Historic schooner mast travels along I-5 Thursday

Commuters on I-5 may see something a little different on Thursday: a truck carrying a 114-foot, tall ship's mast. It's for the Bellingham-based historic schooner Zodiac.

The Zodiac lost its old mast and boom last September in an incident near Lummi Island.

The new mast was created from a 117-foot log at the Spar Shop in Aberdeen. The process took about two weeks.

The mast (which you can see the mast by clicking through the photos above) will be trucked from Aberdeen to Bellingham on Thursday. It should reach Olympia at 10 a.m., pass through Seattle at 11 a.m. and arrive at Bellingham's Fairhaven Cruise Terminal by 1 p.m.

The Zodiac has been restored to look the way she did when first launched in 1924, and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The 160-foot-long pilot schooner isn't a museum piece; it runs a busy cruise schedule around the Salish Sea from March through November.

You can view a public television documentary on the Zodiac at OPB.