Delegation to consider rescuing the Kalakala

As many as 30 Port Angeles civic leaders and potential investors will be on an exploratory mission launched by the Olympic Peninsula town. They're making a strong pitch toward acquiring the rusty but famous Depression-era ferry, a high-tech marvel of its time, as the centerpiece of their harborfront development.

"I'll be cooking hamburgers and hot dogs while they take a look at it and talk," said Peter Bevis, head of the non-profit Kalakala Foundation.

The VIPs however, will have to buy their own Kalakala T-shirts and other gifts.

The Port Angeles folks are demonstrating the kind of serious commitment to restoring and caring for the venerable boat that Bevis says he wishes Seattle would show.

"I and the Kalakala Foundation board want to keep the boat here for Seattle, but we also want to do right by the boat," he said of Port Angeles' chances of winning the boat away from Seattle.

Although the ferry has sparked lots of memories and has many fans in Seattle, the Emerald City's pockets haven't opened deep enough to find the $700,000 in private money needed to get the boat into drydock.

Bevis has been looking for a new berth since last month, after city building inspectors on a routine aerial tour found that the rusty boat poked 50 feet too far into navigation lanes from the berth that it has occupied for 18 months at the north end of Lake Union.

A warning that $75-a-day fines could begin by Oct. 23 has been put on hold temporarily as Kalakala board members and city officials brainstorm ways to help.

Smelling a chance to acquire the boat that once was as much a Seattle icon as the Space Needle, Port Angeles civic leaders launched a movement to explore obtaining and restoring the Kalakala as a centerpiece for its harbor development.

Port Angelinos have fond memories of the 1940s and 1950s, when the art deco boat, with dining and dancing to an on-board orchestra, made the Port Angeles-Victoria, B.C., runs.

Meanwhile, an idea floated by some Seattle city officials to help ease the crisis appears to be drifting away, Bevis said.

The idea of simply nudging the ferry a little to the southwest to get it out of the navigation lane would block views from the equally historic ferry Skansonia, moored next door.

The Skansonia hosts weddings, anniversaries and other functions that would fall into the Kalakala's shadow.

More important, its owners are the Kalakala's landlord, Bevis said.

He said he's asked to meet with Mayor Paul Schell to discuss the boat's future.

"I need leadership, I'm just a sculptor," he mused.

And he's continuing to shop around Puget Sound. Recently, however, some Lake Washington residents floated ideas to at least temporarily moor the boat there, keeping it in less corrosive freshwater.

The Kalakala, after all, was born in Kirkland in 1935. The old Lake Washington Shipyards at what is now Carillon Point was the only outfit on the West Coast to employ a new technology -- electric welding -- to sculpt the streamlined boat.

Bevis, a Fremont sculptor, spearheaded the drive to bring the ferry home to Seattle after spotting it grounded for use as a fish processor in an Alaskan mudflat in 1988.

The boat, a Seattle icon from 1935 to 1969, was rescued and towed 1,700 miles home in November 1998, and was greeted in Elliott Bay by enthusiastic crowds. Its name means flying bird in Chinook jargon.