imafishingnutt
Bronze Member
- Sep 30, 2007
- 1,675
- 34
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- Whites XLT, Tesoro, Whites DFX, Nokta Impact Pro, Ace 400.
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
UPDATE>>>>ON SHIP
OCEAN REVEALS SHIPWRECK BURRIED IN DUNES
OCEAN UNCOVERS SHIPWRECK TREASURE IN DUNES
COOS BAY — Several times a month, Glasgow resident Jack Hammar and his wife hop in their pickup truck and drive out to Coos Bay’s north spit, home to clams, beachcombing and the stern of a wrecked freighter: the New Carissa.
Imagine Hammar’s surprise, then, when just after the new year, his wife pointed at a familiar spot along the beachgrass-fortified dune that the brutal winter’s surf has been pounding for a month — a spot a full two miles south of 1999’s New Carissa wreck.
“Does that look like a shipwreck?” she asked.
Only the wooden prow was sticking out of the sand wall at that point, so the Hammars thought little of it and kept driving along the beach. As the days wore on, the eroding dune revealed more and more of its treasure. Now, there’s the full bow of a wreck that could be 150 years old sitting exposed on the beach, waves beating at it, slamming driftwood into its heavy hull, as they do its neighbor two miles to the north.
Move over, New Carissa. There’s a new shipwreck in town. “You have to see it in person,” Hammar said. “It’s so incredibly massive.
The thing is made with 12”x12” beams all jammed one next to the other, standing upright, sheathed on the outside by 4”x12” timbers, everything held together by iron rebar and scraps. It looks like it would withstand cannon fire.”
The discovery has quickly become a tourist attraction on the remote beach, despite its inaccessibility to vehicles without four-wheel drive.
On Wednesday, inquisitive locals were driving through the sand by the dozens. Those whose vehicles weren’t hearty enough hoofed it, up to three miles each way.
Reuben Lyon rode his mountain bike down the beach at high tide, braving sneaker waves that leapt right up to the foredune that once hid the mystery ship.
“I was shocked when I saw it,” said Lyon, who’s convinced he has a picture of himself as a child standing in front of the same shipwreck in 1948. “The last time it was visible was in the 60s.”
Whether the boat Lyon stood before is the same one or not remains to be determined. Archeologists and historians visited the structure last weekend to see if they could solve the puzzle. They hope to pinpoint the ship’s name and also where and when it met its salty demise.
“It’s a fabulous find,” said Anne Donnelly, executive director of the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum. “It’s a wonderful remainder of the kinds of ships that were built here.”
The leading theory is that it’s a steam schooner, built in the 1800s by a company called Kruse and Banks, in an era when Coos Bay was the largest lumber port in the world. One way to ship their cargo to hungry customers was to build ships. More than 350 vessels were built between 1850 and 1950, Donnelly said, in 91 different shipyards.
All of which makes for tricky detective work. The way the ship was built, the way the planks are constrained and the lead-topped caulk sealing them together suggests it was born in the 1800s, Donnelly said. But there are hex-head bolts and other fastenings that suggest a more recent vintage; perhaps a retrofit. “Somebody’s supposed to be checking out when hex heads came into use,” Donnelly said.
An important question is what’s still buried. By the looks of what’s on the beach now, the bow is broken apart from any other portion of the ship.
But the sides of steam schooners were constructed in such away that the sides of them dropped precipitously at the middle of the ship, at about the point where the North Spit vessel disappears into the sand.
“If it is a steam schooner, there may be a great deal of it further aft, buried in the sand dune still,” Donnelly said.
Historians and archaeologists will try to match the ship with the dozens of pictures on hand of ships that were around 100 or more years ago, cross-checking those findings with the records of some 25 ships that went down between 1868 and 1944 in a four-mile stretch near the Coos Bay bar.
“If we can work backwards from the wreck and identify which wreck it is, we can know what the circumstances of its stranding were,” Donnelly said. “The problem is, it could have ‘pulled a Carissa’ and wrecked in one place, then been carried to a different location by the tide.”
Now what? Unlike the state’s herculean effort to rip the New Carissa from its resting place — slated to start next month — there’s no funding to remove the North Spit’s newest discovery, or anybody lobbying for that to happen. Very little work could take place until September, when the nesting season of the threatened Western snowy plover ends, as the ship is buffered by critical habitat for the fragile bird to the east.
But by then, given the pounding the ship is taking now, there might not be much left to preserve.
