On the afternoon of a day that saw 30 boats sink in the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor by early official counts, damage from a tsunami surge that left an estimated $15 million of wreckage in its wake, Howard Thevenin watched stoically from the side of the harbor and recounted some history.
“It used to be a lagoon,” he said of the harbor. “We swam in it as a kid and played in this house right here.” He motioned toward the Save Our Shores headquarters on Lake Avenue. “We’ve had three tidal waves—we had one when I was about 11, ’65 or sometime. We got out of the harbor but it sucked this harbor dry.”
Until today, he had another boat in the harbor, but he said, explaining, “Now, I’m an end-tie. When it broke, the pull—see how there is a ring around the dock?—the boat’s on the dock, spinning around hitting my boat. Another boat is destroying mine.”
As Thevenin spoke, the water in the harbor was receding for the umpteenth time that day, part of the rapid ebb and flow of water generated by the massive 8.9 quake that struck Japan Thursday night. “It’s just dropped five feet since you walked up here,” he pointed out to a reporter.
Another man interjected, “U dock took the brunt. There were two fingers to it—one off to the left and one to the center—the one to the left is completely gone.”
By the end of the day, U dock was no longer visible, only the piers. The wreckage from it and two other damaged docks—as well as flotsam from damaged boats—were blamed for many of the sunken vessels and for damage, both minor and major, to scores of other boats (as many as 100, according to the County Office of Emergency Services). People were speculating in vague terms about U dock’s fragile state before Friday’s tsunami and how tight budgets and deferred maintenance might be to blame.
Plenty of people were gathered, talking and looking. It seemed the whole town was at the harbor, checking out the damage and watching the mucky water as it gushed from the open ocean into the upper harbor in eerie, unpredictable surges. People milled about on the bridge; some had brought their dogs, their children, their bikes and snacks and beer aplenty for the sunny afternoon. The enormous O’Neill catamaran in the lower harbor looked just fine, but in the upper harbor, chaos reigned while boat-owners and friends stood by, watching and waiting for the tsunami to subside.
Stacey Koch and Lizzy Samson came over from Seabright to see what could be seen. Koch explained that the movement in the harbor was the same kind of motion as when you make a wave in the bathtub, and that for the past couple of hours, they’d been watching several boats swinging back and forth and a pipe that alternated between being submerged and exposed.
Nearby, a weary Katie Wohlstattar prepared to go home. She had spoken to several reporters that day and described herself simply as the owner of the “big blue sailboat that hit the bridge.” It seemed to be the end of her 35-foot Yorktown.
On the bridge, Gordon Rudy pointed to his 36-foot Sea Ray, Donovan’s Reef, “right down there on the end” of the dock next to the now-vanished U dock. It looked fine, but he said he’d already watched four boats sink today. And for him, the stakes were high. Rudy lives on his boat.
Asked what he’ll do if he can’t get back on his boat, he laughed and looked at his mother, who stood beside him. “Move to the motor home—either that or move to Mom’s. We’ve been on that boat for two years, two years in April, but I’ve had a boat in this harbor for 10 years, as a pleasure craft. Lived here as a fulltime person for two years.” He pointed to his former boat, moored just one vessel away.
“You do have a fair amount of ‘live-aboards’ down here, like ourselves, that this is their home, so this is life-changing—it’s not like this is just a situation of the elite pleasurecraft people of Santa Cruz. That’s really not what this is. These are working class folks who have boats, working class folks that live on boats. It’s very different. It’s not like we’re in Huntington Beach.”
Rudy said the dip in the economy put a lot of people like himself on their boats. “At one time I used to be able to afford to have a house and have a boat,” he said. He added that the nature of the Santa Cruz Harbor liveaboard community is “very, very strong.” “It’s always been a fun place,” he said.
It wasn’t just liveaboards and elite pleasurecraft who were taking a beating. Even the harbor patrol lost a boat. With the Harbor Commission prepared to ask for help from FEMA and Gov. Jerry Brown having declared a state of emergency for four counties, including Santa Cruz County, it seemed to be up to the neighbors to band together to repair the losses that everyone’s property suffered.
