Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
Ernie Minney, owner of Minney’s Yacht Surplus, remembers a simpler time in Newport. But he also is keen to remember the potential dangers of open water. Catalina Harbor’s famous waters still hold the skeletons of a boat called Ning Po, which stranded there after a particularly bad storm, and then burned there in 1938, relinquishing its title of “oldest ship still sailing”, having been made in 1753. The three-masted Chinese Junk weighed 291 tons and was beached on Catalina during a particularly nasty storm, and never righted. After a film crew accidentally started a fire on board, it was burned to the waterline, and decomposed there for decades more.
Ernie Minney recalled that when at anchor aboard his boat, Kelpie, “after a ration or two of grog” his father would recite the Ning Po poem. He said that the Minney kids knew it by heart at an early age, and that it had special significance if they could see the bones of Ning Po from a spot in Catalina Harbor, especially as their father had spent his teenage years living in Avalon and exploring the island.
The poem is as follows– have you heard it before?
POEM
Hung in the mud above low tide
On Catalina’s seaward side
Her canvas gone her bottom too
Lies the Chinese pirate junk–Ning Po
Teredoes gnaw at her rotting beams
And mud seeps in through her open seams
She’s a haunted hull with a blood stained deck
A thing of the past a mummified wreck
Some night when the wind and the tides are high
And the combers froth neath an inky sky
The sea gods will call for the old Ning Po
And manned by a phantom yellow crew
She’ll drive down the mud flats and over the reef
Headed for hell with a bone in her teeth
Her deck beams will shiver-her timbers will moan
As the gods of the sea lay claim to their own
– Author unknown
More information on Ning Po can be found at http://www.cawreckdivers.org/Wrecks/Ningpo.htm
