Graveyard of the Pacific: Shipwreck and Survival on America’s Deadliest Waterway

CHAPTER ONE

Friday, July 16, 2021

AS WE LIFTED OUR BOATS off the trailer, the sky was low and gray all the way to the horizon, with only a faint spot of lightening in the south to suggest that the sun was there at all. The air was filled with drizzle and mist, precipitation and evaporation, falling and rising. Lowering my end of the main hull onto a damp patch of mossy grass, I felt a slightly claustrophobic sensation of not just the weather closing in around me but the whole world with it. The scene was so far from what I’d imagined, from the picture in my mind of luminous blue overhead and vivid white caps marking our distant goal, that for the first time I felt doubt slipping in through the cracks in my resolve, and wondered about continuing forward.

FOR MONTHS NOW, MY FRIEND Ray Thomas and I had been talking about the RIGHT DAY to cross the Columbia River Bar. The words had been in quotation marks the first few times we’d used them, but grew into all caps as the concept loomed larger and larger in our thoughts. The venture we had in mind would only make sense, we kept reminding each other, if we found the Right Day.

When I’d first spoken to Ray about the right day back in April, I’d been quoting Bruce Jones, who, along with occupying the office of mayor of Astoria, Oregon, served as deputy director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum. In the email in which he introduced himself and suggested we meet at the museum, Mayor Jones had attached a photograph of the astounding turbulence a person might encounter at the place where one of the world’s largest, most powerful, and fastest-moving watercourses spills into the Pacific Ocean. Actually, this intersection of river and sea is more of a slam than a spill—like two giant hammers pounding into each other, as the head of the Columbia River Bar Pilots Association described it to the New York Times back in 1988.

I studied the image Jones had sent—lashing towers of white water swamping the massive wall of mounded stones that formed the Columbia Bar’s North Jetty—and felt a contraction run through me from throat to sphincter. He had taken the photograph in my previous life, Jones explained in his email, while flying the Bar Pilots Association’s Seahawk helicopter, his primary job to drop pilots on inbound ships five miles outside the entrance to the bar.

The photograph, taken during a November squall, doesn’t do justice to the violence of the seas and wind he saw that day, Jones had written. Those words would have seemed even more ominous if I’d known when I read them what an understated man Bruce Jones is. There was one word in his brief email that gave me comfort, though, and it was November. While I realized it was impossible to ever be entirely certain about the weather on the Columbia Bar, because conditions were known to deteriorate dramatically in a span of minutes during any season of the year, I knew Ray and I weren’t going to be attempting any crossing of the bar in either water or air as cold as November’s.

Based on his email, and in particular on the photograph he’d attached, I had expected Jones to be somewhere between aghast and dismissive when I told him at the beginning of our meeting in the museum’s conference room that, as part of a book I was researching, my friend and I wanted to cross the Columbia Bar in what was essentially a sail kayak, a Hobie Adventure Island trimaran. Instead of scorning the idea, though, Jones sat silent for a few moments, considering, then told me it was doable if we chose the right day.

A little later, Jones asked if my friend was my age. He was, I answered. Jones knew from an article about me that had been published recently on the front page of the Daily Astorian that I would turn seventy on my next birthday, in December. Ray would turn seventy himself four days after I did. Jones saw, I think, that I was in good shape for a man my age. Ray was even more fit, if less strong. Jones made no comment about the advisability of senior citizens, no matter how fit or strong, challenging the Columbia Bar in a nonmotorized light craft, and I appreciated that.

Bruce was a sturdy but not imposing man with gentle eyes and a bookish manner. I would have more likely made him for a professor at a small private college who hit the gym several times a week than for a helicopter pilot who’d made a career of flying in terrifying conditions. Even after our meeting at the museum, I wouldn’t learn for another week what a truly formidable fellow he was, a man whose accomplishments included commanding all and performing many of the air rescues in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. I should have seen him more clearly, I think now. And also, I should have shown more gratitude when he offered me the museum’s resources, including its library, which, although operated by volunteers, houses by far the best-documented history that exists of the Columbia River in general and of the bar in particular.

At the end of our meeting, Jones permitted me to roam freely through the museum, where the most arresting display was a large illuminated map of the bar highlighting two hundred of the more than two thousand shipwrecks that have happened there during the past couple of centuries. An estimated twelve hundred people, nearly all men, have died in those wrecks, though this estimate is rough, given that some of the oldest records state simply that the entire crew was lost. THE GRAVEYARD OF THE PACIFIC, read the heading on the display; it was the sobriquet seamen had bestowed on the Columbia Bar more than a century earlier.

