‘Pacific Graveyard’ a Perilous Puzzle

As the pilot boat Chinook pulls alongside the Japanese freighter Spring Leo, matching its cruising speed, both vessels rise and fall on the seas and swells of the Columbia River bar. A ladder drops over the freighter’s side.

Bar pilot Ellwood Collamore backs down the ladder, his feet on the rungs and hands on the ropes. Near the bottom, he waits for the Chinook to reach the height of a swell and swings onto the deck.

Collamore has just brought another ship through the “Pacific Graveyard” -- an often-tumultuous zone over a sandbar where the Columbia River pours into the Pacific.

“Piece of cake,” he says.

And on this calm day, it was. When the swells run to 30 or 40 feet, he says, it’s another matter.

Entry to the Columbia has been the dread of sailors for centuries. In 1866, a Navy commander found it “one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of the sailor. Mere description can give but little idea of the terror of the bar of the Columbia.”

The bar has been tamed somewhat with channeling and jetties. But insurer Lloyds of London still considers it the most dangerous crossing in the world.

The job of Columbia River bar pilots -- 18 seasoned seamen -- is to guide big ships through this zone of danger. Most are graduates of maritime academies, and all must have at least two years as master of an oceangoing ship. The Columbia pilots are the only ones in the United States with that requirement. To become a master usually means at least 10 to 15 years at sea. They also need a Coast Guard endorsement for the Columbia bar and a pilot’s license from the state of Oregon.

Since Capt. Robert Gray first sailed over the bar in 1792, it has claimed more than 2,000 vessels, including about 200 large ships, and more than 700 lives.

Explorers who sailed along the coast had long suspected that a river was there, but they couldn’t see past the bar’s thundering surf and had no real incentive to risk challenging it.

Spanish explorer Bruno Heceta noted indications of it in 1775 and even named it Bahia de la Asuncion, or Assumption Bay. In 1788, English explorer John Mears found similar clues and renamed it Deception Bay, but neither sailed into it. It was Gray, a Bostonian more fur trader than explorer, who brought his ship Columbia Rediviva, for which the river is named, through the breakers.

Trading ships began to call fairly regularly. By the time Lewis and Clark came along in 1805, coastal Indians and upriver tribes had many trappings of Western civilization -- from trading beads to snappy naval jackets to venereal disease.

Bar pilots tell the helmsman how to steer to coax the ships through the 600-foot-wide channel into the Columbia. Winter work on the bar in winds of 60 knots and swells of 20 feet is considered fairly routine.

“When it starts to get up to 70 or 80 knots, we start to draw lines” about whether to let shipping cross the bar, said bar pilot Robert Johnson, who has been doing it for 15 years. Most of the time, he said, nothing goes wrong. When something does, it’s critical.

Some swells at the 13-mile buoy have been measured at 44 to 45 feet, and they can be even bigger on the bar itself, he said.

The relatively shallow bar is formed by silt carried out by the river flow, the largest into the Pacific in North or South America. It meets the incoming force of the Pacific, which can reverse the flow of the Columbia as far as 100 miles upriver, said Jerry Ostermiller, director of Astoria’s Columbia River Maritime Museum.

When the forces meet, the sand is deposited. “It creates a sandbar you can’t see, but it’s there,” he said. “If a ship touches bottom, it’s not built for that. It will be damaged or sink.”

Bar pilots bring in about 4,100 ships a year. That’s down these days because of the economy.

By Oregon law, all foreign ships and American vessels without a qualified bar pilot aboard must use pilots.

“The pilots know every inch of the bar. Without them, we would have no international commerce,” Ostermiller said.

Ships pay pilots about $2,500 per crossing, Johnson said, but the price varies depending on ship size. Pilots work in strict rotation and the No. 1 pilot, the one next on duty, can decide to close the bar to shipping. “He will listen to weather reports and talk to the pilots, and if he decides to close the bar, it’s closed. Commerce stops,” Johnson said.

Since the pilots are former masters, they understand the commercial implications of lost time and balance it against safety considerations.

“In the days of sail, if the wind wasn’t right, you would wait until it was. It could take days, weeks, even months. That’s the way it was,” Johnson said.

Today, he said, “if a master wants to do a certain thing because of commercial pressure, I can step in and stop it.”

Sometimes, he said, the most important thing the pilots can do is to say no and tell the captain to anchor or head back out to sea until conditions improve.

The pilots’ experience provides a knowledge of channels, winds, tides and swells, and river currents essential to getting ships safely into, or out of, the Columbia.

“You get a gut feeling that this is a good risk or that this is not a good risk at all,” Johnson said. “A lot of times in the winter, we’re right on the edge. We just have to depend on experience.”

In the old days, he said, most wrecks were caused when sailing ships lost wind. The current would run them aground and storms would break them up. Today, mechanical failures cause most problems.

Technology has advanced rapidly over the years; pilots have not lost a major ship on the bar in decades. Fishing boats, which do not require pilots, still go down. Most recently, a 45-foot crab boat sank there in August 2001 and lost two men.

Columbia River traffic took off in the early 1850s because of the California Gold Rush, and the need for lumber and food. Astoria and upriver ports had both. Ships were getting bigger, and grain growers began pushing for jetties to protect a channel to help get their products to market. They were built about 100 years ago.

The first pilots were Indians who would spot incoming ships from a hilltop, paddle out and guide the ships in, Johnson said.

Later, a ship would lower a small boat to go ahead of it, testing the waters with a lead line. How Gray made it through, he said, is unclear.

The Hudson’s Bay Co. had some pilots for its ships. And of course there were freelancers.

“But a lot of them were second mates who had trouble getting [jobs on] ships because they liked to imbibe,” he said. “So they didn’t always get the best people.” Hence the term “Pacific Graveyard.”

In the 1850s, Capt. George Flavel insisted that all bar pilots working for him have experience as a master of a seagoing ship.

Nowadays, pilots take outgoing ships about seven miles to sea before being picked up by a pilot boat or helicopter and brought back. Incoming pilots pick up their ships somewhat farther out to bring them across and hand them off to river pilots, who take them to upriver ports.

The Chinook, a new $3-million pilot boat, is built to roll over completely and right itself. The only time it has was during testing before pilots took delivery.

“It’s a mixture of art and science now,” Johnson said. “New technology and developments are coming along. That’s the science. The art is learning how to use it to maneuver ships. In the end, it all ends up in your stomach. It’s that gut feeling.”