By Louis Hough
Four vessels bore the name Noyo, each with stories to tell. The first was a coasting schooner of 95 tons built at Eureka in 1861. A couple of stories survive, such as when her skipper, Captain H.H. Buhne, and several crewmen were washed overboard at Noyo Bay. Two who could not swim were saved, one by the skipper who kept him afloat and the other by a quick-witted sailor who threw his struggling shipmate an oar to cling to until a rescue boat fished them out. Their schooner did not fare so well when she went ashore at the Coos Bay bar some years later. Through broken planks, seawater flooded into her cargo hold in which were barrels of lime. On contact with water, the lime burst into flames and poor NOYO was incinerated, right to her waterline.
Three of the four Noyo’s were steam schooners, the first completed just before Christmas in 1887 at the shipyard of Alexander Hay in San Francisco. Built for Plummer & White at a cost of $50,000, she was 150 feet long, of 316 tons, and hauled cargoes of nearly 350 thousand board feet of lumber between Fort Bragg, San Francisco and southern California. Passengers aboard NOYO found her comfortable and the meals good.
In the clement summer months between 1889 and 1893, Noyo engaged in “blue water rafting,” towing log rafts to San Francisco. Their builder, red-haired Charles R. Johnson of Fort Bragg, considered rafts an inexpensive method to ship in one package a lot of redwood logs and piles to market. While it was cheaper, log-rafting was risky. For each chain-bound cigar-shaped monster that arrived safely–wholly or partially–several others fell apart completely, littering the shipping lanes with thousands of timbers.
Johnson’s outfit became the Union Lumber Company in August 1893 with some expert help from Carlton L. White and W.P. Plummer–who were Plummer & White, Noyo’s first owners. They helped incorporate, manage and see the infant Union Lumber enterprise on its way to success.
During the reorganization, Noyo was sold to John S. Kimball and steamed to Seattle where she teamed up with the steam schooner NAVARRO, also built by Alexander Hay in 1887. Each made four monthly sailings, hauling eager gold-seekers to Skagway, Juneau and Wrangell, returning to Seattle to embark still more. NOYO provided fifty “first class” accommo¬dations and 175 bunks in steerage where 300 tons of freight and the livestock were stowed. (No wonder pictures show hundreds of men happily waving from the gunwales; they’re in fresh air!) In February 1898, NOYO’s officers told of lawless conditions at Skagway where Soapy Smith, renegade ringleader of a band of hoodlums, controlled the town, defying federal authorities. “We have got them licked,” said Soapy.
Adventures attended Noyo’s coastal voyages too. She nearly foundered in hurricane-gale off Point Arena in January 1896 when the engine room flooded and most of her deckload of lumber was washed overboard. Nineteen passengers in their life jackets stood by while NOYO wallowed in immense seas and Captain Levinson’s crew kept the vessel afloat. Hope arrived when the steamer ALBION stood by her for twelve hours until the wind and sea subsided and NOYO once again had steam and could proceed to San Francisco.
In January 1899, under Captain W.R. Daniels, she went on the rocks at Duxbury Reef, just north of the Golden Gate. Aboard her when she struck the reef were thirteen passengers and fourteen crewmen from the wreck of the steamer JEWEL. Twice in one week had these men been shipwrecked. NOYO was pulled off the rocks and towed to San Francisco–a total wreck. Ironically, less than a month earlier she had been completely renovated and now she was again rebuilt, ready to return to service.
National Steamship Company was Union Lumber’s marine subsidiary which operated more than fifteen steam schooners from 1901 to 1939. The vessels nosed in and out of many “dog holes” on the Redwood Coast from Needle Rock, Westport and Cleone to the north to as far south as Timber Cove, hauling dimension lumber, railroad ties and tanbark to ports on San Francisco Bay and in southern California. From fifteen to forty passengers were accommodated aboard their vessels and, the record indicates, there was not one loss of life aboard ships named NOYO–though some folks had a pretty close call.
National S.S. Company acquired the Noyo in 1913, put her on the southern California run and had her in service for two years before she piled on the rocks at La Jolla Cove. A tug pulled her off and got the casualty safely to a San Diego wharf, where, once her cargo was discharged, she capsized. Back on an even keel and with her hull patched, she proceeded to a dry dock for permanent repairs.
Fate struck Noyo a mortal blow on Saturday afternoon, February 28, 1918. Fate, in the shape of Bull Rock, lies offshore from Salmon Creek. At low tide it is an unseen menace to shipping. Noyo smacked into the rock and seawater flooded in rapidly. To observers ashore, her distress signals sounded like a weak “moan” as the steam pressure fell. The steamer schooner HELEN P. DREW put out from Greenwood as did the BRUNSWICK from Fort Bragg, steaming to assist the crippled vessel.