“We don’t know until we know what’s there,” Donnelly said. “If we’ve got a complete 250-foot-long ship, that’s one thing. Clearly, nobody can hope to remove what could be a 250-foot-long ship. The cost would be insane.”
Ultimately, the State Historical Preservation Society will decide what to do, Donnelly said.
FIRST POST BELOW
NORTH BEND -- A massive wooden ship that disappeared on the southern Oregon coast decades and decades ago is emerging from a sand dune eroded by wild winter storms.
On a remote beach of Coos Bay's North Spit, the seas are revealing the bow of a mystery ship.
Thirty feet of its thick, wooden bow protrudes from the dune. Forty feet wide at its broadest point, the hull sits dug into the dune, pointed toward the sea. Its iron supports are rusted and bent, its deck supports exposed, its portholes deep and square.
The ship was built from massive timbers and likely dates to the late 19th or early 20th century.
"We're pretty sure it is a lumber carrier built for the lumber industry in Coos Bay and bigger ports," said Calum Stevenson, coastal coordinator for the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation. "We think it was built in North Bend at one of the larger shipping places and built from local wood, Douglas fir. We're thinking it's over 250 feet, and we know it has some interesting components not necessarily part of the construction, like the possibility of a bilge pump that may date it to the early 20th century."
But a lot is not known. What ship was it? How did it go down? When?
It's a lot to answer. And the sand is revealing its secret slowly.
Between 1852 and 1953, 58 ships wrecked in a span of about five miles off Coos Bay, said Vicki Wiese, collection manager at the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum. In those years, ships ran between Coos Bay and San Francisco carrying lumber, coal and other supplies.
"After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, ships from Coos Bay are what rebuilt California," Stevenson said.
Guessing the ship's identity has become something of a favorite pastime around here.
Page 2 of 3
"We get phones calls every hour," said Wiese.
One popular guess is the Captain Lincoln, an Army transport ship that went down in 1851. Its crew made it to the beach and traded with the Native Americans.
"It would be great to find that ship," said Stevenson. "It was the ship that basically opened Coos Bay and brought in settlers."
But it's definitely not the Captain Lincoln, he said.
Others suggested it might be the C.A. Smith, a ship built in North Bend by Kruse and Banks in 1917 that went down during a storm in December 1923, taking the lives of its crew.
And still others suggest the Czarina, which went down in 1911. But that was an iron ship, said Stevenson. This one is wooden.
Jack Long, 86, who's lived in North Bend since the 1950s, thinks he knows the answer.
Back in 1960, Long and his father rowed across the bay, hiked over the dunes and found what he believes is the same ship. On its nameplate was carved George E. Long, a name he easily remembers. His father even wrote a letter to Mariner Digest telling of the find. Jack Long still has the letter typed on blue stationary from the editor, dated 1966, asking for more information.
But the sand reburied it.
Jack Long frequently looked for it, even taking his son-in-law, Scott Graham, now North Bend's fire chief, out to the spot. Fifteen years ago, Graham found a part of the ship. But again, shifting sands quickly reclaimed it.
Then, on Thanksgiving, as part of a family outing, the Grahams looked again. It wasn't there. Days later, Graham's son, Jim, found the tip peaking out. Within days, the seas tore away at the dune until a large portion of the bow and hull was revealed.
Now historians and researchers have five weeks to solve the mystery before beaches close March 15 for the snowy plover breeding season. They hope to use maritime records, personal memories and photographs to identify the ship. They may also bring penetrating radar to more accurately pinpoint how far back into the dune it extends.
But even without the beach closure looming, they fear the ship will not last long.
"When preserved wood is re-exposed to the oxygen, it deteriorates much more rapidly than modern wood," said Stephan Samuels, cultural resource specialist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "It is deteriorating even as we speak."
Meanwhile, the newest coastal attraction is also becoming the biggest headache. The mystery ship is about a mile south of the wreckage of the more famous New Carissa, which ran aground Feb. 4, 1999. The seas are high, and approaching the ship can be dangerous, said Stevenson.
The wreck is accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles along three miles of a narrow stretch of sand that is in places soft, puddled and constantly changing. At high tide, the surf laps up and over the wreck, and even at lower tides there is the danger of unpredictable sneaker waves.
Researchers also fear that, even though it is against the law to disturb historical artifacts, people will attempt to take parts of it home, hastening the deterioration of what is already a piece of North Bend history.
"The concern is that people can visit it, and we can't really prevent that," Samuels said. "This is a historic artifact and a historic site. We are trying to preserve it. Don't damage it. Don't mess with it. Don't try to rip off pieces. It might also be a monument. People may have lost their lives. Respect it."
