http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites...572&sid=1&fid=1

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.


beer:

Veru interesting indeed. I hope the state or Federal or some private interest can help finance a rescue of the old ship. p: w:

She's been identified and two other wrecks have been uncovered. Oregon - the place to be!

http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/20...ntified_sh.html

The mystery of another Oregon shipwreck -- a massive wooden vessel revealed by erosion of a dune near North Bend -- was solved today.

The ship, which captured the attention of historians and Oregon beachcombers, is the George L. Olson, a steam schooner that was launched in 1917 and ran aground in 1944.

The 223-foot-long ship has been revealed by shifting sands off and on over the past six decades. The most recent exposure came shortly after Thanksgiving, and nearly 70 feet is now exposed, said Megan Harper, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM and Oregon State Parks also said today that heavy winter beach erosion uncovered two other shipwrecks in the past few days.

One is a wooden ship near where Cut Creek enters the ocean about six miles north of Bandon, said Harper. The other wreck appeared -- and has possibly been buried again -- where the Siuslaw River flows into the ocean near Florence, said Chris Havel, a state parks spokesman.

The Siuslaw wreck received scant attention from the state before archaeologists had to leave to analyze two 800- to 1,000-pound cannons uncovered in the beach during the weekend near Arch Cape on the north Oregon coast.

News of the Coos Spit shipwreck brought thousands to the beach to visit and drew hundreds of queries from people who thought they could identify it.

But it was a call from NOAA maritime heritage coordinator Robert Schwemmer in Santa Barbara that solved the mystery. He and Steve Samuels, BLM cultural resources coordinator, compared old and recent photographs and came up with what they believe is a match.

Among the largest ships built at the time at the W.F. Stone shipyards in Oakland, Calif., it had a 1,000-horsepower steam engine and could carry 1.4 million board feet of lumber. Originally named the Ryder Hanify, the ship was sold to the French government and renamed the Gabriel. In 1922, the French sold it to Oliver Olson of California, who renamed it for a member of his family.

It's still undecided what will become of the George L. Olson, said Harper. "The options range from leaving it alone and letting the sand rebury it, to salvaging portions and trying to preserve it."

Meanwhile, the cannons pulled from the sand Tuesday afternoon are now at Nehalem Bay State Park, in an area without public access. They are resting in tubs of fresh water while two state agencies figure out which is responsible for their restoration and display, said Havel and Julie Curtis, a state Department of Lands spokeswoman.

The cannons are believed to be from the USS Shark, a survey ship that wrecked in 1846 off the Columbia River Bar.

The parks department said it hopes to set up a public viewing schedule by next week. But the state faces a long restoration process for the cannons.

beer:

I wish more articles would provide pictures. It says that "70 feet of the ship is exposed now" so why can't they just take a picture and show us? Ah well, thanks for posting, Andy!

This might help, Erik.

http://www.kxl.com/tabid/72/itemid/15229/M...identified.aspx

beer:

And some others:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cougars/2281956852/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cougars/2280142215/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cougars/2280925962/

beer:

Oregon storms really have uncovered a lot.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WST...EMPLATE=DEFAULT

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- The storms that lashed Oregon's scenic coast this winter have dredged up an unusual array of once-buried secrets: old shipwrecks, historic cannons, ghost forests - even oddities known as "red towers."

One of the first ships to emerge from the sands was recently identified as the George L. Olson, which ran aground at Coos Bay's North Jetty on June 23, 1944.

The shipwreck has become a tourist attraction on the southern Oregon coast. Interest had become so great the Bureau of Land Management had to reroute traffic around the ship and post signs warning visitors to leave it alone because it is now an archaeological site.

Shipwrecks and other curiosities began showing up after December when Pacific storms pummeled the state, damaging thousands of homes and causing an estimated $60 million in damage to roads, bridges and public buildings.

Hardest hit was Vernonia, a Coast Range town of about 2,400 people, where floodwaters damaged about 300 homes, ruined schools and temporarily closing businesses.

The storms also brought high seas, which caused beach erosion. Although sands commonly shift in winter, this season appeared especially dramatic. There were reports that up to 17 feet of sand eroded away at Arch Cape.

"It's really an unusual event, the magnitude of it," said Chris Havel of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

Other shipwrecks have emerged recently - a wooden ship near Bandon, also on the southern coast, and another where the Siuslaw River flows into the ocean near Florence.

Little is known about either ship, Havel said, and sands have reclaimed the Siuslaw wreck.

"In modern days we don't let people leave shipwrecks. If a boat washes up on shore the owner has to come and remove it," Havel said. "Back then the only craft that would really survive would have to be a pretty good size."

Ships aren't the only things surfacing on the coast.

Ghost forests are groves of tree stumps, some estimated as 4,000 years old, that were engulfed by the sea. Because of shifting sands, many have suddenly popped up.

The stumps are especially impressive at Arch Cape, where locals say they haven't seen them for some 40 years, according to Tiffany Boothe of the Seaside Aquarium.

"The forest floor is actually uncovered too, You can see the floor," she said. "There's like these mud cliffs. As your walking on it, it resembles clay. It's definitely not sand at all."

Arch Cape also was where a pair of historical cannons were recently discovered by beachcombers. The origin of the cannons, each weighing between 800 and 1,000 pounds, is not known.

State archaeologist Dennis Griffin supervised the removal of the cannons, which were placed in tanks of fresh water and burlap for preservation.

The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department does not yet know what they will do with the cannons. They possibly came from the USS Shark, a survey ship that wrecked in 1846 off the Columbia River Bar, Havel said.

The "red towers" are strangely shaped deposits of iron that are hidden beneath the sand. The orangy-red lumps, most no more than 3-feet tall, are usually buried deep beneath the sand but now dot the coastal landscape.

"These formations could be gone in the next week. That's how fast the coast changes," Boothe said.

The George L. Olson, uncovered around the New Year, has drawn a great deal of attention because it's origin was a mystery until recently.

After determining the wreck resembled the schooner, local archeologists delved into its history, determining where and when it went down. The facts added up, said Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Megan Harper.

But it was a local man's photograph from 1947 that really convinced the agency, she said.

"It showed him and his brothers on the shipwreck with the words "George L." on the hull," Harper said. "Once we saw that it was, `Yep, that's the one.'"

The George L. Olson was a 223-foot long wood-hulled schooner launched in 1917 and originally named the Ryder Hanify. It eventually wound up on the southern Oregon coast, where it hauled lumber until it ran aground.

The wreckage has drawn curious crowds, including about 3,000 visitors this past weekend alone, Harper said.

"I think there's two reasons, first, the shipwreck here is really accessible. It's easy for people to get right up to it," Harper said. "Second, this area has a real connection to maritime history, or the fishing industry and the lumber industry. So there's a neat tie to the local community and history."