Published: February 17, 2008 09:56AM
NORTH BEND — Sandi Long takes a long, feet-first tumble down the jagged sandy cliff, her camera and bag and laughing voice sliding along with her as gravity pulls her to the beach below. “How do you get back up?” she hollers to her friend, Jim Martin, still standing on the cliff above.
“You gotta go that way,” Martin says, pointing north up the beach. “I’ll meet you in
No, you can’t just walk up to the mysterious shipwreck that the sands of time recently unveiled on the southern tip of
To get there, you need to go west on
Then you need an orange-flagged, 4-wheel drive vehicle that can maneuver along the bumpy, twisting, turning, sandy road for a few miles. Then you need to park and walk a few hundred yards — before tumbling.
Or you could drive down on the beach at low tide, or ride there on a horse or an ATV or a motorcycle.
Thousands of curious visitors have come to see the wooden bow of the ship that could be 100 years old, maybe older. They have arrived with digital cameras and video recorders and binoculars.
Shipwrecks fascinate us.
Why?
“It’s a part of our past,” says Long, of
Unless you’re trying to find an old shipwreck.
“Oh, wow — a lot,” says Barb Dunham of the North Bend Information Center when asked how many people have called or stopped by, asking about the shipwreck and how to find it. “It’s just been shocking.”
Three tour buses from
Visitors have until March 15 to view the wreck before the beach closes for the snowy plover breeding season.
Crowds are not what they were for the New Carissa — which, ironically, is scheduled to be dismantled by the state beginning in March — in 1999, but people are still coming from all over the state, California and Washington to see what Debbie Freeman of Salem says is “a boat. That’s all. It’s an old boat.”
Freeman may not be all that impressed but her boyfriend, Paul Smith, can’t stop running around the 35-foot-long exposed wooden bow that sits about 2½miles south of the New Carissa wreckage — nor stop wondering about it on this sunny, unseasonably warm Monday.
“It don’t look like no lumber carrier to me,” he says, referring to speculation by the Oregon Department of Parks & Recreation and the United States Bureau of Land Management. “Those square holes look like gun holes.”
Identity crisis
What this ship is, where it came from and how it got here are questions that researchers, historians and
“The process of narrowing down the candidates continues,” says Anne Donnelly, executive director of the museum that has erected a display of photographs of ships similar to this one, which was a steam schooner.
Could this be the 275-foot C.A. Smith, built by Kruse and Banks of North Bend in 1917, the ship that was carrying 1.5 million board feet of lumber when it ran aground on
Or is it the George L. Olson, a ship built in
The latter was a thought last week, but probably not since it’s been confirmed that the mystery ship was made of Douglas fir and most likely built north of
Jack Long, 86, of
Asked about a George E. Long ship, Donnelly can only mention the George L. Olson.
The exposed bow of the ship here, revealed after some of the harshest winter winds and rains in years, appears to be the same ship that appeared in 1948 and 1960, says Steve Samuels, a cultural resource specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Identifying the ship is a matter of searching through the thousands of photographs of ships built in the area between 1850 and 1950, says Samuels, who is working with Donnelly and Calum Stevenson, coastal coordinator of the Oregon Department of Parks & Recreation. They are also looking at construction records of ships, with help from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Heritage Program, Samuels says.
The ship was most likely a lumber carrier, he says, because it appears that decking on the back of the bow disappears into the sand, indicating that it’s a lower deck that would have been used to slide logs off at ports.
And what happens when, or if, it is identified?
“Then it will have a name and a story to document,” says Samuels, who adds that in his 11 years with the BLM, he has not seen an old ship reveal itself like this before. But he suspects the sand will cover it up again and it will be exposed again some other time for another generation.
“It’s nice that people are interested in its history,” he says. “They should go out and respect it. But they should only leave their footprints. Regardless of which (ship) it is, it’s tied back to a lot of history in
“Lure of the unknown”
Giant nails stick out of the reddish-brown schooner’s bow. Big, rusted metal pipes sit within it. There are two old, skinny metal bed frames.
It’s early afternoon and the tide is rolling in, closer and closer. White, foamy waves crash against the ship’s remains. A mast, which looks like an old, dead tree trunk that’s been struck by lightning, sticks up in the middle.
“I’ve lived here my whole life,” says David Laird, 62, staring down at the shipwreck from the newly formed cliffs of jagged chunks of receding sand and logs. “I didn’t know it was here.
“The mystery of it all,” he says, explaining what has brought him out on this day. “The lure of the unknown. What happened?”
Don Hall has finally found his way here, after driving up and down the sandy road.
“I’ve always been interested in shipwrecks,” says Hall, of
Hall guesses the ship was built between 1860 and 1890. “I don’t know, I’m just guessing,” he says.
A group of ATVs and motorcycles zooms up, including a Coos County Sheriff’s deputy on an ATV. A Sheriff’s Department beach ranger appears in her white pickup.
Six men appear and dance upon the bow.
Two young women arrive on the edge of the cliff, cell phones in their hands. They slide down. One of them, a blonde wearing a black Billabong T-shirt, runs to beat the tide. She touches the wooden bow, then sprints back to a log near the edge of the cliff.
“You didn’t even get your picture taken!” her friend says.
“I don’t care!” the woman says. “I just wanted to touch it — that’s all!”
Wooden ships out of water
Could one of these Coos Bay-area shipwrecks be the one found recently on the North Spit?
1907: The four-masted schooner Novelty, launched from San Francisco in 1886 as the world’s first four-masted bald head schooner, navigated the globe before running aground on Southern Oregon sand dunes. The crew, captain and his family all walked ashore.
1940: The four-masted schooner North Bend II was the last tall ship built in
Sources: www.shipwreckregistry.com; www.tallshipsofsanfrancisco.com
Danger
Not only can it be treacherous to view the shipwreck on
