Four men and a boat
The Voyager’s new operators: Craig Stanton, Billy Schwaneberg, John Miller, and Ken Swanson. Photo by Olivia Kestin
Few things have remained the same over the past half century of harbor history in Redondo Beach.
An entire downtown district was purposely reduced to rubble. Storms and fires wreaked havoc and remade the city’s pier. Generations of leaders, most who grappled with how to keep the waterfront vibrant, have come and gone.
All the while, a large wooden boat made its way in and out of the harbor almost each and every day.
The Voyager, a 65 ft. passenger vessel that was purpose-built at the very inception of King Harbor, has never been glamorous. The double-decked ship with room for 149 people originally ferried sport fishermen to and from fishing barges – including the Isle of Redondo, the Californian, and the Sacramento – stationed a few miles outside the harbor. Eventually the boat became an attraction unto itself, introducing thousands of youngsters to the ocean. The cost of an introduction to the watery part of the world was a meager 50 cents when the Voyager first began offering rides in the early 1960s.
The boat has also served as the South Bay’s unofficial but beloved maritime academy. Hundreds of teenagers started out as “pinheads” on the Voyager – working for nothing more than the joy of being out on the water, fishing, and learning the ropes of seamanship – and many of those kids worked their way to becoming paid deckhands. The Voyager, perhaps more than any boat along the entire California coast, in this way helped launch the careers of dozens of skippers.
She has been King Harbor’s most stalwart and storied vessel, and so it meant something to a lot of people when the Voyager was put up for sale three months ago. The harbor’s other longtime vessel – the City of Redondo – had recently been sold and had left the harbor, renamed and relocated to Ventura.
But the loss of the Voyager was unfathomable.
“It’s run here for 55 years,” said Leslie Page, the property manager for the Redondo Beach Marina, who has worked in the harbor for three decades. “When we lost the City of Redondo it was a sad state. We want to keep the history of the harbor here in Redondo Beach. People in this town grew up on that boat – the Voyager is a part of Redondo’s entire history.”
“Now that the City of Redondo is gone, it’s one of the last landmarks left, because we tore everything else down,” said Councilman Pat Aust. “I guess that is because you can’t tear a boat down.”
The Voyager has hosted parties, weddings, and even burials. It was much more than the sum of its well-worn parts; it was, in a very real sense, an integral part of the harbor community.
“It was hard enough to see the City of Redondo leave this port, but to see the Voyager go would have been really hard,” said JoAnn Turk, president of the King Harbor Association, who has worked in the harbor since the early 1960s. “It was not the glamorous sister – it was attractive enough, but it was a working boat. It did a little bit of everything.”
The Voyager barely hit the market when four local captains banded together to buy it. Craig Stanton, Ken Swanson, Billy Schwaneberg, and John Miller were all skippers who possessed the coveted master “100 Ton” license – meaning all could operate a large passenger vessel – and each had a long history with the Voyager.
The deal went down almost immediately. The Voyager would stay in Redondo waters.
“It’s got some history, and we’ve got some history, too,” Stanton said. “This has been an anchor here for years. It was purpose-built for this landing. It’s never been anywhere else. Just to keep the history of the boat here was a big part of this – we all worked on it, or ran it, at one point or another.”
“Or ran into it,” Schwaneberg said, laughing.
“The main reason we did it is we are all Redondo guys,” Swanson said. “We saw it as an investment, and we want to keep that boat here.”
The Voyager's new ownership: Billy Schwaneberg, Kenny Swanson, Craig Stanton, and John Miller. Photo by Olivia Kestin
“Those boys came up to the plate immediately, the minute they knew it was for sale,” Page said. “It was the quickest closing boat I’ve seen in all my years in the business…And these are four of the strongest, safest marine operators I have worked with in all my years in the harbor. I couldn’t be more thrilled. And you know how I feel about this place. I love it.”
Past and future
The Voyager, circa 1955
Before King Harbor even existed, a boat was built for it.
The Voyager was commissioned in 1955, six years before the harbor was fully functional. Gordon McCrae Sr., the original Redondo Beach Marina leaseholder, had the boat constructed at the now-defunct Sherman Boatworks in Wilmington. It was built out of old growth popular, now a rarity, and it was built to last, double-planked to withstand the frequent dockings in the open ocean with barges and along the pier.
When Coast Guard inspectors surveyed the boat after its recent purchase, they couldn’t believe what they saw. They quite literally don’t build boats like the Voyager any more.
“The inspectors were astonished,” Stanton said. “They described it as a severely overbuilt boat – they were very impressed with its construction and longevity.”
Gary Wiley, who worked as a deckhand on the boat back in the 1960s and then spent more than three decades on the Redondo police force before returning to skipper the boat in his retirement, said the boat is a relic of a bygone era.
“It’s a good old boat,” Wiley said. “Not fast – it was never built to be fast – but it’s a well-built boat. You probably wouldn’t be able to build one like that today, with that old growth poplar.”
The Voyager was the first boat Stanton ever rode on. He was 10 years old, and he never looked back.
