Visitors check out the wooden hull of a shipwreck on Saturday, Feb. 1, 2008, discovered after Pacific storms washed away much of the foredune, revealing the wreck. And storms continue to take their toll: The log protruding from into the foreground was no longer there by Monday afternoon, but more of the wooden parts of the ship were broken and splintered. - World Photo by Susan Chambers

Talk to any locals and they’ll say plenty about this winter’s storms. There haven’t been many winters like this, they’ll say.

The big waves.

The heavy rains.

“I don’t remember this much wind and rain,” said Jack Hammar, as his pickup truck bounced and bumped on Coos Bay’s North Spit.

It was Saturday. He was leading a caravan of family and acquaintances packed into two 4-wheel-drive pickup trucks and a Jeep. They scooted along the seawall road toward the beach to investigate a mystery ship.

Sure, elderly people who’ve lived here forever will say there have been similar winters. But when it comes to the shipwreck, ask the folks who’ve played on the North Spit for decades and they’ll tell you they’ve never seen one quite like this.

This season’s wind and waves have shifted a mountain of sand day after day, uncovering the 35-foot-long bow of wooden-hulled vessel.

“We’ve been out several times and seen it over the last month or so,” Hammar said.

At first, there was just a tip. Then, storm after storm, the ship materialized into the present, as fast it seems, as people’s memories of it faded away.

Massive mystery

“I’ve been coming out here since I was old enough to remember — about 6 years old,” said Hammar.

“I’ve never seen this up until this winter.”

But he’s only 47.

It’s south of the New Carissa chunk. Week after week, the foredune has slipped away.

“This thing is built on such a massive scale. It blows my mind,” Hammar said.

The ship’s sides protrude up from the sand below a towering foredune. They’re more than a foot thick. Vertical timbers that run through the walls are lined on both sides by planking. All are tied together with iron bars and pins. There appear to be square portholes cut through the sides every six feet or so.

Curved chair-sized ribs rise out of the sand on the insides anchored by more iron bars, but the top deck is gone. It was a two-deck vessel. A schooner at least for a time. But its use is unclear.

Local historians have no idea whose ship it was or when it ran aground — at least not yet.

The historians

“It seems to be from the late 1800s and early 1900s. There’s some evidence it was a sailing ship, but then there’s some evidence it was converted to a coastal barge,” said Steve Samuels, BLM’s cultural resource coordinator.

There’s a small pipe in one side that appears to be from a bilge pump. He estimated another 15 feet of the keel rests deep in the sand.

The archaeologists were beside the vessel first sign of low tide Monday afternoon — Samuels and Reg Pullen of BLM, also Oregon State Parks’ Calum Stevenson.

They say there are ways to guess a ship’s age.

It appears possibly to have been built with some Douglas fir, which would be indicative of the Pacific Northwest. There were ship building outfits small and large up and down the Oregon and California coasts, including at Coos Bay and North Bend.

Long rectangular metal chain plates run up the hull sides where lines would have been attached to hold the masts. While it’s wood, there are the iron bars bubbled with rust that run through the sidewalls. There also are hexagon spikes and even newer rounded nails in the vessel sides. The planking is grouted.

All wooden ships had some sort of caulking, Stevenson explained.

“Older ships had a cotton and then a kind of tar pitch liquid that was put in,” he said.

Later, shipbuilders employed a white leaded paste.

“It looks like a white lead paste kind of caulking on this ship, so that would probably date it to the 19th century,” Stevenson said.

The bow points bow west to the ocean, which is unusual for shipwrecks. It’s on a legally fuzzy dividing line between Oregon State Parks and U.S. Bureau of Land Management jurisdiction. There are no plans at this point to save it.

“Once it’s been exposed like it is, it’s going to deteriorate fairly rapidly,” Samuels said.

The records

Some have speculated the vessel is part of the Czarina that foundered on the Coos Bay Bar and drifted north toward Horsfall 98 years ago. But that ship was metal-hulled. Others have suggested it’s the lumber-carrying C.A. Smith, which ran aground and broke up at the North Jetty in 1923.

Dreamers would like to have it be the historically rich Captain Lincoln. In January 1852, that wood-hulled ship ran ashore at the Coos Bay estuary. There were no jetties protecting the treacherous bar then. The ship was bringing supplies to military outposts in the Oregon Territory. The crew spent four months camped on the spit trading with local Indians. But this shipwreck evidence doesn’t point that way.

And there may not be much time for on-the-sand research.

For a hundred years, or more, it’s been preserved in hard-packed sand and protected by the salt water. But now, exposed to the air, worms and other small critters will get at it, not to forget the waves that slam logs and debris daily into the splitting wood with the coming and going of the tide.

Come March 15, the end of the spit, the dry sand portion and upland will be closed for the six-month snowy plover breeding season. There won’t be special permits for archaeologists. Come September, they will have the short window before winter to learn all they can about the ship.

“We would appreciate any marine architects with historical knowledge to contact us. It might have been something that was built here, but we don’t know,” Samuels said.

And locals, too, are encouraged to share their historical knowledge and stories.

No money to save it

On Saturday, Hammar and his wife, Beth Burback, also brought along Lillas Bledsoe. The 82-year-old Hauser resident rode along to see if the shipwreck was one she remembered from years ago. Bledsoe was born and grew up in North Bend.

After the war, she recalled, her ex-husband “Babe” Johnson, and five other men took a mule team out on the spit. They towed a wagon to salvage lumber from a wrecked barge. That was maybe 1946 or 1947.

On Saturday, she calmly poked around the shipwreck. She sniffed at the splintered wood. “Sea rot,” she said.

“No, this isn’t the one,” she said of the shipwreck.

She said she might have recalled seeing it those many years ago covered with sand. Then again, maybe not.

There are no nameplates left. As yet, no identifying marks from craftsmen show. No historical accounts seem to refer to it. There aren’t pages of news stories chronicling it, as there are about the New Carissa stern shadowed by surf spray farther north up the beach.

Salvors plan to remove that steel-hulled wood chip ship that ran aground eight years ago yesterday. The state has $16 million to do it.

“If this were the Capt. Lincoln, we would be able to find the money to save it,” Samuels said.

That irony isn’t lost on the locals and the historians. They have been visiting this site day after day, trying to learn all they can about this mystery shipwreck that seems destined to fade away.