Sonoma Coast shipwreck Norlina nears historical designation

In January 1926, the steel-hulled tramp freighter Norlina dropped 75,000 cases of Campbell’s condensed soup at the Port of Los Angeles. Seven months and several assignments later, at 5:30 p.m. Aug. 3, she left San Francisco, bound for Puget Sound with cargo to be delivered to the Sears Roebuck Co.

The Norlina got as far as Gerstle Cove on the Sonoma Coast. There, in a dense fog, the ship ran aground on jagged rocks in the middle of the night.

“There was a grinding crash, a sudden sickening lift and lurch, and the vessel was still,” the San Francisco Examiner reported. “The engines were shut off, then run in reverse. But all efforts to back off were vain.”

There were no casualties.

One seaman told The Press Democrat at the time that the captain had been “cockeyed drunk” on the passage. Some crewmen firmly blamed the absence of the steamship’s mascot, a black cat that had ominously been left behind in San Francisco.

Accountability aside, the Norlina would sail no more. The surging swells broke the ship apart in slow motion, over a period of four months, within shouting distance of the shore. Today it lies in pieces along the ocean floor, within the boundaries of Salt Point State Park about 20 miles north of Jenner.

And yet the Norlina continues to steam forward, at least through the bureaucratic waters of historic preservation. The California State Historical Resources Commission on Friday approved the shipwreck’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. The final decision now lies in the hands of the Keeper of the Register, a National Park Service official.

There are few tangible benefits to landing a property on the register — especially a sunken wreck not subject to property taxes. But the blessing of an objective, respected body like National Parks can be a draw to history buffs.

John Harreld, for one, has a rooting interest in the Norlina.

“It’s not mine. It belongs to the public,” Harreld said. “But it feels like I have a special relationship to the wreck that others don’t have.”

It is Harreld who has guided the systematic recording of the site — first as a hobbyist diver, then as a contributing member of the Sonoma Coast Doghole Ports Project, and most recently as president of the Sonoma Coast Historic and Undersea Nautical Research Society (or SCHUNRS, which is pronounced “Schooners”).

Before Harreld and others started surveying the site in 2017, he had explored the Norlina’s ghostly remains only once, about five years earlier. He stumbled into bits of wreckage, but visibility was dauntingly low. Harreld likened it to “trying to map a forest at night with a flashlight.”

Gerstle Cove is, for many reasons, a difficult place to scuba.

“It’s a challenge for advanced divers, I’ll put it that way,” Harreld said. “It’s a relatively shallow dive site. There’s a lot of surge, even on a good day. Unpredictable visibility. And the entrance and exit point can be pretty treacherous to get in and out of. There’s a lot of turbulence and washing. So we could only pick the best days.”

The main concentration of the Norlina’s remnants sits in 15-30 feet of water. At extremely low tides, tips of the ship’s machinery can poke into the air.

Between 2017 and 2020, Harreld and his team, which included fellow Sonoma Coast Historic and Undersea Nautical Research Society diver Jason Herum, spent a total of 18 hours underwater at Salt Point. They swam 30-meter transects, photographing and videotaping sections of the Norlina’s remains to build a map of the floor. Harreld also surveyed the cove in a kayak outfitted with a sonar system.

The Norlina, built in England in 1908 and originally launched as the Harfleur before a new owner renamed it for a small town in North Carolina, was 385 feet long and 51 feet wide when seaworthy. Its remains are strewn over an area longer than a football field, generally oriented northeast to southwest. There is structural material from the ship’s hull, along with its 130-foot drive shaft, steam engine, boilers and propeller blades, most of it encrusted with urchins, starfish and other types of marine life.

It’s on the shortlist of the Sonoma Coast’s most intriguing shipwrecks, Harreld said, along with the Pomona off Fort Ross and the Klamath near Sea Ranch.

But as historic preservationists well know, it takes more than a cool visual to qualify a site for the National Register. Advocates must also demonstrate its historical significance, and its integrity, meaning important elements of the original structure must remain.

For the Norlina, that task fell largely to Deborah Marx, a maritime archaeologist who also worked on the Doghole Ports Project and who prepared the nomination for the state Historical Resources Commission.

Historical integrity can be in the eye of the beholder, but a few factors work in the Norlina’s favor, Marx said.

Among the compulsory categories in a National Register nomination is “integrity of location.” That one was easy. “With a shipwreck site, that’s kind of a given,” said Marx, who grew up in Burlingame but currently lives in Key Largo, Florida. “It sits where it sank.”

The Norlina’s precise resting place works to its advantage, too, the archaeologist said. Since 1971, when Salt Point State Park was expanded, it has lain on public land, a strong barrier to looters and souvenir hunters. An extended salvage operation removed the cargo and many usable items from the steamship before it sank in December 1926, but it hasn’t been bothered much in recent years.

Finally, one simple quality preserves the Norlina’s character: It was constructed entirely of steel pieces, riveted together.

“Similar vessels made of wood, there might be an engine left, but not the amount of hull pieces of the Norlina,” Marx said.

All in all, she said, this site has ample integrity.

“The question is, does Norlina currently reflect the way it was built and designed, and it surely does,” Marx said. “There’s enough of it there to say yes, this is a shipwreck. Yes, it’s the Norlina. And yes, it’s what you’re saying it is.”

As for historical uniqueness, there are currently 24 freighters on the National Register, but none of them are located west of Minnesota. Marx also pointed to the Norlina’s modified duty during World War I — first as a civilian merchant vessel armed with 4-inch guns of war, then, after it was acquired by the U.S. government, as a Navy cargo ship.

“There are no properties categorized as an ocean going freighter listed on the National Register that were built around the same time, share similar design specifications, or had comparable merchant marine career activities,” Marx wrote in her nomination.

California’s highest historical authority agreed with her Friday. If the National Park Service checks the final box — a determination that generally takes two to six months — the Norlina will receive national recognition nearly a century after her final run. Her status will be marked with a plaque, visible even in the highest tide.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.