The Wreck of the Cottoneva
Two Half Hitches are Enough! by Gunnar Hexum We had to pull out of Port Orford with the Cottoneva because it got so God-damn rough. We had a heavy blow ... it was blowing the lumber off the shoreside piles down onto the ships . Like a man shuffling a pack of cards and they get away from him- that' s the way those planks were flying through the air. ' 'The Kaiser,' ' his last name was Stahlbaum, and his brother had bought' the ship some years before. His brother was on the bridge with him this time. All he could say as we tried to get out of there was , " Oh my God , my God , my God ." They probably didn ' t have much money . The Cottoneva was the old Frank D . Stout. She had been laid up for a while when we joined her. We went over to Oakland Estuary and got her ready for sea, renewed all the running rigging and so on . She was kind of short on stores. The Kaiser hired old friends for mates and engineers and they had to put up with the conditions. He explained to them that he was on a shoestring- "It's either going to make us or break us." They were glad to get a job. It was still depression times; a good many of the steam schooners were shut down . But for us sailors it was the first trip after the ' 36 strike and we insisted on full and plenty. What it amounted to was that we had bacon , and the Kaiser's friends-the officers-<lidn 't. The ship was unusual in that she had her boilers on top of the engine room. The boilers were in our mess room. There was a hatch behind the boilers down to the engine room. She was a twin screw . The Cottoneva had friction winches-very delicate. When you released them they were gone . . . brother , if you let them go too far you couldn't hold them. But great for fast discharging; swing the load and throw it shoreside and let it go completely . . . the load would just throw itself. Getting back tu Port Orford , there was a heavy sea running , but the wind was the worst of it. The lumber was blowing off the stacks and through the air .. . like a hurricane. We let go and got away from the dock but we hit an old wreck. It damaged one of the propellors . That doomed the ship; she couldn't be maneuvered . We began to drift in towards the beach. Stahlbaum tried to anchor, but when the mate, "Snoose Eric," went forward to let go, the chain pipe pulled right out of the rotten old deck . It rode up and jammed the wildcat. I don't know what was the matter with the other anchor, but. by that time the seas had got the best of us and we were a goner anyway. A young Swede and I went forward and put on clean dungarees and put our sailors' papers in our pockets . We figured we were going to do some swimming. We took a tum of baling wire 2 right through the pants to keep them there; the papers were in an oiled wallet. She hit a rock and rolled right over on her side-the Swede and I were by the hatch coaming and slid down the deck on our backs. We thought we were going over completely. I'll never forget his eyes . . . both his big blue Swedish eyes were ready to pop right out of his head as we went sliding down the deck. I have never seen eyes bulging like those two blue eyes. But Cottoneva straightened up again. There is only about a quarter of a mile of sandy beach there; all the rest is rocks. The Phyllis had gone ashore in the same place. When the Kaiser knew the ship was lost, he decided to drive her ashore on that little strip of beach to save our lives. It was damn good ship handling. ' The Record of the American Bureau of Shipping shows the Cottoneva bought by Stahlbaum in 1932 and wrecked in 1937. On the steam schooners you might have seizing wire or you might have baling wire. They were half farmers on those God-damned ships. When you secured a shackle pin through the eye you were just as likely to use baling wire as anything else. 2
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Gunnar Hexum devoted his later years to the Masters , Mates & Pilots union and the young San Francisco Maritime Museum. He is seen here holdin g Jeanie Kortum at an early fundrais er f or the Balclutha. Pharo courresy Karl Kortum.
The Coast Guard fired a breeches buoy out to us and I went up the foremast to make it fast. Two half hitches will hold anything, 3 but when they dragged the big line out to us it had not two half hitches, but about eight or nine. You can imagine how jammed up they were- a brand new line being dragged through the sand and surf, swelled up. I was up aloft, trying to hang on-no cross trees, no nothing-and undoing all those half hitches with a marlin spike. I had to go down to get the spike-a wire splicing spike; I needed a flat tip to pry the half hitches loose, one at a time. I was hanging on by my legs while I was working with my hands . I still have scars on my legs from trying to clamp myself to the mast. Der Kaiser was next to the last ashore and I was the last. When I came in I wanted to know who the f--- was responsible for that bad sailorizing. Because I was the last man off the Cottoneva they thought I was the captain: "Yes, captain ... no, captain . . . . " 'Tm not the God-damned captain," I said, "I just want to know who tied all these half hitches." I will say for them that the first thing that came out to the ship on the breeches buoy was four bottles of whiskey. ''Snoose Eric" took charge of this and we drank whiskey and used slices of ham for a chaser.
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Afterward the Kaiser rigged his own high line to salvage what gear he could. Some of us stood by up there a couple of weeks. At the start he offered another Norwegian and myself $35 if we would go out to the ship and send the mooring lines and the running rigging ashore. Anything that could be unrove. We got out there and bent one line onto another and they hauled it onto the beach. We were back in about an hour. "How much do I owe you?" said the Kaiser. "Why, the deal is $35. " The Kaiser started to buck: he had thought it was a bigger ' There is an old sea story: Ship's boy: " Captain , didn ' t you say that a round tum and two half hitches will hold anything?" Captain: " That's correct. " Boy: " Well , sir, that's the way I tied up the jolly boat last night and it's gone this morning." SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1985-86