OCEAN REVEALS SHIPWRECK BURRIED IN DUNES
OCEAN UNCOVERS SHIPWRECK TREASURE IN DUNES
COOS BAY — Several times a month, Glasgow resident Jack Hammar and his wife hop in their pickup truck and drive out to Coos Bay’s north spit, home to clams, beachcombing and the stern of a wrecked freighter: the New Carissa.
Imagine Hammar’s surprise, then, when just after the new year, his wife pointed at a familiar spot along the beachgrass-fortified dune that the brutal winter’s surf has been pounding for a month — a spot a full two miles south of 1999’s New Carissa wreck.
“Does that look like a shipwreck?” she asked.
Only the wooden prow was sticking out of the sand wall at that point, so the Hammars thought little of it and kept driving along the beach. As the days wore on, the eroding dune revealed more and more of its treasure. Now, there’s the full bow of a wreck that could be 150 years old sitting exposed on the beach, waves beating at it, slamming driftwood into its heavy hull, as they do its neighbor two miles to the north.
Move over, New Carissa. There’s a new shipwreck in town. “You have to see it in person,” Hammar said. “It’s so incredibly massive.
The thing is made with 12”x12” beams all jammed one next to the other, standing upright, sheathed on the outside by 4”x12” timbers, everything held together by iron rebar and scraps. It looks like it would withstand cannon fire.”
The discovery has quickly become a tourist attraction on the remote beach, despite its inaccessibility to vehicles without four-wheel drive.
On Wednesday, inquisitive locals were driving through the sand by the dozens. Those whose vehicles weren’t hearty enough hoofed it, up to three miles each way.
Reuben Lyon rode his mountain bike down the beach at high tide, braving sneaker waves that leapt right up to the foredune that once hid the mystery ship.
“I was shocked when I saw it,” said Lyon, who’s convinced he has a picture of himself as a child standing in front of the same shipwreck in 1948. “The last time it was visible was in the 60s.”
Whether the boat Lyon stood before is the same one or not remains to be determined. Archeologists and historians visited the structure last weekend to see if they could solve the puzzle. They hope to pinpoint the ship’s name and also where and when it met its salty demise.
“It’s a fabulous find,” said Anne Donnelly, executive director of the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum. “It’s a wonderful remainder of the kinds of ships that were built here.”
The leading theory is that it’s a steam schooner, built in the 1800s by a company called Kruse and Banks, in an era when Coos Bay was the largest lumber port in the world. One way to ship their cargo to hungry customers was to build ships. More than 350 vessels were built between 1850 and 1950, Donnelly said, in 91 different shipyards.
All of which makes for tricky detective work. The way the ship was built, the way the planks are constrained and the lead-topped caulk sealing them together suggests it was born in the 1800s, Donnelly said. But there are hex-head bolts and other fastenings that suggest a more recent vintage; perhaps a retrofit. “Somebody’s supposed to be checking out when hex heads came into use,” Donnelly said.
An important question is what’s still buried. By the looks of what’s on the beach now, the bow is broken apart from any other portion of the ship.
But the sides of steam schooners were constructed in such away that the sides of them dropped precipitously at the middle of the ship, at about the point where the North Spit vessel disappears into the sand.
“If it is a steam schooner, there may be a great deal of it further aft, buried in the sand dune still,” Donnelly said.
Historians and archaeologists will try to match the ship with the dozens of pictures on hand of ships that were around 100 or more years ago, cross-checking those findings with the records of some 25 ships that went down between 1868 and 1944 in a four-mile stretch near the Coos Bay bar.
“If we can work backwards from the wreck and identify which wreck it is, we can know what the circumstances of its stranding were,” Donnelly said. “The problem is, it could have ‘pulled a Carissa’ and wrecked in one place, then been carried to a different location by the tide.”
Now what? Unlike the state’s herculean effort to rip the New Carissa from its resting place — slated to start next month — there’s no funding to remove the North Spit’s newest discovery, or anybody lobbying for that to happen. Very little work could take place until September, when the nesting season of the threatened Western snowy plover ends, as the ship is buffered by critical habitat for the fragile bird to the east.
But by then, given the pounding the ship is taking now, there might not be much left to preserve.
“We don’t know until we know what’s there,” Donnelly said. “If we’ve got a complete 250-foot-long ship, that’s one thing. Clearly, nobody can hope to remove what could be a 250-foot-long ship. The cost would be insane.”
