Audio
John Gherini
Transcript
My name is John Guarini and I'm the great great grandson of Justinian. Care who owned the entire island of Santa Cruz in the 1880s. My grandparents Ambro and Maria Guarini, acquired the East End of the island in 1926. The Guarini family operated a sheep ranch on the eastern 6200 acres of Santa Cruz Island. From 1926 until 1984, for these 58 years, the Greenie family continued the arduous task of herding, shearing, docking, separating and transporting sheep and wool to the markets on the main. Plan while our family lived in Santa Barbara, we spent many weekends and summer months working on the island. Well, I first started going over to the island, probably in the 1950s. Maybe I was six or seven years old, and I can remember on days of the roundup that I was too small to go on the roundup. So one of my primary jobs is was to help the cook. Grind coffee at 4:00 in the morning and do chores around the ranch well. The riders were out on the the roundup, but as we grew older, of course we soon found ourselves on the roundup we found ourselves building fences and. Helping with chores and being involved in the the sharing process, not actually sharing, but sacking the wool and separating the flock and then helping repair fences. Well, there were a couple memorable trips, but on either the NATCO, which is a boat that we had until 1959, or on the Hodge, it would take about 2 1/2 hours, 3 hours from Santa Barbara to to Scorpion Harbor and. Trips could be very rough, particularly going back because of the prevailing northwest winds, but certainly on 2 occasion I was on the NATCO when it almost sank. We were three or four miles off of Scorpion with a lot of heavy Caterpillar part. And the NATCO, which is was a 42 foot salmon trawler really that's what it was designed for, started taking on a lot of water and the Coast Guard had. To come out and. Get us and they actually towed us back into Santa Barbara. The other incident was in 1976. Where I. Was. On the Hodge, so when we bought the boat in 1959, it was, you know, adapted for our needs because we could put a lot of supplies in the cargo hole and and it had good deck space for shipping maybe 400, four, 150 sheep when we did the the shipping. But in January of 1976, we were coming out of the harbor of Santa Barbara Harbor. And and the city was having trouble with the dredging of the harbor and the entrance to the harbor was very narrow and we hit the sandbar going out. I can remember distinctly that we pulled back off the sandbar and then we proceeded on our way. Once we were clear, the sandbar we were. Carrying about 16 or 1755 gallon drums of gasoline and diesel, and that was the purpose of the trip to take the the fuel out to the island. And maybe we had seven or eight people on board. And so we're about 3 miles out of Santa Barbara Harbor, and my Uncle Francis he. He thought the engine was dragging. It didn't sound right to him, so he went down to the engine room and he came up and his first words to me were were sinking. And he said get everybody in the their life jackets, which we did, but it was pretty obvious our skiff that we tow off the stern when we go over the island wasn't big enough for. All the people. So he radioed, you know, Mayday to the Coast Guard, which I believe was run at that time, run through the Long Beach station. And the point Judith, fortunately, was at the harbor with their entire crews. The point Judith was Coast Guard vessel. About a 60 footer and it came out probably within about a 45 minutes to an hour by the time it came out, the water was deck level and while the the seas were fairly calm, you know 4 to 5 foot seas. With the water in the cargo hole, the dynamics of the Hodge changed to where there was doing a lot of. Rocking. And so that the captain that commanded the point, Judith, he was very good and he wanted to make sure that when we transferred the people from the Hodge to the Coast Guard that. They didn't get caught between the two vessels because that had been probably a serious injury. So when that was done he tried to tow the the Hodge back to Santa Barbara and that work. For he tried maybe for 1/2 hour and it was, the drag was just too great. And so he chopped the lines and then we saw the boat sink between beneath the seas. It was an adventure.
Description
Duration
5 minutes, 33 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
06/04/2016
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