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…
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