I had known since I was a boy that the Columbia River Bar was generally regarded as the most dangerous entrance to a commercial waterway on the planet. It has been described many times as the world’s most dangerous bar to cross, period. One of those who said this was my father, who was a merchant marine when I was born and had by age twenty-five traveled to virtually every corner of the earth. The single most frightening experience he ever had aboard a ship, my father said, came the first time he entered the Columbia River Bar. The freighter he was aboard was about to run aground on a hidden sandbar that had appeared suddenly out of the fog off the port side of the bow, he recalled. Only a brilliant maneuver by the captain that bounced the ship off a smaller sandbar on the starboard side and spun it slightly had saved him and the others aboard, he said. My father was a man who almost never showed fear, or any other emotion that betrayed vulnerability, but I could hear the resonance of panic in his voice then, describing an experience he’d had twenty years earlier.

NO ONE OUTSIDE THE BAR PILOTS’ association knew the perils of the Columbia River Bar better than Tom Molloy, the commanding officer at the United States Coast Guard’s National Motor Lifeboat Rescue School. The Coast Guard’s main high seas rescue academy was located at Cape Disappointment, on the Washington State side of the Columbia’s mouth, because, as Chief Warrant Officer 3 Molloy told me, we figure that the best place to learn this stuff is in the most challenging environment in the country.

I liked Molloy a lot within a few minutes of meeting him. The same word that had come into my mind while talking with Bruce Jones occurred to me while getting to know Tom: solid. Only in Molloy’s case this word had a more distinctly physical aspect. Molloy was not a tall man—five nine, I’d reckon—but with a pair of shoulders on him that easily would have filled out a size 48 suit jacket. He had been built up, I would learn, from a life spent largely on the water. Having grown up as a surfer on the Atlantic coast of Florida, Molloy had joined the Coast Guard mainly as a way to stay close to the sea. Even now he kept a private surf spot in a cove hidden by a spill of rocks on the west side of the rescue school and the adjacent Coast Guard base. I go out whenever I get the opportunity, he told me with a grin that made me love him. Molloy was in his early forties, but there was something of the sunburnt boy about him, perpetually at play in the fields of the Lord. Yet he must take his duties seriously, I thought, or otherwise he wouldn’t occupy the position that he did.

I knew that was true when I observed the respect Molloy commanded from the young men and women he was training, evident in their admiring eyes as they saluted him passing them while showing me around the rescue school. Along with a rank that made him one of the more versatile members of the US Armed Forces, Molloy had been awarded what is probably the most coveted title in the Coast Guard, the Surfman Badge, conferred only upon coxswains who have qualified to operate boats in the heavy surf that is encountered regularly on the Columbia Bar. The surfman’s motto was: The book says you’ve got to go out, but it doesn’t say a word about coming back.

Molloy had bright eyes and a broad, open face. Perhaps the most telling thing I learned about him during the time I spent with Tom was that the tattoo on the third finger of his left hand was a replacement for the wedding ring he’d lost during a Coast Guard operation. He’d had the image of that ring inked onto his finger, made it literally part of his flesh, not simply as a form of apology to his wife but in order to demonstrate to her that his commitment was absolute.

I was pretty sure that Tom Molloy was what my friend Ray would have described as one tough boy, but there was nothing cocky or pugnacious about him. The man had the same sort of quiet confidence that I had recognized in his friend Bruce Jones, and there was something uplifting about meeting the two of them back-to-back, a confirmation of what I wanted to believe about the quality of the men who held sway on the Columbia Bar. My father, whom I grew up hearing described by the longshoremen working under him as the toughest man on the West Coast waterfront, might have had that same quality, I felt, if he hadn’t been so tortured inside and so prone to meanness.

My confidence was buoyed when Molloy agreed with Bruce Jones that crossing the bar in a trimaran could be done. And just like Jones, he said it was all about choosing the right day. Actually, the right day at the right time of day was what Tom said. I recalled that Bruce Jones had told me that finding a day in the second half of July or the first half of August was advisable, because both the air and the water would be warmer than at other times of the year. Molloy again agreed, but added, Even in August the weather on the bar can turn nasty in no time. Boats go down and people drown out there in the summertime, too.

There were three awesome forces to contend with on the bar, Molloy reminded me: tide, current, and wind. All had to be accounted for in any calculation of the risk involved in being out there.

