Eldia grounding ‘seems like yesterday’

March 29--ORLEANS -- It was a March nor'easter much like the one that just blew by us this week. Thirty years ago today, winds gusting to hurricane strength of 70 mph onshore, and 80 to 90 mph offshore, spawned 18- to 20-foot waves.

The storm had its effect on the land. The 166-year-old Great Point Light on Nantucket collapsed into the surf. At sea, the 471-foot Maltese-flagged freighter Eldia, riding high in the water with her holds empty after dropping off a load of Colombian sugar at St. John, New Brunswick, was having a hard time making headway.

The ship was so buoyant that the rudder was unable to make good purchase in the swells and the Eldia's captain, Ernesto Garces, found he couldn't steer her into refuge in Cape Cod Bay. Instead, the vessel was driven by wind and waves onto the deadly sandbars of the Outer Cape, known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, with more than 3,000 known shipwrecks going back hundreds of years.

It proved a Fellini-esque spectacle that drew more than 100,000 people to the beach to gawk at the outsized structure that dwarfed the landscape and sightseers, but was as helpless as any sea creature cast onto the shore.

At 4:05 p.m. on March 29, 1984, the Eldia broadcast an SOS and Garces ran out his anchors, but they didn't hold.

Former Orleans Fire Chief Steve Edwards was one of the first to arrive on the scene. He wasn't the chief then, and he and another firefighter were simply responding to a call from a local guy who said he thought he saw a fishing boat in trouble.

As they came over the hill, Edwards could see the mast and bow towering over a 20-foot dune head on into the beach. He knew he was dealing with something far bigger than a fishing boat.

"We could tell it was bigger, but because it was face on to us, we had no perspective," Edwards recalled.

By the time they got down to the beach, the vessel was drifting parallel to the shore, dragging two enormous anchors that were doing little to slow its progress. The waves were breaking big and nasty, and huge rollers would occasionally send spray right up over the decks 40 feet above the water. At one point, the ship listed badly.

"It was like, 'Holy Smokes!' Our first inkling was that it was going to roll over," Edwards said. He felt helpless in the face of what seemed an unknowable scope of disaster. Questions about how many were onboard, what the cargo was, and how much fuel could spill raced through Edwards' mind.

The two men could do little else but give chase. They hit the off-road trail system behind the dunes hoping to catch up to the vessel as it drifted south toward Chatham.

News photographer and videographer Bill Quinn, of Orleans, was helping his son William, the current fire chief but then fire inspector, build his house.

Naturally, the scanner was on in the background and they both heard the dispatcher say there was a fishing vessel in trouble. Then the voice of an officer fired back, "God! This thing is a helluva lot bigger than a fishing boat!"

"We dropped our tools," said Quinn, who was already known for writing books on the Cape's many historic and modern shipwrecks.

The Eldia would prove to be the largest of all the thousands that foundered on Cape shores.

By the time they arrived, the vessel had drifted a half-mile down from the main public beach, and Quinn couldn't see it until they reached the parking lot. One of the two anchors dragged up the trans-Atlantic cable that was no longer in use but had once been the primary link between France and the United States.

The Eldia was in such shallow water and was so lightly loaded that its enormous propeller was half out of the water, Quinn said.

"The company that owned her was cheap. They didn't want to put ballast in because it would be heavier and burn more fuel," he added.

Quinn was snapping photographs in a howling northeast wind as a helicopter attempted in vain to put a rescue line on deck. He heard a Coast Guard chief was lamenting that they didn't have a breeches buoy, a lifeline fired from shore by cannon to the ship. Once secured on both ends, a seat traveled along the line, and could offload crew.

"He wasn't sure the helo would be able to get them off, so we went up to the historical society and brought (a breeches buoy) down," Quinn recalled.

It wasn't needed, as Coast Guard helicopter pilot Lt. Commander David Cooper, Petty Officer Jeff Amatrudo, the hoist operator, co-pilot Lt. James McManus, and Petty Officer Charles Hancock, the radio operator, all received air medals for their rescue work that day taking the 23 crew members and captain off the vessel.

But the story didn't end with the rescue.

When former beach Superintendent Paul Fulcher got the news about the shipwreck, he was packing for a vacation. Little did he realize on the ride down to the beach that the fishing boat would turn out to be so much more and would monopolize his life for the next two months.

"If my family wanted to see me, they had to come down to the beach," Fulcher recalled.

Although they lost count, Fulcher said that a conservative estimate of 100,000 people who made the trek down to see "The Boat" wasn't far-fetched.

Initially, crowd control was handled by police details paid for by the vessel's insurance company.

But, as those bills mounted, the insurers stopped payments and the police went back to their normal patrols. That left park personnel, Fulcher said, with no overtime, racking up comp time that they wouldn't be able to take until the ship was gone.

"I knew from watching other things come in and get sanded in that it wasn't going to be removed too quickly," Fulcher said. "I didn't think we were going to be out there for two months."

The people just kept coming, night and day. To protect the fragile dunes, they were diverted onto the beach. It was easy to see the appeal. Photographs show the monstrous bulk of the big, rusty orange and blue hull towering over people eager for a snapshot. With his budget stretched to the breaking point, Fulcher started charging $2 a car for admission to the beach parking lot and racked up $80,000.

Other enterprising endeavors grew around the ship. Local merchants loved the off-season business, and they sold commemorative mugs, T-shirts and other knickknacks. Restaurants had Eldia-themed sandwiches.

The captain and some of the crew remained behind for the salvage and became local celebrities. A local woman, the late Ardath Reynolds, showed them kindness and fed them at her restaurant.

For 49 days, the ship persisted, stuck in the same spot, as if it might remain forever, long after Clean Harbors had drained the last of the 130,000 gallons of fuel oil from its fuel tanks, pumped through hoses thousands of feet long to tanker trucks.

Then, one night, a cat's cradle of lines and tackle stretched between 6- to 8-ton anchors and an anchored barge pulled the 4,000-ton ship off the beach on a rising tide under a full moon. It was quiet, Quinn recalled, so quiet you could hear the waves breaking, as the ship slipped away. Years later, it was dismantled in a Rhode Island shipyard, too broken by Nauset Beach to continue.

"It seems like yesterday to me," Quinn said.

"I was glad to see it go," said Fulcher. "Everybody was pretty well burnt out from putting in that many hours."

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