Peninsula Daily News
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TACOMA — Faced with a deadline to move the rusty hulk or face a daily fine, the owner of the former ferry Kalakala is offering the historical vessel for just $1.
There’s a string attached.
The buyer would have to immediately come up with $1 million to move and help restore the art deco Kalakala — the pre-Space Needle symbol of Seattle that plied the Port Angeles-Victoria route from 1954-1959 and was retired on Puget Sound in 1967 — to its former glory and not sell it for scrap, the owner, Tumwater developer Steve Rodrigues, told Seattle-area reporters this week.
The hulk now rests in Tacoma’s Hylebos Waterway, through which up to $23 million in commerce passes in the Port of Tacoma each month, said Cmdr. Chris Woodley, prevention department chief for Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound.
The Coast Guard is among the principal agencies pressuring Rodrigues to fix or move the 276-foot-long vessel, which was retired as a boat with Washington State Ferries in 1967 and sold to an Alaska fishing concern.
The Kalakala has been tethered to a private dock in the Hylebos for about five years.
It listed at about a 30-degree angle last summer, but Rodrigues had the hull plugged and righted the vessel.
But his lease has ended, and he must pay $32,000 in daily fines unless he moves the Kalakala out of the Hylebos.
It’s another deadline the Kalakala faces since the art deco-design ferry, built in 1935 on the hull of a burned San Francisco ferry, was found as an ex-cannery abandoned on an Alaska shoreline and was towed back to Seattle’s Lake Union in 1998.
Rodrigues bought the Kalakala in 2003 and created a foundation for its restoration.
The Kalakala Foundation had an office in Port Angeles for a short time, but Rodrigues could find little support to provide it a home.
After he promised jobs for partial restoration, the Makah tribe allowed him to tow it to Neah Bay.
But the failure to provide those jobs while the hull pounded and damaged a pier caused Rodrigues to find another location — the Hylebos Waterway — to store the faded ferry.
The dollar buyer must promise to restore the Kalakala and not scrap it.
“One million dollars will save this ship forever,” Rodrigues told KING-TV.
For that million dollars, Rodrigues said, he has a long-term home, a plan and a partnership that will return the Kalakala to its former glory.
More about Rodrigues’ proposals are at www.kalakala.org.
