"We're going at the problem with everything we can, and making some good headway," said Sheri Eng, petty officer with the Coast Guard, which is helping lead the cleanup effort. "There's a lot of oil out there."

The aggregated armada of boats on the water either searching for oily messes or mopping it up grew today from 11 to 60, Eng said, and the number of people working the cleanup shifts grew from 300 to 500.

Twenty of the boats are skimmers - specially rigged craft that skim oil up from the water - from private contractors hired by the company that owns the Cosco Busan container ship that rammed a Bay Bridge tower last week and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay. The other 40 boats are volunteer fishermen, recreational sailers and local agency craft that are patrolling to direct cleanup efforts, Eng said.

By the end of today, the National Transportation Safety Board is expected to take over the lead of the investigation, since the primary responsibility for the spill will apparently lie with the staff of the ship that caused it. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein is due to arrive Sunday to tour the catastrophe by air and confer with disaster officials.

The Coast Guard has been the lead agency until now, and is the lead agency for the initial response to all big oil spills in the bay. It has been taking heat from officials from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., for both the cleanup effort and for its slowness in getting word of the huge size of the spill out to the public after it happened.

Coast Guard Rear Admiral Craig Bone, whose agency will still be involved in the probe along with the NTSB, reiterated his earlier contentions that the immediate response to the crisis on Wednesday was appropriate - even though the Coast Guard did not notify the public of the extent of the spill until more than four hours after learning of it.

"We did everything we could as quickly as we could," Bone said. As evidence of that, he noted that a cleanup skimmer was on the spill scene within an hour of the incident, something that he said usually takes several hours to happen.

"The work was done in heavy fog at high risk to individuals," he said.

The notification to the public, however, was not well done, he added.

Since the heavy bunker fuel spewed from the Cosco Busan's ruptured hull at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, it has spread as far north as Tomales Bay, to nearly every surface of the San Francisco bay north of Hunter's Point, west to the Farallon Islands, and south to Ocean Beach.

One woman near Santa Cruz in Aptos, 78 miles south of San Francisco, said that this morning she found dozens of oil-soaked, dead birds on the beach. But those birds turned out to have been killed by an "unusually severe incidence of seasonal Red Tide (poisonous algae contamination)," said state Department of Parks and Recreation spokesman Roy Stearns. Park rangers picked up 23 dead birds and two live ones, he said.

The ramp-up of the mopping effort is an improvement, observers said - but not enough.

"It's good that there are more skimmers out there and that they are in the worst of the worst locations, but we still find places where absolutely nobody is doing anything," said Sejal Choksi, program director of the environmental watchdog Baykeeper. "They need more cleanup crews. It seems like this is the weekend where we could make the most impact, because once it starts raining and another day of tides and currents move this oil around, it will be much harder to get at."

But ordinary citizens seeking to join cleanup crews, however, were left frustrated.

Hundreds of would-be oil spill cleanup volunteers who wanted to do something were told on Saturday in San Francisco to go home and do nothing.

Spilled oil is just too dangerous for ordinary citizens to clean up, the experts said.

The word came at an "informational session" for would-be volunteers at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium sponsored by the state Department of Fish and Game.

"Don't go to the beach, don't pick up tar balls, don't touch wildlife," said Yvonne Addassi, a wildlife director for the department. "We don't want you to be in contact with the oil. It's a hazardous substance."

Scores of public-minded citizens who had shown up for the meeting - many wearing old clothes and gloves and ready for a messy day of hard work on the beach - were clearly confounded. The official announcement of the meeting said officials would tell "how the public can get trained."

But Addassi said there was really nothing an average citizen could do at the beach except get in the way or get harmed.

"We appreciate your passion," Addassi said. "We know you're trying to do the right thing. But if you want to help, please stay away from the beach."

Large numbers of people will "scare away" oil-soaked birds from landing on the beach, Addassi said. And Chris Powell, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, said Ocean Beach is "not a place we need a concentration of people even though we know you want to help out."

