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“Guardians of a Forgotten Warship,” a Cal Poly Humboldt student documentary highlighting a group of local veterans, has been selected to screen at the 2024 Veterans Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The five-minute documentary, directed and produced by Ray Olson of Humboldt Outdoors, tells the story of six dedicated veterans who have taken on the tremendous task of restoring the USS LCI(L)-1091 – affectionately known as Ten-Ninety-One – a World War II-era warship beached on the Samoa Peninsula.

Before it arrived here in Humboldt County, LCI(L)-1091 took part in the Battle for Okinawa in 1945, witnessed atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and served as a medical lab during the Korean War to help prevent the spread of wartime disease. In 1988, landing craft infantry veteran Ralph Davis bought the historic ship and renamed it Ten-Ninety-One. Davis used the ship as a fishing vessel for 17 years before he donated it to the Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum with the hope that it could one day be restored. The ship sat in Humboldt Bay for another decade before it was dragged ashore to its current location behind the Samoa Cookhouse.

Twice weekly, the Ten-Ninety-One crew climbs aboard the historic ship to battle the ever-present threat of rust, tackle leaky areas of the top deck, touch up the paint, weld new deck plates and work on various other repairs.

McCarthy

“It’s definitely a labor of love,” U.S. Airforce veteran Royal McCarthy said in an interview with the documentary crew. “[W]e don’t want to see this thing go away, and we don’t want to see it rust into nothing. We definitely don’t want to see it cut up for scrap, so we’re doing all we can to promote the longevity of the boat and to make sure it’s saved.”

If the crew can’t find a new location for the ship, it will be scrapped to make way for the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal project, which aims to convert the Redwood Marine Terminal I property into a state-of-the-art industrial site for manufacturing, assembling and exporting the massive components needed for offshore wind development on the West Coast. 

Relocating the ship would cost an estimated $50,000, which is “far beyond” the crew’s financial resources, according to Olson. The crew’s dream is to replace the bottom of the ship, lug it back into Humboldt Bay and turn it into a museum and a meeting place for veterans. However, doing so would cost another $1 million dollars.

“It’s a long shot – I know it’s a long shot – but that isn’t going to stop us because the mission is to save the ship,” said U.S. Army veteran Ron Matson. “If we don’t, they’re going to cut it up into little pieces, which would be a travesty.”

“Guardians of a Forgotten Warship” was produced by Olson as a class assignment for Cal Poly Humboldt’s film class “Documentary Film Production” with help from Toni Brown, Solomon Winter, Tyler McNally and Jake Stoll. 

“‘Guardians of a Forgotten Warship’ embodies everything we hope for in the documentaries our students create,” Dave Janetta, an assistant film professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, wrote in a statement to the Outpost. “We encourage them to tell local stories that resonate widely and bring awareness to issues that need attention. … It’s incredibly rewarding to see our students apply the lessons of the classroom to real-world projects in the community and have the opportunity to share their work with a broader audience.”

The documentary will screen at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 15.

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