Watery grave found almost century later
Robot tracks wreck off Point Reyes coast
It was a beautiful fall day out in the Pacific, 6 miles off Point Reyes, just over 22 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco was visible in the distance. There was plenty of life all around: sea lions, hundreds of them, dolphins, even some whales.
But what the scientists aboard the research vessel Fulmar wanted to see was under the surface: a shipwreck, a vessel that had been lost for 95 years.
They were using a small submersible vehicle on a recent day.
“We are seeing this ship for the first time. It’s amazing. An amazing day.” Robert Schwemmer, West Coast regional director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s maritime heritage program
The device is the size of a microwave oven but loaded with high-resolution cameras, sensors and powerful lights. It could see underwater and send live images back to the Fulmar. Cyril Poissonnet, the operator, said it was like flying in the water.
Exciting discovery
Robert Schwemmer and James Delgado, marine archaeologists, sat in front of two screens aboard the Fulmar. It was like watching live color television.
It was clear there was something in the water, just above the pebble-strewn bottom of the ocean, 200 or so feet down. It was ghostly, dark and covered with sea plants. “Closer,” Schwemmer said, directing Poissonnet, who guided the robot sub. “Move it up. Come left.”
His voice rose. “Yes,” he said. “Yes! That’s it.”
What they were seeing was the pointed bow of a very old ship.
This ship was unusual, a humble, iron-hulled fishing boat with the clear, clean lines and pointed bow of the sailing yacht it had once been. The scientists had pictures and drawings of the ship they were looking for. The wreck they’d spotted was clearly all that remained of the trawler Ituna, 133 feet long, steam-powered, which carried a cargo of machinery and sacks of cement on its last voyage.
“We are seeing this ship for the first time,” said Schwemmer, who is West Coast regional director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s maritime heritage program. “It’s amazing. An amazing day.”
Sinking in storm
The Ituna, built in Scotland in 1887, had sailed from San Francisco on the evening of March 13, 1920, headed for Reedsport, Ore. The vessel turned north outside the Golden Gate and ran into heavy seas. The Ituna was more than 30 years old and had been a yacht, a research ship, a combination passenger and cargo ship, and now a fishing vessel. It was old and tired, the storm was too much, and about 10:30 that night, the seams opened in the bow and the Ituna sank within 10 minutes.
There were 14 men aboard, and 12 got away in the single lifeboat. But two men — George Nevins Jr., a cannery worker from Pittsburg, and George Orton, a marine firefighter from Aberdeen, Wash. — were trapped below and never seen again.
The scientists on the Fulmar spent more than two hours moving the robot sub around the sunken ship — to the sides, the bow and stern, even looking inside. There was no trace of the lost men. The sea must have taken them.
What was left was the skeleton of a ship. Many of the hull plates had fallen off, and the iron ribs of the hull were exposed. Fish swam in and out of the wreckage or stared dully at the robot submarine. The smokestack lay in pieces alongside one side of the wreck, broken.
‘It was their grave’
The submarine hovered over the ship’s 300-horsepower steam engine and a winch, with the wire still coiled tight.
A ladder led down into what was the engine room, ending nowhere. There was a single dinner plate, broken in two.
“It reminds us of the men who were on board,” said Delgado, who is the director of the NOAA’s marine heritage program. He pointed at the screen, at the images of the Ituna’s remains. “This was their home. And for two of them, it was their grave.”
The sinking of the Ituna was a big story in early 1920 and made a big black headline in The Chronicle. But there was other big news, too — riots in Germany, a huge fire in Texas.
The Ituna’s survivors told a harrowing story — how they got off the ship just in time, how they had to row in an open boat 4 miles to the San Francisco lightship, anchored off the coast. “The perils encountered by Capt. Westerdale and his companions were terrifying, even to so hardy a sailor as the veteran master who has sailed the seven seas for more than 40 years,” The Chronicle’s story said.
The world moved on, and the Ituna was forgotten. “But it should remind us that an awful lot of people go out to sea and don’t come back,” Delgado said. “It’s not just big liners and famous warships. In a lot of cases it’s just working boats, people trying to make a living.”
Finding the Ituna was a bit of a detective story. It began with the 1920 sinking, but in 2007, Jim Gray, a well-known computer scientist, sailed on his yacht alone from San Francisco to scatter his mother’s ashes off the Farallon Islands.
He never returned. His family spent five months doing high-tech searches in the Gulf of the Farallones but found no trace of Gray. They did find what looked like shipwrecks.
Detailed plans
The NOAA and Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary scientists thought one of them might be the longvanished Ituna.
They found detailed plans and pictures of the former yacht, so they knew exactly what they were looking for. On Oct. 5, they found what they thought was the wreck. Four days later, they went out to see.
“It is a historic site that sat there untouched for nearly a century,” Delgado said. “It is like exploring your own backyard and finding something unknown.”