Bret Apthorpe, retired Jamestown Public Schools superintendent, found the news while doing research for a book. Apthorpe has lengthy ties to the Sea Lion growing up in Mayville and spending time working on the ship in his younger years.

“I got to see a lot of things and I grew up with those guys doing that,” Apthorpe said. “I got to see a lot of things that I felt needed to be told because it’s a lot of local stuff. When I was working on the aftermath, the afterword, that’s where I did my phone calls both to Virginia and Albany and that’s when I had learned the ship was (decommissioned). They just didn’t have the money and the resources. It wasn’t your average ship. And to try and restore it to its original state. To try to restore it to its original state would require an unfathomable amount of money and also the skill sets to do that. So they decommissioned it.”

The plan had been for the Sea Lion to be relocated to the Citie of Henricus where it can be interpreted to the over 25,000 school children who visit the park each year. The Sea Lion Foundation Grant Proposal is focused on providing educational experiences for students in a unique, safe, and engaging environment outside of the classroom, thus capturing the imagination of visitors.

The trip never happened.

The Sea Lion is pictured in the winter of 1983 in its cradle in Mayville. P-J file photo

The Sea Lion was originally conceived by Ernie Cowan of Mayville in 1971 with research into building a replica 16th century English merchant sailing ship.

“Fourteen years ago, my wife and I went on vacation,” Cowan told the Buffalo Evening News on the eve of the Sea Lion’s first water trials. “We saw the Mayflower II and walked aboard her and thought it would be nice if, somewhere, there was a real ship like that you could really sail on – so you could go out and feel what it must have been like for the pilgrims when they came over. I always wanted to build a boat anyway.”

The plans and designs for the Sea Lion were discovered by Cowan in a journal written in 1586 by English shipwright Matthew Baker. Only a compass and a straight edge was used to design the ship, with each piece of wood sized in direct proportion to the others. A special caulking called oakum was used that was derived by the British from hemp plants that required special federal permits to be delivered and used on the Sea Lion. A special work bench had to be built with wooden vices and grips so that the wood didn’t scar. Designing the ship was only half of the battle for Cowan. Wood for the ship was found on the Cheney property in Chautauqua County and turned into more than 10,000 board feet of virtually knot-free wood for the ship’s hull and framing.

The ship first sailed on May 21, 1984, in Mayville, with regular excursions into Chautauqua Lake planned for 1985. One of the hurdles was dredging sand from the Sea Lion Drive drydock so that the Sea Lion could actually make it to the lake, with 7,000 cubic yards the lake eventually dredged under a 1979 DEC permit. The ship was officially commissioned in August 1985 and declared ready for visitors.

Finances always hung over the Sea Lion’s proverbial head. It was a heavy lift to secure the financing to build the ship, and even as the ship was getting ready for trials on Chautauqua Lake there was a threat of the bank foreclosing on a $50,000 loan that had been taken out for construction. It was only four years after the 1985 commissioning that a fight for control of the ship began. The Sea Lion was running a deficit of between $15,000 and $20,000 a year because of maintenance and dredging expenses to clear the channel to the ship’s winter dry dock, with issues arising by 1989 with reports of mushrooms growing in the ship’s interior, moldy linen sails and cracked paint. The ship didn’t take passengers in 1989, and in November 1989 negotiations between the Chautauqua Lake Historic Vessels board and the Sea Lion’s builders and crew members had turned into a stalemate after years of board shakeups, concerns over finances and sale of the Sea Lion’s marina in an effort to make the project financially viable.

Ernie Cowan is pictured in August 1985 on the deck of the Sea Lion. P-J file photo

The ship ended up in Lake Erie, moored in Buffalo, when the ship sank in the ice in February 1999. Pieces of the ship were removed and scattered throughout the county, with efforts to raise the ship finally successful in 2000.

“I know what we accomplished is one hell of a feat,” Sam Genco, leader of the dive team that raised the ship, said in July 2000. “This baby’s going to sail again someday.”

The town of Westfield placed the ship in Barcelona Harbor, where it sat until October 2015. She never sailed again.

Ernie Cowan is pictured in Mayville in March 1985. P-J file photo

The crew of the Sea Lion is pictured on Chautauqua Lake in May 1985. P-J file photos

The crew of the Sea Lion is pictured on Chautauqua Lake in May 1985. P-J file photos