It was a momentous day for the crew of the Spanish galleon San Salvador as they raised the mainsail on the replica ship for the first time ever while it was underway in the San Diego Bay.

Measuring almost 57-feet-high from the deck, the huge sail slowly unfurled as the yard was raised up the main mast which towers some 85-feet above the stately ship.

“This is the first time in 400 years we’ve set sail on a galleon in this bay,” said Mike McDermott, who works for the Maritime Museum of San Diego, the organization in charge of the project.

“This has never been done before,” said crew member Mac McQuinn, at least not since 1542 when Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo sailed into San Diego.

And it was no easy task. The main yard on the three-masted ship weighs 775 pounds and the sail itself is about 200 pounds, said McQuinn.

Six crew members slowly worked the capstan, a revolving winch turned by hand, that lifted the heavy sail aloft as eight other crew members worked pulling rigging and adjusting the many ropes needed to do the job. It was very labor intensive, said McQuinn.

“It was very smooth,” said volunteer Irene Batch, one of the crew raising the sail. She said the main thing they wanted to find out was just how much muscle it was going to take to get the sail up and down again. The answer? A lot!

Ships nowadays used hydraulic lifts. “Juan Cabrillo didn’t have that,” said McQuinn.

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McQuinn joked that the effort was like a driver’s education class. “It worked very well, just like we planned it,” he said. After all, he pointed out, there is no user manual on how to sail a 16th century galleon. “We’re writing it today,” he said.

“They didn’t sink it,” quipped one volunteer as he walked by.

The construction of the San Salvador, a historically correct model of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s flagship vessel, has taken some $6.2 million and more than four years to build.

The Maritime Museum says the ship is a symbol of California’s history and a window into the age of exploration and the genesis of the West Coast region. Cabrillo was the first non-indigenous person to step foot into the state.

If all goes as planned, the ship will set sail later this year on an excursion up the coast of California. For now, though, the crew is literally, just learning the ropes. So far so good.

“It was great,” said McQuinn. “I had a chill, I really did. This is our baby. We love it.”

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