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February 08, 2008
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.
Copyright © 2007 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA
Posted by victoria at 12:45 PM
February 07, 2008
The journey of Hitler’s Lost Fleet to Turkey at shipwreck conference
ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News
The final resting place of three German submarines found at the bottom of the Black Sea has been brought to the agenda of the Turkish media.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that a team led by Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish submarine archaeologist, has located the three U-boats, a type of Germany military submarine, off the Black Sea coast of Turkey and will present his findings at a conference on shipwrecks to be held Saturday in Plymouth, England.
Many mass circulation newspapers in Turkey announced the following day that �Hitler's lost fleet has been discovered.� However, the submarines had been discovered previously, Kolay told the Turkish Daily News: �I only identified the submarines and researched their history.�
The vessels, including one once regarded as Germany's most successful U-boat, formed part of the 30th Flotilla of six submarines. They were transported across Nazi-occupied Europe by road and through rivers from Kiel, Germany's Baltic port to Constanta, the Romanian Black Sea port.
In two years, the fleet sank dozens of ships and lost three to enemy attacks. But in August 1944, Romania switched sides and declared war on Germany, leaving the three remaining vessels stranded.
With no base and unable to sail home � the Bosporus and Dardanelles were closed to them because of Turkish neutrality during the war � their captains were ordered to scuttle the boats before rowing ashore and trying to make their way back to Germany with the crew. However, all three crews were caught and jailed by the Turks.
Kolay identified the boats through research in German archives, interviews with surviving sailors and sonar studies of the seabed. �The only story I will tell at this shipwreck conference will be the conversations I had with the commander of U20 [one of the three submarines], Rudolf Arendt, about the submarines as well as the background history of how the ships arrived in the Black Sea and how they were scuttled,� Kolay said, adding that he was surprised by the reports in the media.
The Turkish Naval Forces discovered the first U-boat. �Submarine Rescue Commander Mehmet Kanyon called and asked if I could identify it and so I did. The story of the U-boats is a very interesting detail of the war,� said Kolay.
He has already completed successful dives to the U20, almost four kilometers offshore and about 25 meters under water. He believes he has discovered another, U23, at twice that depth, 5.5 kilometers from the town of Ağva, but bad weather forced him to suspend diving until spring.
He thinks he is also close to pinpointing the third boat, U19, thought to lie more than 300 meters underwater and 5.5 kilometers from the Turkish city of Zonguldak.
Kolay emphasized he has discovered and identified more than 60 shipwrecks to date and never attempted to salvage any of them as he has no intention to salvage these U-boats either. �I am not interested in the pieces or material of the wrecks. I am only interested in their history,� he said.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr
Posted by victoria at 12:43 PM
