The Ship That Wouldn’t Die

Twice rescued, twice transformed, some ships just are overachievers

By Robert R. Frump 

(Time to start writing again about maritime affairs, disasters, rescues and reforms.  Stick around on for some sea stories. True crime, after all, doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.)  

In the cold off Alaska, sailing from Yokosuka,  bound for Balboa, Eugene Ericksen was on watch at the stern of the T-2 tanker the SS Sackett’s Harbor, on March 1, 1946, idly trying to hone a war time story as funny as that of his friend James O. Calton Jr.

On convoy duty, Seaman Colgan had longed for shore leave from the Liberty Ship the SS Bret Harte and struck upon an elaborate plot to convince the officers he was cracking up.  He began pretending he had a dog. He would walk the imaginary dogeverywhere, scolding the dog  for urinating on bulkheads, cautioning those who got in the dog’s way: the pup was a biter.  Don’t piss him off.  

He became bolder with his antics, demanding food for the dog, bowls of water from the mess and even space for the dog when master and pet lunched together.  In one dramatic moment, he even cautioned the captain mid-step not to tread on the imaginary pooch. 

That did it and the captain summoned Calton for a meeting. 

“Listen Colgan,” the cap says. “You think I’m stupid?  You think I don’t know what you’re doing?

“Look, it’s okay to have a dog on board, but the next time he craps in my cabin, you both have to go.”

Tall tale? Almost certainly.  Still a good bit and Ericksen chuckled about it on that  cold night on the water  800 miles southwest of Adak, Alaska.

What story could he tell?

Then, he heard a thunderous crack and felt the ship rise up gently as if she had nosed over a speed bump. All the lights went out. 

“We’ve hit something,” he thought, but knew that was improbable and began running toward the bow of the ship. 

Then, at midship, he grabbed the rail and came skittering to a halt. The ship simply ended. With no warning, she had split in two. 

 His half of the Sacketts Harbor, the stern half, floated evenly and seemed almost stable. But in front of Ericksen, the bow section of the Sacketts Harbor bobbed at a crazy angle. He could see the officers hanging on to slanted decks. He could see the whole cross section of the ship as if it were the cutaway view of a dollhouse. Frantic, the men clung to anything they could on the bow, as it bobbed and bucked, twisting to that same forty-five-degree angle in the water. 

A U.S. Navy destroyer,  thank God, was right there and pulled those men off quickly, but Ericksen did not think the officers in the bow would have stood much of a chance if the destroyer crew had not seen it happening. How could an alarm be raised? The officers in the bow had the radios but no power. And the stern had the power but no radios. They would have had no way to get the word out.  

Ericksen now had his story – a good one that just got better. 

Once all the officers were rescued from the bobbing bow, the Navy destroyer opened fire and blew the bow out of the water so there was no navigational hazard. 

Then to the surprise and pleasure of those in the stern section, the engineers proclaimed themselves masters, and were able to maneuver the hull. – essentially backing it up 800 miles to port.  The crew was not so much rescued as dropped off at a wharf in Alaska. 

There, the story took another bizarre twist. The ship became something altogether different.  The Sacketts Harbor was powered by huge electrical turbines.  They could light up a city, the builders of T-2s would say of the vessels, and in this case, that’s exactly what happened. The ship docked and for five years served as the chief generating station for the city of Anchorage.   

As to the cause of the wreck?  It was sort of a given.  T-2 tankers and other wartime welded ships sometimes turned brittle in cold water and then could just snap in half because there were no rivets to stop the fractures.  It was the war time price one paid for a fleet of mass-constructed vessels.   

Now it was peace, but few T-2’ were scrapped in post-war America. In fact, they were in high demand.  Because American-built hulls were required for cargo moving from American port to American port, the stern-half of the hull still represented real value.  

So it was that in 1957, the stern remnant of the SS Sackets Harbor moved to the San Francisco yard of Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding.

And there, strange work began.  

A new, strengthened bow was fitted.  Then 26 separate tanks were created inside the hull.  Stainless steel pipe, valves and pumps snaked through the interior of the vessel with a complex maze of inlets and outlets. 

This was a puzzlement to some in the tanker business, but not to the winemakers of Northern California, whose better vintages now were finding favor on the East Coast of America and the Midwest. 

The market was huge in the affluent boom era of the 1950’s. But   how did one move that much wine 3,000 miles across country?  Rail had been the answer but rates there had soared.  

One man had a vision.  Louis Petri, the manager of the Petris wine vineyards, would build a custom wine super tanker.  The tanker would carry tons of wine east, where it would be offloaded at American ports and bottled close to local markets.  

The concept was not new, but the technology and scale were. Petri was willing to spend $7 million — $75 million in today’s dollars – to make it happen. 

The result was the construction of the SS Angelo Petri.  She launched on June 4, 1957, and she was a nautical site to see. 

The wartime oil tanker-turned-power plant now was transformed into a slick, white, gleaming 22,000 ton “wine tanker.” The  26 separate tanks and super-clean piping made sure vintages were isolated and preserved. Fully topped off, the ship carried 2.4 million gallons of wine – about 12.1 million bottles.  

The bulk wine would move through the Panama Canal, offload at East Coast ports, where the wine could then be bottled and distributed.  Officially owned by United Vintners, she made her maiden voyage shortly after launch with VIPs staying in the owner’s quarters – with decorated walls, drapes and furniture all color-coded to various vintages of wine.  

Her arrival on October 9, 1957, was notable enough that the staid New York Times marked the passage with this article:

“The largest seagoing wine bottle in the world was decanted yesterday. It was the wine tanker Angelo Petri of the United Vintners Line, the first such craft to sail under the American flag. The white-hulled tanker, twenty-three days out of Stockton, Calif., her loading port, completed the discharge of 1,400,000 gallons of wine at Port Newark.”

Seven roundtrips each year cut the costs of transportation.  The company worked in a stop in Houston on the return trip – and loaded barges with bulk wine.  These shipped up the Mississippi to Chicago and covered the Midwest market. In just three years, the winery had gone national – and paid off the ship. 

All seemed fair winds and following seas from the bridge of the Angelo Petri. 

But off the coast of San Francisco on February 9, 1960, that was not a lazy Pacific roller of a wave headed toward the tanker.

It was a rogue wave, 40-feet tall, about to crest over the stack and decks of the SS Angelo Petri — and begin a new rescue saga. 

(Next: Shaken and stirred:  the rescue of the wine tanker the SS Angela Petri.)