One man stood up and told the crowd that he had already gathered about 20 pounds of oily beach goop over the past few days and wanted to know what to do with it.

That's part of the problem, Addassi replied. The goop can't be tossed in the trash. It must be disposed of in special toxic waste dumps.

"Just send it back to the ship!" someone hollered from the back of the hall.

The ship - the Cosco Busan - was at an Oakland dock on Saturday with a 100-foot-long gash in its side after crashing into a support tower of the Bay Bridge. Chunks of wood and wire from the bridge tower's protective buffer were sticking out of the hole in the hull.

At the volunteer meeting, everyone at the gathering was given an official-looking state volunteer application to fill out, complete with a loyalty oath. The fish and game people said volunteers might be contacted later, for non-hazardous duties.

"It's frustrating" said Ryan Gross of San Francisco. "I want to help, I don't want to sit home and do nothing. But that's what they told us to do."

Addassi assured the crowd that dozens of official beach cleaners were at work around the Bay Area, but many people at the meeting reported going to oily beaches and seeing little or no official cleanup taking place.

Some of the people at the meeting said they had already tried to do their own, unofficial cleanups and been ordered off the beaches by cops and threatened with citations or worse.

Beth Brown of San Francisco said she and her boyfriend spent about 15 minutes cleaning Baker Beach on Saturday morning, filling a couple of plastic bags with oily clumps. Then a park ranger and a cop appeared, told her the beach was closed and threatened them with arrest.

"I want to do what they want us to do but, right now, they want us to do nothing," Brown said. "And I can't do nothing."

After 90 minutes, Addassi said the "public class" for volunteers was over because she was late for her next public class in Richmond, where she was scheduled to tell another roomful of volunteers to go home and do nothing, too.

Meanwhile, a group of San Francisco surfer activists known as the Surfrider Foundation was urging its members to show up at Ocean Beach with "kitty litter scoops and heavy duty bags." But Addassi said any ordinary citizen who came to the beach would be ordered to stop picking up goop and go home.

It was much the same in Marin County, where Sigward Moser led a 30-person volunteer group - including 20 monks-in-training from the Mill Valley Zen Center - onto Muir Beach on Friday. For his efforts, he was detained and handcuffed.

The little army managed to scoop up nearly 500 bags of gloppy, sandy oil between 2 and 5 p.m. Moser said it was easy duty: "It rolls up like kitty litter, right off the surface of the sand. Went right into the bags with no problem."

They got almost all of the oil they could find - and then a National Park ranger showed up.

"He asked us to leave, and we said we needed to do what we were doing, so he put me in handcuffs," said Moser, a communications consultant. "I told him, 'Well, there was nobody else doing the cleanup before we began,' but he just said I was breaking the law and this is hazardous material that I shouldn't be dealing with."

Moser was cited for two misdemeanors, failure to obey an official order and entry into a restricted area, and released.

Now he has 500 bags of glop in his yard, and he has no idea how to get rid of it.

Rich Weideman, spokesman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area that administers Muir Beach, said he could understand the citizen impulse to help. But, he said, it is to no real avail.

"You have to have hazardous materials training to clean up oil," he said. "And that takes, at a minimum, 24 hours of training time. We do all of our training in-house, so were looking all day for a company that could do that kind of training for people who want to volunteer, but we can't find anyone."

So basically, he said, everyone who wants to help is out of luck.

"We'd love to have people involved, but we have to obey state labor laws," Weideman said.

The oil spill has shut down most beaches around the Bay Area. It also closed Angel Island state park and idled the ferries that serve it.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Triathlon at Treasure Island became a Bi-athlon when the bay swimming part of the competition was cancelled. Many of the 900 athletes from around the world who hoped to gain points to qualify for the Olympic games were left high and literally dry.

E-mail the writers at kfagan@sfchronicle.com, srubenstein@sfchronicle.com and jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com.