They came this week by car, by truck, by ATV.

By bicycle, on foot.

The comments around town were all about the traffic jam.

“It’s like our version of an L.A. freeway out there.”

“If you can’t drive yourself onto the North Spit, just hang out your thumb.”

The mystery shipwreck uncovered by this winter’s storm on Coos Bay’s North Spit has kindled a lot of excitement. Phones, faxes and e-mails are humming, while friends swap ideas on the its identity. And Google’s shipwreck search business must be booming.

The wreck also has prompted old-timers and the kids and grandkids of long-gone dunes explorers to pull out shoeboxes and closeted away stacks of black-and-white photographs. That’s what Reuben Lyon Jr. did Tuesday, when he read all about the weathered wood bow north of the Coos Bay jetty. He remembers this wreck from when he was a kid. He’s even got photos.

The ship with no name

“It never had a name. It was just something that was there,” the 63-year-old recalled Thursday.

One 1948-circa snapshot shows a bow, with three port holes in the side, standing about 6-feet-tall above the beach. A mast in the center leans south toward the jetty. Below it, there’s a woman, Lyon’s mom, Marianne; a young Reuben; and his sister, Joan, (who’s standing on a log sticking out of a porthole.)

Come Wednesday morning, the lanky home putterer just couldn’t sit any longer. He unparked his silver mountain bike and peddled out toward the sand from his Hauser home.

“It was just amazing to see it with the bow and the mast,” he said.

Lyon said the shipwreck seemed old when he was kid. He grew up in a house in the dunes at Hauser. His family beachcombed. They got ducks, fish and geese. But the glass balls and shipwrecks were the real finds.

There was a lookout left over from the U.S. Coast Guard from World War II in those days between Beale Lake and beach,  he said. Lyon’s dad would climb up there and watch the beach after Southwesters.

“They’d see masts after a big storm and they’d go out there,” he said.

He recalled his dad telling about the wreck of the Alvarado. In 1945, the steel-hulled ship ran aground north of Coos Bay. It was a big storm. The Coast Guardsmen shot cannons from the beach, sending lines out to the vessel to help the crew get ashore. Lyon still has a paint-flaked lifeboat oar his dad picked up at the beach from the lumber ship.

“It was only used once,” he quipped.

Converging paths

As Lyon poked around the shipwreck Wednesday with dozens of others, he just might have been there about the same time as Jack Long. The 86-year-old North Bender went out there with his son-in-law, Scott Graham, to see the shipwreck.

“It has changed, but I knew immediately it had to the be same ship with the big huge heavy sides on it,” Long said.

He saw it first in the 1950s. Long recalled just the bow in the sand those decades ago when he was out there goofing around.

But it was the shipwreck of the Alaska Cedar he remembers in brilliant, smash-up detail. It was December 1962. The 2,444-ton steel-hull steamer went down on the jetty. At the time, Long was at the North Spit.

“The Coast Guard went flying by and we followed them down there. We helped get 17 guys off that ship,” Long recalled.

But back to the mystery shipwreck, Long is sure there was a name on that bow when he was there years ago. He lived in Barview at the time and took a boat with his dad, Les Long, and his uncle, George Long, to the spit. They hiked and came across the fated bow. He remembers seeing a nameplate on the bow — the Geo. E. Long. Naturally, the name stuck in his brain. He’s not surprised there’s no sign of a nameplate now on that bow.

“Somebody picked it off I’m sure. We didn’t have any tools,” he said.

Generating explorers

Long wasn’t the only one to hike out across the dunes in search of fun. Most people didn’t have sand buggies decades ago. But those shipwrecks beckoned anyway. Coos Bay resident Bob Richardson was looking at photos of the shipwrecked schooner North Bend on Friday, wondering if it might the bow, but it wasn’t the mystery shipwreck he recalled, rather an adventure at the wreck of the Sujameco.

He went with his dad and his uncle and some others. They took a 12-foot skiff his dad built across the bay to Henderson Marsh and set out across the North Spit to the Sujameco.

“I remember there was a hole in the side and we went in and climbed up inside,” said Richardson, recalling a long day’s hike across the dunes in about 1940.

The steel steamer ran aground in 1929, and what’s left of its metal hull still can be seen when winter has pulled sand off Horsfall Beach. It’s just north of the infamous New Carissa. That’s the shipwreck that, with its grounding in 1999, enticed Richardson’s daughter, Karin, an artist, to cut salvaged freighter metal into art and environmental commentary that spilled into room after room at the Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay.

Beachcomber bounty

These shipwrecks have never been the plunder of pirates, but rather the bounty of beachcombers.

That’s how Jim Hillar sees it.

His dad, W.M. Hillar, was a port engineer and an avid photographer. He’s still got his dad’s old Kodak 616. The talk around town of the newly uncovered old wreck prompted Jim to pull out stacks and stacks of his dad’s ship and shipwreck snapshots.

There was the YMS 133, a military minesweeper that broached in the Coos Bay bar one nasty February day more than 60 years ago (See sidebar). As it turned broadside, the incoming seas rolled it over and over. Despite a fast response by Coast Guard rescuers, Hillar recalled that 13 men drowned.

There was the wood-hulled Fort Bragg, in 1932. It ran into shore south of the jetties in fog.

“It had a lot of lumber on it,” Hillar said.

The vessel, he said, also carried hundreds of 21/2-gallon Shell oil cans that ultimately floated in all over the bay and everyone picked  them up. Just flotsam and jetsam. The lost lumber went to build houses. People climbed aboard the wrecks they could get to looking for booze and longing for cash.

And there was money in vessel skeletons, too. Hillar recalls visiting Lighthouse Beach to see the grounded North Bend in 1940. In the end, he thinks they burned it down to the sand and sold the leftover metal for scrap.

But when it comes to the mystery shipwreck, Hillar has just one recollection — of the bow tip. He thinks maybe it was jutting out of the beach about 70 years ago, when he went to see crews rebuilding the north jetty. He was just a boy.

As to its name, Hillar isn’t offering any guesses. In the early and mid-1900s, there was swamped steamer after smashed-up schooner at Coos Bay.

“There’s so many, they all run together,” he said.