Posted by (This continues a series on “serial sinkers” – ships that had to be rescued more than once. Hope you enjoy the saga of the Angelo Petri. I think the SS Fort Mercer is the only other nominee in this category. Let me know if there are others.)
Shining bright white, framed by the Golden Gate Bridge, debt free and sterling proof of concept for a revolutionary shipping approach, the wine super tanker SS Angelo Petri, filled with more than a million gallons of bulk Cabernet and Chardonnay on February 9, 1960, left San Francisco as a proud symbol of technology and prosperity.
Yes, it was stormy, but nothing a ship of 615 feet couldn’t handle. She made seven trips a year from San Francisco wine country ports through the Panama Canal and then to east coast and gulf ports, carrying 1.7 million gallons of wine on each trip for the Petris Wine Vineyards.
In just her third year of operation, the Angelo Petri had paid for the $7 million she cost and the wake she cast was one of bounteous plenty. The bulk shipping of wine dropped millions of dollars in savings to the bottom line of her owner.
Yet on this journey just a little bit past the Golden Gate, against all that fortune, there rose up a huge rogue wave. At more than 40-feet, it towered over the deck and even the ship funnels.
“We were hit so hard by the sea that everyone thought we’d run into another ship,” said Seaman John Jabin, who was lying in his bunk when the wave hit.
Worse than the impact, the rogue crested over and poured into the ship’s funnel and the funnel designed to funnel-out exhaust now funneled-in the water straight through to the ventilators.
“Water doused the main switchboard and that was that” Third Engineer Maurice Widner later told reporters. “It shorted out everything.”
Amazingly, the ship herself floated intact. But without power, she and her crew were at the mercy of currents and tides off the sandy shallows of Ocean Beach. She was being pushed inevitably eastward toward shore – which would result in a hull fracture and the first mass wine spill in modern history.
The frivolous thought of the world’s largest wine cooler cocktail was less amusing when you considered the rest of the cargo. Carried too by the tanker: 3,500 tons of vegetable oil and 1,000 tons of rocket fuel for the US Air Force.
If all those ingredients were shaken and stirred, Ocean Beach was in for more than an overnight hangover. Ocean Beach could be napalmed. This would be an environmental catastrophe – and a serious fire hazard and threat of incineration for the crew.
The Angelo Petri may have been state of the art for wine tankers, but no ship without power was safe or seaworthy. Without power, she lacked steerage. Without steerage, she was at the mercy of the ocean and the winds.
She had been in peril once before. Seaman John Jabin on the Angelo Petri could say how it all happened. He had been there 14 years earlier, the first time the ship tried to sink. In fact, one half of her had sunk.
She may have been a sleek wine tanker in 1960, but she also had lived another, harder life.
The Angelo Petri was born as an oil tanker during the war nearly twenty years earlier. Then, she was the SS Sacketts Harbor. Cruising in rough waters off Alaska in 1946, she simply broke in half – snapped in two because of brittle steel used during the war.
The bow half of the ship was unsalvageable – and so, sunk by the Navy to clear navigation channels. But the stern of the Sacketts Harbor still floated and was still valuable. The engineers backed it up 800 miles to dock in Alaska – and for years the stern was used as a power plant serving Anchorage.
Power plant though she may be the old Sacketts Harbor stern was still valuable as a ship. The stern still qualified as an “American bottom” – a vessel built in the United States. Therefore, the hull could carry cargo from one American port to another as required by the Jones Act cabotage law. She was fitted with a new bow and sophisticated wine tanks and pumps in 1957 – and found life anew as the Angelo Petri
All had gone well until the rogue wave. Now, in her third identity, crew members and engineers worked frantically to restart the powerful turbines of the ship. They could not. The wiring was well and truly fried.
On the bridge, Captain Edward A. Lehm Jr. made sure a distress signal was sent and then ordered the crew to drop both the ship’s anchors, thinking to slow the drift.
Nothing happened. Minutes ticked by and the Angelo Petri continued to drift toward the breaking surf. The anchors dragged and bounced along the bottom with no purchase. Night came and squalls lashed the coast with wind and rain carrying the ship toward land.
At last, after drifting for miles, the ship’s anchors caught hold on a sandbar just west of Fleishhacker Pool by the San Francisco Zoo. The grip was fragile, but enough to stall the ship’s drift toward shore.
Still, even riding at anchor the. Angelo Petri was being battered mercilessly. She was neither safe nor secured. What the anchors had done was to give rescuers a precious bit of time. A window had opened. That might allow for salvation.
The drama was noticed on the mainland. Perhaps it goes without saying: In San Francisco, wine in peril attracted concerned crowds.
“Let it never be said that San Franciscans will sit idly by when 1.7 million gallons of wine are at risk,” a local journalist commented. Dozens of people flocked to the beach to observe the attempted rescue. They would not be disappointed by the show to come.
The U.S. Coast Guard was first to respond. At Coast Guard Air Station San Francisco, helicopters scrambled into the teeth of the storm. The crew heard the sound of choppers above as the helicopters hovered like mother birds concerned for the nest. The choppers turned spotlights on the ship, cutting through the wind and clouds, then dropped baskets and slings on lines.
