Talk about an epic haul.
It was a beautiful fall day in mid-November when San Pedro fishing boat skipper Vince “Enzo” Lauro and his five-man crew on the 70-foot-long St. Joseph headed out for what was to be a routine day collecting squid.
But what they wound up hauling onboard nearly rolled the vessel: An old, 8,000-pound anchor that had been sucked down long ago into the ocean floor several miles off the Long Beach breakwater opening.
Lauro, 59, described the find succinctly:
“Crazy.”
But once the crew hauled the anchor onboard, on Nov. 14, they were “kind of stuck with it,” he said.
It was too heavy, Lauro said, to dump it back into the ocean.
So back to shore they went.
And now, the Trotman-style anchor — which could be as old as 200 years — sits along the Southern Pacific Slip, where San Pedro’s commercial fishing vessels are tied up.
“We thought we’d maybe move it but it’s too heavy,” Lauro said. “I know the port’s going to get on my rear end to move it, but where?”
Lauro said he’s had a private offer on it but would like to see it on public display in San Pedro — perhaps at the new West Harbor waterfront development now under construction.
)In the meantime, Capt. Michael Patterson, a private contractor working with the Los Angeles Maritime Institute, which is next door, has been doing some research on the find.
Lauro called him as they were heading in.
“We need a forklift to get this thing off the boat,” he told Patterson.
“So he comes pulling in with this 8,000-pound anchor,” Patterson recalled.
His research showed the anchor would have been made in Great Britain sometime between 1860 and 1910.
“If you had a British warship or were a merchant (seaman),” Patterson said, “this was the anchor you’d have.”
It’s the kind of anchors that were on the Queen Mary, though this one is smaller, Patterson said.
No chain was attached, he said, speculating it could have rusted away.
It could have been set down in a storm, he said. But there is no shipwreck in that area, Patterson said, so leads are scarce.
“It’s hard to say how this anchor was lost,” he said.
But Patterson has a guess.
“I think this was off of some 4- or 5-masted schooner of the day,” he said, “anchored out there waiting to come in and a storm could have caused it to lose the anchor.”
But that part of the story remains a mystery.
Lauro’s boat, which uses underwater electronic technology, didn’t pick the relic up on its monitors, Lauro said. Its existence appears to have been unknown by area fishing crews, he added.
“Nobody knew it was there,” he said.
But when Lauro’s crew lowered the net and the powerful cables closed above, it was snagged and the force pulled the old anchor loose from the depths — complete with giant scallops on it.
Once they saw what came up, Lauro said, the crew first “had to get it off the (expensive fishing) gear” and inside the boat before heading back to shore.
While no one had apparently ever pulled it up before, the anchor had clearly been snagged by fishing gear in the past, probably over many decades.
The anchor was wrapped in a “huge bramble of old nets,” Patterson said, including the old cloth cotton nets dating back to the 1950s and 1960s.
“This thing had been down there snagging nets for maybe 100 years; they were stacking up,” Patterson said.
Any identifying manufacture or numbered markers, though, have long since corroded away, he said.
Lauro’s boat was “tipping over by 30 degrees and they were fearful it was going to capsize the boat,” Patterson said. “When we got it onto the dock and started cutting it free, we realized it was too heavy for a forklift.”
They used a crane on wheels provided by the Jankovich Company nearby in the port.
By legacy, Patterson said, the anchor “belongs to the fisherman who found it.”
Lauro put the anchor into the maritime museum’s custodial care for now, Patterson said, and research is still being done on it.
The anchors get their name from John Trotman, who patented the type of anchor in 1852, according to an article posted by the Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Virginia.
Among monuments to the anchor on display is a plaque commemorating one from around 1852 that was discovered in 1996 off the west coast of Vancouver Island.
“There’s a whole story line on how these Trotman anchors became the ones that were (so uniformly) used,” Patterson said.
But his outreach to researchers seeking to learn more about the specific anchor recovered in the San Pedro Bay hasn’t yielded much response so far, he said.
“This would have been on a pretty good-sized vessel at one time,” said Lauro, whose father was a fisherman when he brought his wife and five children to San Pedro from Ischia, Italy, in 1967. “The thing is mammoth.”
Lauro said he believes it could date back to the 1800s.
And what does that all say about his forebears, who worked and sailed seas so long before him?
“They were tough,” he said.
Source: Orange County Register
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