The Gazela, a barquentine ship whose home port is Philadelphia, in June 2015. (Emma Lee/WHYY)
By Buffy Gorrilla, WHYY News
Patrick Flynn was a teenager from Havertown when he first boarded Gazela, the wooden tall ship currently moored at Penn’s Landing. It was 1986, and the ship needed a fresh coat of white paint and other repairs to get it ready for the Statue of Liberty centennial celebration. Gazela was a place for him to learn shipwrighting and a wide range of skills that would lead him to a career at sea.
“What started out as volunteering became a profession, and I got my Coast Guard captain’s license and worked on probably about a dozen ships like this around the country. But I seem to keep coming back to Gazela,” said Flynn, who is now the superintendent of ships for the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild.
Marcus Brandt felt the same lure. “Gazela is very beautiful,” he said. “She’s not a huge ship as sailing ships go, but it’s a really nice size for training young people and sailing out on the ocean.”
Brandt, like Flynn, started out as a volunteer and is a member of the board of directors of the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild. He even met his wife on the decks. She’s a tugboat captain.
The Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild is the custodian of the 120-year-old Gazela, which sailed from Portugal up the Delaware River in 1971. This has been its home ever since. Now, Gazela needs repairs including a costly and extensive hull rebuild to allow it to sail beyond the sheltered waters of the Delaware.
To keep marine growth at bay, Gazela is clad with copper sheets. In the hull rebuild, the plan is to strip off the copper, reprocess it into new copper sheets, then reinstall it.
“Completely recycled and reused,” said Brandt. “Rather than using anti-fouling paints on the hull, this is a much more environmentally friendly alternative.”
The way Brandt and the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild are approaching the renovations is “maritime stone soup,” recalling the children’s story about villagers each contributing a little to a pot of soup that started with only a few stones. If you have something to add to the mix, the PSPG could be interested.
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