Ultimately, the State Historical Preservation Society will decide what to do, Donnelly said.
FIRST POST BELOW
NORTH BEND -- A massive wooden ship that disappeared on the southern Oregon coast decades and decades ago is emerging from a sand dune eroded by wild winter storms.
On a remote beach of Coos Bay's North Spit, the seas are revealing the bow of a mystery ship.
Thirty feet of its thick, wooden bow protrudes from the dune. Forty feet wide at its broadest point, the hull sits dug into the dune, pointed toward the sea. Its iron supports are rusted and bent, its deck supports exposed, its portholes deep and square.
The ship was built from massive timbers and likely dates to the late 19th or early 20th century.
"We're pretty sure it is a lumber carrier built for the lumber industry in Coos Bay and bigger ports," said Calum Stevenson, coastal coordinator for the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation. "We think it was built in North Bend at one of the larger shipping places and built from local wood, Douglas fir. We're thinking it's over 250 feet, and we know it has some interesting components not necessarily part of the construction, like the possibility of a bilge pump that may date it to the early 20th century."
But a lot is not known. What ship was it? How did it go down? When?
It's a lot to answer. And the sand is revealing its secret slowly.
Between 1852 and 1953, 58 ships wrecked in a span of about five miles off Coos Bay, said Vicki Wiese, collection manager at the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum. In those years, ships ran between Coos Bay and San Francisco carrying lumber, coal and other supplies.
"After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, ships from Coos Bay are what rebuilt California," Stevenson said.
Guessing the ship's identity has become something of a favorite pastime around here.
Page 2 of 3
"We get phones calls every hour," said Wiese.
One popular guess is the Captain Lincoln, an Army transport ship that went down in 1851. Its crew made it to the beach and traded with the Native Americans.
"It would be great to find that ship," said Stevenson. "It was the ship that basically opened Coos Bay and brought in settlers."
But it's definitely not the Captain Lincoln, he said.
Others suggested it might be the C.A. Smith, a ship built in North Bend by Kruse and Banks in 1917 that went down during a storm in December 1923, taking the lives of its crew.
And still others suggest the Czarina, which went down in 1911. But that was an iron ship, said Stevenson. This one is wooden.
Jack Long, 86, who's lived in North Bend since the 1950s, thinks he knows the answer.
Back in 1960, Long and his father rowed across the bay, hiked over the dunes and found what he believes is the same ship. On its nameplate was carved George E. Long, a name he easily remembers. His father even wrote a letter to Mariner Digest telling of the find. Jack Long still has the letter typed on blue stationary from the editor, dated 1966, asking for more information.
But the sand reburied it.
Jack Long frequently looked for it, even taking his son-in-law, Scott Graham, now North Bend's fire chief, out to the spot. Fifteen years ago, Graham found a part of the ship. But again, shifting sands quickly reclaimed it.
Then, on Thanksgiving, as part of a family outing, the Grahams looked again. It wasn't there. Days later, Graham's son, Jim, found the tip peaking out. Within days, the seas tore away at the dune until a large portion of the bow and hull was revealed.
Now historians and researchers have five weeks to solve the mystery before beaches close March 15 for the snowy plover breeding season. They hope to use maritime records, personal memories and photographs to identify the ship. They may also bring penetrating radar to more accurately pinpoint how far back into the dune it extends.
But even without the beach closure looming, they fear the ship will not last long.
"When preserved wood is re-exposed to the oxygen, it deteriorates much more rapidly than modern wood," said Stephan Samuels, cultural resource specialist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "It is deteriorating even as we speak."
Meanwhile, the newest coastal attraction is also becoming the biggest headache. The mystery ship is about a mile south of the wreckage of the more famous New Carissa, which ran aground Feb. 4, 1999. The seas are high, and approaching the ship can be dangerous, said Stevenson.
The wreck is accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles along three miles of a narrow stretch of sand that is in places soft, puddled and constantly changing. At high tide, the surf laps up and over the wreck, and even at lower tides there is the danger of unpredictable sneaker waves.
Researchers also fear that, even though it is against the law to disturb historical artifacts, people will attempt to take parts of it home, hastening the deterioration of what is already a piece of North Bend history.
"The concern is that people can visit it, and we can't really prevent that," Samuels said. "This is a historic artifact and a historic site. We are trying to preserve it. Don't damage it. Don't mess with it. Don't try to rip off pieces. It might also be a monument. People may have lost their lives. Respect it."
