Los Angeles herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1900-1911, 1908-12-28

and dry, a helpless victim to the next
storm that comes screeching up the
coast to pile breakers against her and
crowd her even higher upon the beach.
1t is not easy to say which OF all the
dangerous opportunities of the wrecker
is most dangerous, but seldom does any
exceed that which, in addition to other
dangers, needs q storm to make 1t sue
cessful-the particular method of
wrecking known as walking a ship to
her cables"
Walking Her to Cables
When a big vessel like an ocean liner
loses it's bearings and the giant nose
turns shoreward and into the sands,
the monstrous hull, backed by the
enormous impact of 5000 or 1900 tons
moving at a speed of from ten to tWen-
ty knots an hour, gouges into the yield
ing bottom like a gigantic pillow that
digs furrow fifteen or twenty feet
deep and does not come to rest until
the steamer is all but high and dry,
surrounded by water hardly deep
enough to float a brick schooner. The
wrecker's method for dragging an un-
fortunate of this sort back to deep
water is what is known as walking
the ship to her cables
To walk a ship to her cables the
wrecker needs a storm. Not a cheap
little thirty or forty-knot zephyr, but
a real storm. A baby hurricane, the
wilder the better, for literally he In
tends to harness the storm with giant
hawsers, whereafter he stakes his life
and the fate of the vessel that the sea
will pull the wreck back to safety.
To harness one of these storms he
takes from four to six 20,000-pound
anchors, attaches a hawser fourteen
inches around to each one, drops each
anchor into the sea at distance from
$50 to 300 fathoms astern of the wreck
and brings the ends of the hawsers
aboard the stranded vessel There
they are set up tight as fiddle strings
by means of the ships windlasses
Then, unless the storm breaks at once
he takes cargo and everything that is
movable out of the ship to tighten her
and awaits the blow" AS the fury
Of the storm increases and the seas be-
come higher, up goes the stern, mo-
mentarily afloat on the house-high
breakers and down she comes with a
thud and a crash that threatens to
snap out her masts, while men in
sou'westers and yellow oilskins are
obliged to hold fast not to be knocked
off their feet Every time she is lifted
and momentarily afioat on a breaker,
she is being dra aged seaward-an inch
two inches-a foot at a time. For
although each time she rises the surf
tends to cast her higher up on the
beach, there are four or six of the
mightiest cables 1t is possible for
humans to make, each Of these cables
having an elasticity of something like
twenty-five or thirty feet, and the
combined elasticities or pulling power,
of all the hawsers is even mightier than
the sea. Therefore, instead of the wreck
being battered higher up the strand, IT
is pulled seaward and merely the oc-
casional setting up of the hawsers is
necessary to tauten this harness thrown
over the storm.
But, however he works, whether it
be in dragging a vessel from a sandy
beach, raising her from deep water or
blowing her up with dynamite for the
benefit of navigation, the wrecker's life
is in danger. What he has done the
public sometimes reads; how he does
it, seldom or never.