Ghost Ship

 from Children of Vallejo

 

There were lots of places to fish along the shoreline that wrapped around Vallejo, but the Old Destroyer was by far the most fun. We’d study our tide tables and look for a high between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning. The plan was to fish a couple hours either side of high tide. We’d stop off at Parmisano & Sons fish market down on lower Georgia Street and buy several pounds of fresh sardines for bait. Then we’d get dropped off on the edge of a western subdivision and hike west on the levee that bordered the salt marsh, all the way out to the bank of the Napa River.

             Sometimes the fog would be so thick you could barely see where you were going. We’d find our favorite spot on the riverbank and go to work, rigging up our poles, cutting bait, getting ready to cast into the brown, brackish water. Then the sun would start to take charge and the fog would begin to lift and slowly, about a hundred yards to the north, the Old Destroyer would appear like a vision.

No one ever explained how she got there, a Navy ship lodged against the bank. She was just there. There was a plank that ran from the bank to the deck of the ship. If the fishing got slow, we could go aboard and explore. There wasn’t much to see. The superstructure was gone and only the hull remained.

Fishing was always great at the Old Destroyer. It was nothing to catch twenty fish in a day, mostly undersized striped bass. The size limit in those days was twelve inches and we’d usually catch three or four keepers to bring home and show our parents. The fun part was a running contest to see who could catch and release the most fish.

If the bite slowed down and there was no action, you’d sit and look at the old ship and wonder. Of course, you could make up your own version of her history:

 

            She was the USS Shane, a proud veteran of World War I, having served in the North Atlantic protecting convoys of merchant vessels heading for North Sea ports, fighting off the German subs that preyed on merchant shipping like a pack of hungry wolves. The Shane had six confirmed kills and survived many a battle with the Germans. At the close of the war, she was reassigned to the Pacific Fleet and sailed through the Panama Canal and up the coast, all the way to Mare Island for a complete overhaul.

With the work completed, the Shane was scheduled for a shakedown cruise, out into San Pablo Bay, then about-face and back up the Mare Island Strait and the Napa River channel, then back to the dock at the shipyard. On the way upriver, a cold front moved in and the temperature hit the dew point and the fog bloomed so thick that visibility dropped to zero. The crew missed a bend in the river and steamed onto the mud flats, hard up against the riverbank. All efforts to free her failed, so the Navy stripped her down, sealed her up and left her there, a proud warrior with no war to fight, an old sailor dumped on the shore for the last time.

 

           No doubt there were gaping holes in that story—a little truth, a little fiction, a little scrimshaw carved to fit the occasion—but in a Navy town like Vallejo, there were a thousand stories just like it.

_____

Note: The Old Destroyer was actually the USS Corry (DD334), launched at Bethlehem Shipyard in San Francisco in 1921. In the aftermath of World War I, the Navy decided to reduce the size of the fleet. The Corry was decommissioned at Mare Island in 1930 and towed a few miles to a spot on the east bank of the Napa River. The rotting hull is there to this day.