If the winds are gentle Sunday, Nov. 17, the historic warship Constellation will be nudged gingerly from its Inner Harbor wharf for the first time in 16 years, and tugged to a Fort McHenry dry dock for 2 1/2 years of repairs and reconstruction.
Corsetted in rubber sheets and trussed by cables, the leaking Civil War relic will leave at high tide, about 11: 30 a.m. The cautious, 1.5-mile sail should take three to four hours if it doesn't end on the harbor's bottom.
The Constellation will get a new, watertight hull and spar deck, new masts and rigging, and an appearance more faithful to the ship's 1854 origins. The president of the United States will be invited to help welcome the ship back in the spring of 1999 if repairs are made on schedule.
"This is what we have been struggling toward for 22 months," said Louis F. Linden, executive director of the Constellation Foundation. "This is the beginning of turning our hopes and dreams into reality."
A week before the move, Nov. 10 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., the ship will be reopened briefly to give the public a final chance to walk aboard. It has been closed to the public since October 1994.
Details of the move were to be announced today at an 11 a.m. Inner Harbor ceremony.
The foundation has raised $5.2 million of the $9 million needed to rebuild and preserve the ship. Of that, $3 million has been pledged by the city of Baltimore, $1 million by the state, and $1.2 million from corporations and foundations.
Another $2 million in state matching funds will be sought from the General Assembly. The final $1.8 million must be raised from the private sector. A campaign for individual donations will begin after the ship is moved.
Foundation Chairwoman Gail R. Shawe said the fact that the foundation has reorganized, secured more than half its funding and won Navy approval for its repair plan "should demonstrate that we have the will and the support to go forward."
Linden said, "No cultural institution, symphony or museum or library can survive without an organized constituency of people who care, and that's something the Constellation never really had."
That has been blamed in part on decades of public confusion about the ship's history.
For 40 years, the ship's caretakers sought to win public support by portraying the ship as the frigate Constellation, built at Fells Point in 1797 and sister ship to the USS Constitution -- "Old Ironsides."
