Their bodies felt the impact before their minds could register that they were sinking. The crew wasn’t expecting to be hit. The war with Nazi Germany was on the other side of the world, and their job was to help create the news by transporting 1,250 tons of newsprint to San Francisco, not to become the news…certainly not the news like that printed on their very own newsprint six months prior, in reporting on the attack on Pearl Harbor; but I-26 had spotted their vessel through a periscope, and the Imperial Japanese Navy had their orders.
The Coast Trader had just turned south, like they had on many other voyages after casting off from Port Angeles and leaving the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was a Pacific Northwest summer day, and the western seaboard had been relatively quiet. Lurking below the water on June 7th, 1942, however, was the submarine that would change that quietness. I-26 had just carried out its reconnaissance for the Aleutian Island Campaign and was heading South when it crossed paths with this merchant vessel. At 14:10 in the afternoon, the Coast Trader crew was more aware of the sea around them then the torpedo that was being launched below the surface. Within 40 minutes, the 56 officers and crew of the Coast Trader, along with 19 US Army guards, went from doing their jobs to surviving a missile strike. They were set adrift on a life boat and couple of life rafts to face the perils of an oncoming storm, with their newsprint sinking below their story.
Eighty-three years later, the Coast Trader still sits where I-26 torpedo left it, at a depth of 165 meters (around 550 feet) and 38 nautical miles west of Cape Flattery, Washington, out of sight and out of mind to most. It serves as a social hub for marine life and a storage depot for heavy fuel oil that is on par with the volume of the Nestucca oil spill that occurred off Gray’s Harbor on December 22, 1988. In that spill, the heavy fuel oil evaded sight from fly-overs and snuck up on Vancouver Island shoreline nearly ten days later, together with oiling ~10,000 sea birds and 100 sea otters. According to Washington’s Department of Ecology, the Nestucca spill “resulted in one of the largest, most damaging environmental incidents in the history of Washington,” and its northward transport was consistent with winter circulation patterns in the Pacific Northwest. Given this history and previous reporting on the likelihood of Coast Trader oil to impact Vancouver Island if released, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) reached out to my previous supervisor, Susan Allen (UBC), who connected me with them to see if I could help them evaluate the potential impacts from the Coast Trader in the event that corrosion takes the “storage” out of “storage depot.” They reached out just before I started my job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and this confluence of events opened up an opportunity for a collaboration between our countries, with me using NOAA’s GNOME modeling suite to evaluate fate and transport in all seasons, not just Winter. (There may be an upcoming NOAA blog with more information on these results. Stay tuned.)
This story is one of many untold stories of the WWII sunken vessels documented by the RULET project (see link below). Some vessels, like the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach, have leaked and have prompted response by NOAA’s office of Response and Restoration to remove the fuel from fuel tanks; but the locations of many of these sunken vessels remain unknown.
On this Memorial Day, I’m thinking of this Coast Trader story and the many other untold stories of loss that accompany these torpedoed vessels during World War II. My heart goes out to all the family and friends who have lost loved ones during times of service. I am grateful to have the opportunity to work with NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration to help keep hardships in the past and to prevent future loss of lives and livelihoods. Here is to honoring those who have acted to protect and to serve and to carry forward this mission in the varied ways that we can.
- NOAA Coast Trader Survey photo and information at https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/us-canadian-border-surveying-world-war-ii-shipwreck-history-and-oil.html
- RULET Project homepage: https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/history-rulet-database
Copyright (2025-present) by Rachael D. Mueller. All rights reserved.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode