Sometimes it's the threads that bind
I saw first saw it last November, a few days after Ocean Shores beach comber Steve Sauve found it. A 15-foot-long piece of shipwreck... and it looked old.
The folks at the Ocean Shore's Interpretive Center are now the caretakers and principal investigators of this assembled collection of heavy timbers, burned in places and held together with long iron spikes and even wooden pegs.
Exhibits curator Gene Woodwick believes it's a locally built lumber schooner that got hung up on the once-treacherous bar off the mouth of Grays Harbor between 1890 and 1904.
She says her research indicates at least three of the heavily laden ships, likely loaded with freshly cut lumber for California, caught fire and burned after being trapped and battered by heavy seas.
She also thinks it's one of four possibilities. Two on that list include the ships "Peter Mahoney" and the "Jabez Howes."
I'm one of those people who loves history, and even though lumber ships don't rank up there with the likes of the Titanic in their level of romance, they are our history and the idea of shipwrecks, even working boats like this one, tweak people's curiousity.
It's a reminder of what the heyday was like on Grays Harbor and in its principal waterfront towns of Aberdeen and Hoquiam. In those days, it seemed like the the timber and the good times would never run out.
While it hardly looks like a ship anymore, this piece of "driftwood" is a hard connection to the state's past... and one people want to know more about.
Click here to see video report.