I had understood even before my meeting with Bruce Jones that Ray and I did not want to be out on the bar in an outgoing tide, because the greatest danger to us, in a nonmotorized craft, was being capsized and swept out to sea. Jones’s colleague Jeff Smith, the museum’s curator, had suggested setting out on a slack tide, in the interval between the ebb and flood tides. Molloy disagreed slightly: he believed it would be best for us to launch about an hour before low tide. That last bit of ebb tide will help push you out into the river, you can get going during slack tide, then use the flood tide to hold you in until you get back on land, Molloy said. We wanted to be sure we had as many hours of rising tide as possible to work with, he explained, because you never know what kind of complications might come up. Believe me, if your boat capsizes you want to be in the water with the tide coming in. Much better chance of making it to shore, or being located and rescued should the need arise.

RAY AND I HAD MANAGED to get together for three practice sessions in the trimaran, each several hours long. Our first was on the Willamette River, which is the arterial center of Portland, Oregon. Ray kept seven boats of various sizes—the largest being a Kenner Suwanee houseboat equipped with a working woodstove we’d enjoyed on a fair few winter evenings—at Portland’s gem of a downtown marina, Riverplace.

Ray had gotten rich about a dozen years earlier, when he’d finally collected his share of attorney fees from a lawsuit against the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. I’d remarked several times that Ray was the only person I’d ever known who seemed to have been made happier by becoming wealthy, but I wasn’t sure I meant it. He did seem to be having more fun, though, and definitely owned more expensive toys to have fun with. Crossing the bar on his Honda jet skis would have been many times easier than in the trimaran, Ray had pointed out, but I didn’t want it to be easy, and he understood that.

When I’d first proposed this undertaking, I could see Ray calculating not only the factors of risk and reward but also just how much he trusted me. I’d explained to him that part of what the book I wanted to write would be about was the effects on us both of having grown up amid so much violence, a great deal of it inflicted on us by our fathers. I felt it had a lot to do with why we’d each been driven to do difficult and dangerous things, as a way of demonstrating our ability to cope with and even master those difficulties and dangers.

Ray’s enthusiasm appeared to waver. He was wary of any encapsulation of him I might attempt. I’m not ever trying to prove anything to anyone, he told me.

The right thing to do as his friend, I decided, was accept this. Me neither, I told Ray. Except maybe to myself.

Not even to myself, Ray said. I do what I do because I want to, period.

If you say so, Ray, I thought this time, but just nodded.

By the time we first sat down together in the trimaran, me in the front position, him in the rear, on a glimmering May afternoon, I had accepted that Ray felt a need to test me. I understood already that his trimaran was a unique vessel. A two-seat kayak, nineteen feet long by just a little more than two feet wide, was the centerpiece, but Hobie had equipped the boat with assorted special features, including a pair of collapsible outriggers (called by their Polynesian name, amas) that provided an extraordinary enhancement of stability on the water, even though each was only about six inches wide. In addition to paddles that were generally used only in shallow water or tight spaces, the trimaran provided two superior methods of moving across the water’s surface: a removable single mast and sail was one; the other was Hobie’s marvelous Mirage Drive system—two kick-up fins attached to pedals that can nearly double the boat’s speed even when the sail is full. What Ray wanted me to prove was that I could pedal in the trimaran for up to three hours at a stretch. The Mirage Drive might be our main form of propulsion out on the Columbia Bar, depending upon the wind, and especially given that we would be pushing against a flood tide for most of the trip.

Still, I felt Ray had reminded me one time too many that for more than twenty years he’d been leading a weekly bicycle ride into the steep hills above Northwest Portland in which the other participants were lawyers less than half his age. My only bike was a beach cruiser that I rode eight or nine times every summer. I needed to demonstrate that I could keep up, Ray said, for him to feel confident going forward.

In addition to testing me, Ray also wanted me to understand that he was our captain. It was his boat, one he’d sailed off both the East and West Coasts of the country (and on the Mississippi River as well), in a variety of challenging conditions. But the way he barked orders once we were out on the water began to bring back some unpleasant memories from my childhood, and finally I told him to dial it down. You rebel against every form of authority, Ray said. That concerns me.

I was able to laugh and keep on pedaling.

The Willamette is a major river, the largest in the state, given that the Snake and Columbia run along Oregon’s eastern and northern borders. Sailing the Willamette, though, was like boating on a small lake compared to how it would be on the Columbia Bar. When we returned to the boat launch at Willamette Park after a pleasant if exhausting excursion, Ray was cheery, telling our six-foot-nine-inch training advisor, Kenny Smith, who lived with his girlfriend, Candy, aboard the biggest boat on the Willamette, a sixty-eight-footer he’d bought from a professional hockey player and hauled down from Canada, that I had performed excellently and really surprised him by pedaling steadily for two and a half hours.

