Shipwrecks

In January 1954, a fierce coastal storm tore away enough sand to reveal something long buried: the bones of the Emily Reed, a sailing ship, wrecked offshore in 1908. With the help of a bulldozer, the fire department uncovered part of its wooden skeleton directly in front of the church.​

Imagine the tale of the Emily G Reed shipwreck as told by Rockaway’s pioneer Lewis C. Best.  ​

...bound for Portland, Oregon, 103 days out of Newcastle, New South Wales, the Emily G Reed lost her bearings and hit a sandbar on Rockaway Beach two miles south of the entrance to Nehalem Bay at 1:30AM on February 18, 1908, in a cold fog-soaked rain. She was an old wooden ship and was soon prey to the heavy pounding surf.  ​

The Captain, his wife and four of the crew, not knowing where they were in the early morning darkness, decided to chance swimming ashore with a rope tied to the wreckage should they not make land, only to find jumping overboard that their feet touched the ground and they could walk ashore.  ​

The strangest story of this disaster was that four men, including the ship’s cook, could easily have waded ashore had they known. Instead, they took to a lifeboat and were carried far out to sea. Drifting for days, they were exposed to the open sea without food or water. The cook finally died and the other three, in a weakened condition, landed in Washington, more than two hundred miles north of the wreck.   ​

Most old-time sailing ships that came to a watery grave are swallowed up forever by the shifting sands and soon forgotten. Here though, the angry ocean, stirred into fury by the wintry southwest gales, chooses from time to time to uncover parts of her hull as a reminder of this proud old ship and her time sailing the seven seas.   ​