The Drew got a tow line on the casualty and proceeded to tug Noyo south. But the seas made up late that afternoon, the tow line parted and NOYO drifted southward–alone and abandoned–into the stormy darkness. At dawn Sunday somewhere near Stewart’s Point, Brunswick (another National steamer) found her. Lying on her side, she wallowed sluggishly in heavy grey seas. A halting tow to San Francisco resumed, with the unruly hulk disobediently veering off course. The ordeal ended at Point Reyes when NOYO abruptly plunged to the bottom.
National bought their second Noyo six years later, in 1924. She was a handsome steel-hulled vessel built in San Francisco by the Union Iron Works in July 1913. Named AROLINE, the 224-foot long vessel steamed between San Francisco and Los Angeles carrying freight and passengers for her owners, the Independent Steamship Company.
She became the Admiral Goodrich by her second owners, Pacific Steamship Company, when they purchased her in 1916. The line had two elegant passenger ships on that run–the popular Harvard and Yale –so Admiral Goodrich was in “secondary passenger service” (think Economy Class). And as such she also steamed to those less frequented ports in chilly Alaskan waters.
In 1923, National bought the vessel and named her Noyo. She soon earned the title “a fast ship”–with a sea speed of 13 knots–for her efficient performance. To her skipper, Captain John P. Bostrom, goes much of the credit.
He was well seasoned, having sailed around Cape Horn as a teenager, not as a passenger, but as a member of the crew. Since 1900 Bostrom worked in the company fleet. Nicknamed “Hurry-up Jack,” this hard-driving and well respected skipper is best remembered for a heroic 36-hour battle to rescue the disabled auxiliary schooner Escola in a 100-mile-an-hour gale off Point Reyes. Having gotten ESCOLA’s men to safely, the resolute captain and his crew struggled in fierce seas to keep ESCOLA from the killer rocks. But to no avail. Typically, the cool-headed Bostrom commented tersely, “It’s all in a day’s work.”
Captain Bostrom had been master of the steel steam schooner NOYO eleven years when disaster befell his ship in a pea-soup fog off Point Arena. Shortly after one o’clock in the morning of June 10, 1935, an adverse current pushed the northbound vessel too close to Saunder’s Reef and ended the career of what was fondly considered “our favorite” of all the Union Lumber vessels, a comment made by Otis R. Johnson in 1949.
The two passengers aboard Noyo would never claim such affection. They were newly-weds, the groom a southern California client of Union Lumber. In the ship’s hold was their brand-new car. They never saw the car again, nor see the ship, blanketed in fog.out there on some miserable rocks.
Distress whistles–four short blasts–had penetrated the dense fog all night long, but NOYO’s location eluded everyone, including the life-saving crew from Point Arena, until the following day. One hundred yards offshore she was gripped in the clutches of North Saunders Reef, her steel hull punctured, cargo holds flooded, and tons of steel rails shifting and battering the hull even more. Attempts to refloat her failed, though a tug and a huge electric salvage barge from San Francisco, tried their level best. As she was pounded by incessant waves, Noyo went to pieces, lost her identity, and her name was passed unceremoniously to another vessel.
She first bore the peculiar name Griffdu, christened that by her first owner, James Griffiths of Seattle who had her built there by J.F. Duthie & Company. Launched in October 1920, the steel-hulled steam schooner with her 1400 horsepower engine joined Griffith’s lumber-hauling fleet–James Griffiths & Sons–comprised of the steamer GRIFFCO and a large wooden barge GRIFFSON. (Need we explain where the name came from?) Griffdu made a number of voyages to South America and Hawaii in addition to carrying lumber down the west coast.
Captain Bostrom virtually stepped from the bridge of one NOYO to the other. The third NOYO was acquired that month, June 1935. A ship to match the hustle of “Hurry-up Jack,” she had cargo handling gear capable of hoisting aboard and discharging lumber at a prodigious rate. At Fort Bragg, Noyo could be loaded in as little time as one working day. Her capacity was one and one quarter million feet (1,250,000 board feet), enough to build 74 five-room houses. Speed was achieved by Union Lumber Company’s practice of packaging milled lumber in units of 6 or 7 tons. The units were promptly unloaded by NOYO’s long booms which could easily reach flat cars on three lines of railroad tracks on wharves at southern terminals.
During the year 1938-1939, Noyo delivered one lumber cargo at San Francisco to every four delivered to San Pedro and San Diego. Despite her efficiency, shipments by rail and truck proved more economical for the firm. When Noyo arrived in San Pedro on March 25, 1939 she landed her last shipment of redwood from the Union Lumber wharf at Fort Bragg.
Her career far from over, Noyo was chartered out to other firms and hauled lumber cargoes from Coos Bay, Puget Sound and Columbia River ports to southern California. Sold in August 1940 to a Bangkok buyer, she left the west coast forever in October to become NANG SUANG NAWA for the Thai Niyom Panich Company. The British Transport Ministry operated her from 1942 to 1948 renaming her EMPIRE ADUR. Once again flying the Thai flag and again with the name NANG SUANG NAWA, the vessel sailed until 1955. While being towed to Hong Kong to be scrapped in November that year, she and the tug mysteriously disappeared.