Wreck
We went back to the beach before we left Fort Stevens State Park so we could check out the shipwreck we'd seen the night before.
The Peter Iredale was a 285-foot, four-masted steel sailing freighter built in 1890 in Maryport, England. It was named after its owner, a Liverpool shipping magnate, and it shows why a shipping magnate should never name a ship after himself, because you never know when your own name might become synonymous with nautical disaster. The ship set out from Salina Cruz, Mexico, on September 26, 1906, and had almost reached its destination at Portland, Oregon when a storm blew up on October 25. The captain knew better than to try making the entrance to the Columbia and planned to ride out the storm well off the coast. The storm had other ideas and pushed the ship to this piece of beach right here, where it got stuck on the sand. Nobody died, and the ship suffered no significant damage, but though plans were made to pull it out, nobody ever did. The ship had been here almost exactly one hundred years when we saw it.
Pictures on the internet suggest it still looks roughly like this twenty years later, though sand comes and goes, and sometimes you can see more of the ship than other times. I wonder what it looks like right now. I wish I could grab a picture on the anniversary.
Wreck
We went back to the beach before we left Fort Stevens State Park so we could check out the shipwreck we'd seen the night before.
The Peter Iredale was a 285-foot, four-masted steel sailing freighter built in 1890 in Maryport, England. It was named after its owner, a Liverpool shipping magnate, and it shows why a shipping magnate should never name a ship after himself, because you never know when your own name might become synonymous with nautical disaster. The ship set out from Salina Cruz, Mexico, on September 26, 1906, and had almost reached its destination at Portland, Oregon when a storm blew up on October 25. The captain knew better than to try making the entrance to the Columbia and planned to ride out the storm well off the coast. The storm had other ideas and pushed the ship to this piece of beach right here, where it got stuck on the sand. Nobody died, and the ship suffered no significant damage, but though plans were made to pull it out, nobody ever did. The ship had been here almost exactly one hundred years when we saw it.
Pictures on the internet suggest it still looks roughly like this twenty years later, though sand comes and goes, and sometimes you can see more of the ship than other times. I wonder what it looks like right now. I wish I could grab a picture on the anniversary.