SS Catala

My son has become fascinated by photographs of wrecks; train wrecks, car wrecks, shipwrecks, you named it, if it wrecked it is interesting.  I'll show him a picture and he'll say, what happened.  Most the time I don't know because it is just a picture with no details.  We were looking at the University of Washington photographic collection recently and came across a photo of the SS Catala in the sand on Damon Point near Ocean Shores.  I actually could tell him about this wreck and that I had seen it and there are pictures of me next to it.  Very fun stuff, you see once upon a time, the Williams family vacationed each year at Ocean Shores.  One of the highlights of any trip to Ocean Shores was to go down and see the SS Catala, which by the time of my youth was a rusted and vandalized listing mess.  I was considered too young to ever go inside the old lady, so I missed out on that, I remember that my sister and Dad went inside at least once.  It amazes me, by twenty-first century standards, that the State let people crawl around on the thing, let alone let it sit on the beach.  

The SS Catala was built in Glasgow, Scotland in 1925.  It spent most it's years carrying around lumberjacks and fisherman on the B.C. coast.  In 1958, it was retired and sold, eventually ending up in Seattle as a floating hotel for the World's Fair in 1962.  After the fair it moved to Ocean Shores were it was once again a hotel.  On New Year's 1965 it was grounded in a storm.  It could not be re-floated and was abandoned on the beach, to become a jungle gym and source of wonderment of young boys.  In the early 1980's a girl broke her back when she fell through the rusted deck.  After that the ship was scrapped down to the level of the sand.  Then in the aughts, wind, waves and rain exposed the hull again.  This time also exposing oil leaking from the hull.  The State then spent a couple years cleaning up and removing the last of the remains.  

Tonight a photo of me in front of the SS Catala, which is oddly enough the only picture my parents took of the ship.  I was a bit surprised to realize that, we seemed to make it out there every year, or at least that is how I remember it.

Enjoy

Dan