphia in the 1976 tall-ship parade, OpSail, in New York Harbor. But when Philadelphia hosted its own tall-ship parade in 1982, Gazela's engine was in such poor condition that it never ventured from the dock. Ownership later passed to the Penn's Landing Corp., which in 1988 gave it to the Preservation Guild.

Gazela costs more than $100,000 a year to operate, according to Lorgus - and then there are the repairs.

Between 2001 and 2003, the guild replaced the entire deck, water tanks, electrical wiring, and much of the hull planking above the waterline.

Recently, Flynn discovered rot in the main timbers to which the planks are fastened. Although the rot does not extend far below the waterline, hull planks near the affected timbers must be removed to get to them - a costly and labor-intensive job.

If it can be done with volunteers at a dry dock at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, the price will run about $3.5 million, Flynn said. Professional repairs at Norfolk, Va., or Boothbay Harbor, Maine, would cost "much more."

Either way, say Flynn and Lorgus, the Preservation Guild must soon launch a fund drive to start the job.

"It's do or die," said Flynn, who first set foot on Gazela as a teenage volunteer. "If we don't do it in the next 10 years, she'll be lost."