A classic air rescue ensued. One by one, crewmen of the Angelo Petri were lifted to the helicopters and shuttled to safety through the lashing wind and rain.
By midnight, fourteen crewmen had been plucked off the Angelo Petri and delivered safely to shore – to shelters or hospitals.
But then the helicopter rescue was paused. We might just be able to save her, the captain said, and half the crew stayed on board with him in a fight to save the ship. She seemed stable. They might just pull this off if the half-crew was up to the challenge.
The men now looked not up to the sky for rescue but out to sea. Beyond the breakers, a flotilla of tugboats was fighting through the seas, bucking and breaching the high waves, appearing in line of sight at the crests, then disappearing in the troughs, as a pod of dolphins might.
Prominently among them? The tug Sea Fox, a 118-foot Crowley Marine boat from San Francisco’s famous “Red Stack” fleet. – one fifth the size of the Angelo Petri.
The plucky little boat maneuvered in the waves and steered dangerously close to the wallowing Angelo Petri. The tug crew sized up the drift of the tanker and the power of the tug and then shot over a line that then secured a heavier towing line.
For the first time since the rogue wave hit, now there was true cause to be hopeful. The ship had no power and no control over her direction. But now the tug – an extraordinarily over-powered boat designed for torque and propeller purchase– became the Angelo Petri’s new engine and maritime tow truck.
So it was that the Sea Fox became a major hero of the saga – along with the other fleet of tugs. The little boats tooted and twirled in the rough waters, shot over hauling lines – and saved the Angelo Petri from certain grounding in the surf.
Others aided. Through it all, those remaining Angelo Petri crew on deck scrambled s to attach cables and clamp bridle chains to whatever tug managed to approach.
The Coast Guard Cutter USCGC Taney also stood by – well offshore but coordinating the choppers, the tugs, and actions on board the Angelo Petri.
Even offshore, this was no small trick of seamanship. The Taney was a seasoned high-endurance cutter, designed for rough oceans, but crew on the Taney later described the swells that night as enormous; one Coast Guardsman said the cutter’s 100-foot-high mast sometimes stood near-level with the wave crests. This marked how violently the cutter was pitching.
Towed to Safety and Aftermath
Daylight on February 10 saw an easing of the storm. With improved conditions, more tugboats joined the rescue effort. In all, five tugs pushed, pulled and prodded the hulking tanker. After spending two nights at anchor on the sandbar, the Angelo Petri was finally ready to move.
On February 12, the tugs began towing the ship off the sandbar and back toward the Golden Gate. In a slow, careful procession, the Angelo Petri inched back into deeper water. By that afternoon, the world’s largest wine tanker was towed safely under the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco Bay.
Crowds cheered from the shore and the bluffs as the parade of tugs escorted the Angelo Petri into port. The fully loaded tanker was brought to a Pier 70 drydock for repairs.
The good luck of the Angelo Petri returned. The damage was not catastrophic – mostly electrical systems, the blown-out funnel, and some distressed hull sections. Within a few weeks the tanker was fully repaired and ready to sail again.
Moreover, the 1.7 million gallons of wine on board had survived the voyage was tested and “deemed fit to drink.”
In the aftermath, the Coast Guard and local authorities praised the teamwork that had saved the Angelo Petri. No lives were lost, and only a few minor injuries were reported among the crew.
The incident became a case study in successful maritime rescue: quick thinking by the ship’s officers (dropping anchor at the right moment), the Coast Guard’s swift aerial evacuation of crew, and the tenacity of the tugboat crews that kept the ship off the beach all combined to avert disaster.
The Sea Fox became a local hero of the waterfront, and after her retirement, the tug’s pilot house was preserved and is still on display in San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
As for the Angelo Petri herself?
She went right back to work hauling wine after her repairs. The giant tanker would serve through the 1960s and into the mid-1970s on the wine route to the East Coast and Gulf.
Few who saw her limp into San Francisco Bay in February 1960 would have guessed that the ship – born from the halves of two vessels, pressed into service as a power plant , then nearly wrecked by a rogue wave – would survive to sail for many more years.
Like most American-flagged ships, she continued in service far past her prime because she qualified for the coastal trades in the United States.
She was sold and renamed the Californian in 1970, and then Sea Chemist in 1975 and finally came to rest in 1978 at a scrapping yard in Vinaros, Spain, aged at 35 years old – nearly twice the lifetime of most ships.
A rough estimate shows she delivered the equivalent of close to 650 million bottles of wine to the East Coast and Midwest in her lifetime.
Thanks for a great story
An excellent story, thank you!
I have told the story of this ship to many people through the years. While studying for and receiving my BS in Winemaking from Fresno State University in 1973, 1974 I worked in the cellar at a COOP Winery just south of Fresno. I loaded a good number of bulk tanker trucks with wine destined for the Port of Stockton where there were storage tanks holding the wine for transshipment on the SS Angelo Petri. At the time there was still a good bit of bulk wine being shipped east to bottlers using rail bulk tank cars. By the end of the 70s most of or nearly all of the large bottling only plants had shut down. Instead wineries were bottling and shipping as case goods. This coincided with the shift from desert wines to table wines in the California Wine industry which required a higher degree of care in shipping.