The convention began in earnest Friday morning, and L and M went down to the ballrooms and danced, while I stayed in the room and caught up on my blog feed and YouTube subscriptions. They came back about ten-thirty and we got breakfast at Denny’s, or tried to anyway. The staff were stretched beyond their limit, as a cook and a waitron hadn’t shown up for work. We finally got out about 11:15, and decided to spend the rest of the day playing at tourists.
San Francisco has a really varied transit system. Besides their fleet of buses and the cable cars everyone knows about, they have a fleet of electric trolley-buses and a number of vintage trolley cars, dating from the 1910s to the 1940s. One of the vintage trolley lines runs down to Fisherman’s Wharf, our goal for the afternoon, so after a short misdirection when I got us on a car going up to the Castro by mistake, we got turned around and headed back down the F line. The picture is a 1928-era Peter Witt model formerly used in Milan, Italy, headed back uptown on the F, taken from our car.
The trolley dropped us in front of the Aquarium of the Bay, which M wanted to see ’cos she likes aquariums. I thought it a distinct disappointment after seeing Monterey, although they did have a couple of nice features, including a long tunnel through a tank stocked with Bay fish, from the common (anchovies) to the very uncommon (white sturgeon). They also had a nicely visible octopus, which was pleasant as the Monterey octopus had been shy or otherwise octopied.
For a wonder, the Bay was fog-free and we had a good view of Alcatraz. I didn’t feel any great pull to visit and M was uninterested as well, so we didn’t book a tour.
Pier 43 had one of L’s intended destinations for the afternoon: the Jeremiah O’Brien, one of the last two surviving Liberty ships from World War II, as well as S.S. Pampanito, a Korea-era submarine. M wangled L into touring the Pampanito (I get claustrophobic so I didn’t go on), but by the time they got back dockside L’s knee, which had been giving trouble all day, was bothering her so badly that she had to give up the idea of going on the O’Brien.
Instead, we walked on down to the national maritime park at the Hyde Street pier, where several older ships were moored: the C. A. Thayer, a lumber schooner undergoing restoration, the Eppleton Hall, a coal tug from Newcastle in dreadful condition (I hope they’re raising money to try to restore her; her freeboard is rotted through in places and her paddles are completely rotted away, leaving just the iron frames), the Eureka, one of the sidewheel car ferries that used to take cars across the Bay in the days before the Golden Gate was built, the Hercules, an ocean-going tug used for ferrying log rafts, and the Balaclutha, a square-rigged three-master once used in the lumber trade. Balaclutha and Hercules are both more or less seaworthy, Eureka’s side wheels have rotted completely away below the waterline, and the Thayer is completely dismasted as part of the restoration process.
Hercules at her mooring. She’s a very trig little ship, well shined and polished.
Hercules’s engine room and telegraph. She used a triple-expansion steam engine. The boilers were on the deck below and blocked off.
The galley. This is quite spacious as galleys go; I’ve seen ones barely big enough to hold the stove and the cook.
Balaclutha’s main deck, looking forward from the cabins. She was completely square-rigged, unlike Elissa and other cargo ships I’ve had to do with. L was surprised at how small the hatches were, given the ship was hauling logs. (I suppose it might be explicable if she were hauling finished lumber.)
The Eppleton Hall, rusting away. She has a noticeable list to port, you can see the wooden decoration over the paddle guard delaminating and rotting off, and those with sharp eyes can see the fragment of a wooden paddle hanging on to the frame. The display card said she steamed from Newcastle to San Francisco under her own power in 1970, but to all appearances she’s been allowed to rot at her mooring since then.
It was getting late in the afternoon and we were supposed to be back for the dancers’ grand march from Union Square to the hotel, so we walked up to the Hyde Street end of the cable car line, bought tickets, and proceeded to wait. And WAIT and wait and wait, for two hours in the sun, as the line for the cars inched forward. We did have a street guitarist serenading us with ’60s and ’70s singles, and at one point an escape artist entertained us by getting himself out of a straitjacket and chains.
Every car that came in to the terminus had to be turned on the turntable by hand before it could be sent out again.
Finally our turn came for a car, and we got on and waited some more while the conductor took up tickets. At last he couldn’t think of anything else to delay us with, so he rang his bell, the gripman let in the clutch on the cable, and we were off . . . for a couple of blocks. Then we got stalled halfway up Hyde Street hill behind a couple of cars that wouldn’t get out of the way. When they finally did go, the car was too heavy to start itself again with everyone on board, so the conductor made us all get off and walk up to the next flat place to wait for the car. A good quarter of the people immediately leaped directly into the car’s path to take pictures, only moving sheepishly off after I roared at them, “FOOLS!! Get off the tracks! Are you just trying to get yourselves killed??”
Then it was crawling up and down hill across town, stuck in traffic and inching along. We thus missed the grand march, and instead went to get supper after which L and M went and danced some more while I wrote up the entry for the third and then went to bed.
