Los Angeles Yacht Club will host the 17th running of the Port of Los Angeles/Cal Maritime Harbor Cup Regatta — one of the nation’s preeminent intercollegiate sailing events — from Friday to Sunday, March 7-9. This is the only event where the Long Beach Sailing Foundation allows its matched Catalina 37s to ignore its sunset curfew and be away from Long Beach for the weekend. The regatta annually brings 10 sailing teams from leading universities and institutions to Los Angeles to compete in the keelboats. This year’s lineup includes defending champions Maine Maritime Academy — which will compete for the 14th time. USC, meanwhile, is also in its 14th year participating in the regatta and is looking to best its second-place finish last year. The Cal State University Maritime Academy and U.S. Naval Academy will continue their respective streaks of having never missed the Harbor Cup. Eight-time winners the University of Hawaii and past winners the College of Charleston will also return, while Arizona State and the University of Victoria will make their Harbor Cup debuts. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy will round out the field. Information:
layc.org/harbor-cup .
Goodbye, iconic ships.
Coincidentally, California State University Maritime Academy is located in Vallejo, to where I made quick trip on Feb. 26, though I didn’t go to visit college students. Rather, I went to say my final goodbyes to a couple of vessels that called Long Beach home for many years — the paddle-wheeler Grand Romance and the cruise ship Aurora. Grand Romance called Long Beach’s Rainbow Harbor home for almost 18 years. The ship left Long Beach, as colleague David Templeton put it in his Argus Courier column, “due to some sort of longstanding disagreement to do with electricity and storage.” In 2019, Grand Romance made the north, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge to Vallejo, where it remains today. Unfortunately, there have been several incidents of vandalism since the ship’s arrival — making it doubtful that it will return to service. Just across the channel from Grand Romance is another vessel that at one time called Long Beach home: the 273-foot former cruise ship Aurora. The ship is dry-docked at Lind Marine on Mare Island. The company’s chairman of the board is Jon Slangerup, a former top executive of the Port of Long Beach. “Lind Marine is a California-based leader in diversified marine services and products operating throughout the Pacific West Coast,” according to Slangerup’s LinkedIn profile. It appears that Lind Marine has a contract to salvage the Aurora. Readers might recall Aurora is a German-built ship that spent many years anchored near the Belmont Pier. Recently, the ship sank in the California Delta. After being raised, the ship was towed to Mare Island. A team was zealously working on board preparing Aurora to be scrapped.
SS United States
The 990-foot retired American ocean liner, which was built for United States Lines, has been on the news this past week as it was being towed from Philadelphia to a shipyard in Alabama, where hazardous materials will be removed. The ship will then be sunk in about 180 feet of water, about 20 miles off the Okaloosa, Florida. The ship will become the world largest artificial reef. In our Long Beach home, we have our own memory of the sleek fast ship: a leather chair from the first-class smoking lounge on board. As a fire precaution, the only wood on the ship was the butcher block in the galley and a mahogany piano. Our orange leather chair is constructed with multiple sections of metal, ensuring its sturdiness. The chair will be strong for many years. Many have called the final journey of the ship being towed as its “death march.” I prefer to think of it as the SS United States’ “victory tour.” The SS United States is the largest ocean liner to be entirely constructed in the U.S. and the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic Ocean. It has been sitting for nearly 30 years — hidden in a dock behind an Ikea store. As a reef, the SS United States will continue inspiring future generations to learn about it.
