The Shipwreck Coast: Duxbury Reef and the Marin Graveyard

The water below this stretch of coast contains more shipwrecks than any comparable length of the Pacific Coast. That is not a figure of speech. The NOAA Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, which protects this area, has documented a dense concentration of wrecks from the eighteen fifties through the early twentieth century along the Marin coast between Point Reyes and the Golden Gate.

The reasons are simple and relentless. The reef systems here, including Duxbury Reef off Bolinas, extend far enough offshore to catch ships running close to the coast. The fog that blankets this stretch for more than two hundred days a year reduced visibility to yards even in the middle of the day. Before radar, before radio, before GPS, the only navigation aids available were the lighthouses, the lead line, and the skill of captains who often could not see what they were about to hit.

On March seventeenth, nineteen oh-eight, the passenger steamer SS Pomona struck the rocks off the Marin coast in conditions that had destroyed dozens of vessels before it. Eighty-four passengers and a crew of sixty-two were aboard. All were evacuated without loss of life, which was not the outcome for every wreck in this record.

Duxbury Reef, where this and many other wrecks occurred, takes its name from the ship that gave it its name, which is itself a casualty list.

Almost none of these wrecks have interpretive signage. The road above them carries tourist traffic past a maritime graveyard without a marker. The water keeps its records quietly.