“I rode out to the barges, when I was 10-years-old, in the early ‘70s, and proceeded to work on the boat back on weekends,” Stanton said. “I was a pinhead on the barges, like Kenny was…We all cut our teeth on that and got salt in our veins.”
Swanson likewise started working on the barges at the age of 14, and thereby became acquainted with the Voyager. Pinheads on the fishing barges frequently also worked on the Voyager, transporting fish back and forth between the boat and the barges and helping people to their cars with their catch (for tips, hopefully) back in the harbor. Swanson later first became a captain on the Voyager in 1990. He went on to become a successful lobster fisherman and skipper.
“That is where I started,” Swanson said of the Voyager. “It was definitely a kind of nostalgic feeling getting back on the boat.”
Schwaneberg came at it from a slightly different angle. He is a diver who performs underwater maintenance and started out doing the maintenance on the Isle of Redondo barge.
“That’s how I got to know that boat, back in 1983,” Schwaneberg said. “I worked side by side with it ever since that, rode through a couple of major storms and helped keep it intact…I never thought I would be part owner of it. I just would like to see this boat still work here and be successful.”
Miller is a fisherman. He grew up around the docks and became acquainted with anything and everything that had to do with the harbor and fishing.
He remembers picking former Voyager skipper Tiny Tumanuvao’s brain while riding the boat to the barges.
“I was just kind of up in the wheelhouse talking about fish and bullshitting….” Miller said. “There used to be lots of kids hanging out in the harbor, you know. Not so much anymore.”
Miller has become one of the best-known local sport fishermen. He has won several tournaments and spends part of each year in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, as the captain of a 60-ft. marlin tournament boat. He has had his eye on the Voyager for a long time.
“It always just seemed one of those bitchin’ little businesses to own,” Miller said. “It’s a staple in Redondo, and it just seemed like a good deal and I’ve got a good feeling about it. None of us will get rich, of course, but one of the cool things is we can make a few bucks and we can own a little piece of the harbor here.”
Stanton, who works as the operations manager for Decron Properties, owners of the Redondo Beach Marina, has skippered several of the harbor’s boats, including the Voyager, the Sea Spray, and the Legacy Searcher.
“All four of us have something to bring to the table,” Stanton said. “Kenny has been an operator. Billy is our structural engineer, so to speak. I would be more the business manager. And John is an ace machine electrician.”
They will join a long line of Voyager skippers and operators who have been an essential part of the larger-than-life history of the harbor – characters such as Captain Tiny, Mark Willy, Paul Hendricks, Mark Podall, John Glackin, Adam Berry, John Strunk, John Baker and Casey Kajiyama.
Turk said that because the boat is a “single-screw” — meaning it has only a single propeller – the Voyager takes a little more skill to maneuver and has thus helped produce particularly good skippers.
“If they could run the Voyager, a single screw, they could run anything,” she said. “And many of them are. Some are down in Long Beach, some are on tugs, some work the Chevron ship in El Segundo, a couple of kids are up in Alaska running fishing camps…It was a good training ground.”
More than anything, Wiley said, the Voyager has helped provide generations of kids access to the ocean. Wiley, who skippered the boat the last six years, said that the Voyager is particularly good as a Whale Watch vessel. Because it is wood and has been in these waters so long, Wiley said, whales seem to approach the boat more often than other boats.
“Naturalists believe whales have memory, and they know from years past we are not trying to run them down or give them problems,” Wiley said. “So it’s a guess, but I think the boat doesn’t scare them and doesn’t have that hard sound or vibration, and it’s been there for years and years…”
“How do you describe the wonderment on people’s faces, kids and adults alike, when they see a huge whale come up alongside the boat? There is no way to describe it,” Wiley added.
One of the primary intentions of the new ownership foursome is try to revive more interest among kids in coming down to the water.
“We are going to try to make it more available to the school system and to the civic community,” Stanton said. “We hope to put a touch tank on it in the near future and hopefully enlighten some more kids to the marine environment, like we were enlightened to it at that age.”
“We definitely need to get more young people down in the harbor,” Swanson said. “It’s not like it used to be, kids coming down and going out fishing. It seems like kids sit at home on their computers now.”
Everyone involved hopes to also helps represent a new beginning for the harbor. In its first month of operation, the Voyager has attracted more riders than it has in a decade, selling out on the Fourth of July for the first time in recent memory.
The Voyager, circa 2010. Photo by Olivia Kestin
“The Voyager represents a lot of beginnings for a lot of people,” Turk said. “The kids come out maybe for their first boat ride ever, or the first time out on the ocean. Some kids came down on the docks and became pinheads or deckhands and get exposed to the ocean – maybe they lived nearby, surfed, or fished on the pier, but never had the chance to go out on the ocean. It was such a good training ground for so many young men.”
It’s also a new beginning for the Voyager itself, as well as the four, not-so-young men who have just ensured that the Voyager remains in Redondo waters.
“If that boat wasn’t out there, there’d definitely be a missing link in the chain,” Swanson said. “That is for sure.”
For more info, see www.voyagerexcursions.com; for Whale Watching, call Redondo Sportfishing at 310-372-2111. For charters, call the RB Marina at 310-374-3481. ER