"Graveyard of the Pacific" by Randall Sullivan

Above:  "Graveyard of the Pacific - Shipwreck and Survival on Ameria's Deadliest Waterway" - Randall Sullivan - 237 pages.  I completed reading this book today.
Grok summary followed by SDT personal notes.
Grok:  Graveyard of the Pacific: Shipwreck and Survival on America’s Deadliest Waterway (2023) by Randall Sullivan is a 272-page mix of maritime history, adventure journalism, and memoir focused on the Columbia River Bar—the turbulent meeting of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon-Washington coast. Nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific, the bar has wrecked some 2,000 ships since the first European vessel attempted the crossing in the late 18th century.
 
The Columbia is one of the world’s great rivers: roughly 1,200 miles long, draining more water into the Pacific than any other river in the Americas, fed by mountain ranges and major tributaries. At its mouth, enormous river outflow collides with ocean swells over a shifting underwater sandbar. The result can be 40- to 65-foot breakers, heavy undertow, frequent fog, and conditions that change in minutes. Jetties have been built, but the bar remains treacherous. Many wrecks happened after ships entered and could neither proceed nor turn back. Sullivan opens with the river’s violent geological origins—fire, ice, lava, and fault lines—then traces its role as an inland route that drew European explorers, displaced Indigenous peoples (including Clatsop canoe navigators who once crossed in large vessels), and turned the region into a commercial hub.
 
The heart of the book is a series of vivid, moment-by-moment accounts of disasters from the 18th through 20th centuries. These include early European attempts, the 1880 storms that destroyed much of the salmon fishing fleet and killed more than 60 men, and later wrecks such as the Peter Iredale, Andrada, Laurel, Columbia, Triumph II, and the 1991 Sea King sinking, in which fishermen and a Coast Guard rescue swimmer died despite a large-scale operation. Sullivan profiles captains, crews, and rescuers, showing how small decisions—waiting for weather versus keeping a schedule, hiring a pilot versus going it alone—often decided survival. He also covers the Columbia River Bar Pilots, a specialized group that has guided ships since the 19th century (today often reaching vessels by helicopter) and can close the bar in winter, plus the Coast Guard station at Cape Disappointment, a training ground for the most dangerous water work. Navigation technology, boats, and safety have improved, but the physical forces have not.
 
Woven through the history is Sullivan’s own story. Approaching 70, he and his friend Ray—both survivors of violent, abusive fathers—prepare to cross the bar in a two-man sailing kayak on a carefully chosen July 2021 day with favorable tides and weather. Skeptics warn them off. Sullivan’s father had been a sailor who once made the crossing; the author’s childhood included severe physical abuse (one blow left him deaf in one ear). The book treats the kayak attempt as a late-life rite of passage and a way to confront inherited ideas of manhood, risk, and fatherhood. They reach the ocean but capsize in surf near the beach. Sullivan uses the crossing to commemorate earlier sailors and to reflect on what drives men toward extremes.
 
The narrative is research-heavy and propulsive on the wrecks, more personal and meditative on family and friendship. Reviews note that the memoir thread is substantial—some readers find it the book’s emotional core, others feel it sits uneasily with the subtitle’s promise of shipwreck history. The recurring practical lesson is patience: many lives were lost because captains would not wait for better conditions or a pilot. The book ends as both a portrait of a uniquely dangerous waterway and a reckoning with courage, damage, and what can be salvaged late in life.

SDT Personal Notes.

On July 9, 2026, I rolled into Astoria, Oregon, on two wheels with two friends. I had been there two or three times before—also by motorcycle—but those visits barely registered beyond a meal, a bed, and, once, an unplanned Candy Crush binge. This time we had a destination: the Columbia River Maritime Museum.

I left the museum with a newly purchased book and a yearning to know more about the area. There I had encountered the Columbia Bar—a maritime minefield of history and hazard that has swallowed ships and helped shape the coast—and seen that Astoria is no mere waypoint on a motorcycle itinerary. The town helped write the story of the American Northwest.

Columbia Bar

Where the Columbia River finally meets the Pacific, there is no gentle delta—only a narrow, fire-hose mouth that slams millions of cubic feet of silt-laden fresh water every second into oncoming ocean swells born thousands of miles away. That collision, over a constantly shifting kidney of submerged sandbars six miles long and three miles wide, builds standing waves that can rear 30 or 40 feet, stack steep and close together on a strong ebb, and change from glass-calm to lethal in minutes as wind, tide, and current wrestle. Clatsop Spit and Peacock Spit reach like jaws from either shore; between them a dredged channel no wider than many ships are long and only a few feet deeper than their keels threads the chaos, while hidden speedbumps of sand rise and migrate beneath the white water. Since Captain Gray first crossed in 1792, some two thousand vessels and more than seven hundred lives have been claimed here, earning the bar its grim title, Graveyard of the Pacific; even now, with jetties and constant dredging, bar pilots still board by helicopter or leaping from pitching boats to thread the same roaring, fog-shrouded, ever-rewritten passage that early sailors called one of the most fearful sights a mariner could behold.

Astoria, Oregon

Astoria, Oregon, the state’s oldest city and the first permanent American settlement west of the Rockies, sits on the south bank of the Columbia just inland from the Pacific, a place whose history and character are inseparable from the river’s mouth. Long before John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company raised Fort Astoria in 1811, Clatsop and Chinook peoples had built a maritime trading world here; Lewis and Clark wintered nearby at Fort Clatsop, and the post that followed—trappers, voyageurs, sailors, and Native traders exchanging beaver and sea-otter pelts—became a claim in the Oregon boundary dispute even after it was sold to the British in the War of 1812. That same rough waterfront later drew salmon canneries, Scandinavian fishermen, Chinese cannery workers, lumber schooners, and the Columbia River Bar Pilots who still guide ships across the Graveyard of the Pacific. The town that grew from it remains unpolished and river-facing: Victorian houses climb the hills above a working port, the Astoria Column watches over the confluence, and the character is still that of a salty, weather-beaten outpost—proud of its firsts, shaped by wrecks and tides, and more interested in authenticity than in being a postcard beach town.

The Astoria–Megler Bridge dominates Astoria. A steel cantilever through-truss, it carries U.S. Route 101 across the lower Columbia from Astoria, Oregon, to Point Ellice near Megler, Washington, some fourteen miles from the Pacific. Opened to traffic on July 29, 1966, and dedicated a month later, it stretches 21,474 feet—just over four miles—with a 1,233-foot main span and 196 feet of clearance at high tide. It is the longest continuous truss bridge in North America; its two narrow lanes carry about 7,000 vehicles a day.


In "Graveyard of the Pacific," magazine veteran Randall Sullivan—Rolling Stone, Esquire—turns research into propulsive narrative. He reconstructs wrecks and rescues minute by minute, detail sharp enough that the deck lifts and the spray hits, then opens into lyrical geology (“the great river of the west was born from violence, from fire, and from ice”). Memoir overlays it all: an abusive seafaring father, a lifelong friendship, and his late-life attempt to cross the bar, the water a metaphor for masculinity, courage, and breaking a cycle of violence. History, adventure reportage, and personal essay braid together vivid when ships and river take the page, more interior when he turns to himself.