Positions, both literal and figurative, began to shift between Ray and me during our two practice sessions in the trimaran on the Columbia. We set off on the first of these from the boat launch in Hammond, a community spread along the westernmost reaches of Youngs Bay, a huge spread of choppy water created by the flow of the Youngs River into the Columbia close to the bigger river’s mouth. Hammond had been through several iterations. For centuries it was the village the Clatsop tribe called Ne-ahk-stow. Then, in 1899 it became New Astoria, a name I found pretty amusing when I first heard it. Astoria—old Astoria, so to speak—was less than six miles to the east. The New part made some sense, I supposed, given that Astoria itself is the oldest enduring American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. Beginning with the winter of 1805–1806, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition waited in vain for a ship at a tiny log structure they called Fort Clatsop, just southwest of where the city stands today, Astoria has been one of the most storied towns in the entire United States. During the nineteenth century alone, Astoria transitioned from frontier trading outpost to crucial military installation to wide-open seaport, where tall ships crowded into its harbor while disembarked sailors swarmed the dozens of saloons, brothels, and card parlors ashore.

Hammond’s history is considerably more modest, even though its access to the mouth of the Columbia River had positioned it to be the greatest harbor on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco, according to an Oregonian article published in July of 1895. The name Hammond was given to the former New Astoria in 1903 by a man who promised to build a gigantic sawmill on the two thousand feet of waterfront he had purchased there. Instead, Andrew B. Hammond built his mill at Tongue Point, on the peninsula north of Astoria, and the town that bore his name languished. By 1991, Hammond had been absorbed into the town of Warrenton, but the community still identified as a distinct entity, and as good a place for a fisherman to live as existed on the West Coast.

Hammond’s most notable feature, for Ray and me, was its marina, which allowed one to put in off a launch that offered a remarkably close view of the Columbia River tumbling past in all its immense and astonishing power. The Hammond Boat Basin was not only literally the last place on the Oregon side where one could board a vessel before approaching the Columbia Bar, but the little marina’s channel was so short that even our trimaran passed out of it into the river after only a couple minutes of paddling and pedaling on the afternoon of May 21.

We knew already that the wind that day was steady at about twenty-two miles per hour, too intense for a bar crossing in a kayak, but neither of us was prepared for what that felt like on a span of the river where the Columbia’s mouth was only a little more than a mile to the west. The wind waves were three and four feet, not coming in sets at intervals of seven to nine seconds like on the ocean, but in an incessant and erratic chop that struck our boat from changing directions as current and tide thrashed against one another. I was in the front position again, and up there I felt more like a buckaroo than a sailor, being tossed not only from side to side but also fore and aft as we passed abruptly over peak and into trough and then onto peak again, and so forth, our heads soaked, gasping in awe. Our sail was full, and we were both pedaling, going at what was probably the trimaran’s max velocity, about seven miles per hour.

After a few moments of being shaken, I felt exhilaration rise in me, and I was grinning crazily, marveling at how well the Hobie absorbed the pounding it was taking, continuously oscillating back to equilibrium, no matter how tilted it was by the waves. We had headed out of the boat basin straight for the buoy that floated in the middle of the river, intent on crossing to the Washington side, a distance of nearly four miles. We got only as far as about a hundred yards from the buoy, though, when Ray, who had the rudder, turned us back to shore.

The wind and our front-to-back positions made explanation difficult, but when I turned to look at Ray, I was pretty certain I saw fear in his eyes. This was perfectly understandable under the circumstances, I knew, but I was disappointed that we hadn’t continued across the river. And I was surprised. I knew Ray as a risk-taker. He had long been unpopular among the wives of various friends and associates, mainly because they believed he was determined to put not only himself but also their husbands into life-threatening situations. It was a reputation that discomfited him even as he cultivated it.

Yet Ray had been circumspect from the first about the idea—my idea—of us crossing the bar in his trimaran, warning me more than once that it would have to be approached in stages that started with building trust that we could work as a team on the water, and then together studying the Columbia Bar in depth and at length before venturing onto it. That was fine. I was already committed to doing the research in order to write this book, and it seemed like an excellent idea for Ray and me to practice in the trimaran for some number of times before taking on the