CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, Wash. — Metal clinked on metal as three small groups of U.S. Coast Guard students and their instructors clipped canvas waist belts to both sides of their 47-foot rescue boats, vital lifelines for staying onboard when the big waves come.
And on these waters, they always come.
The Columbia River, the fourth largest in America by volume, surges into the turbulent tides and currents of the Pacific Ocean here at a spot called the Columbia River Bar, where two far-west corners of Oregon and Washington meet at the river’s mouth to form a pincer. Waves 30 to 40 feet high are common in winter as river energy and ocean energy collide and then perversely recombine, swirling in complex patterns driven by tidal surges, winds and storms.
More than 2,000 boats and ships over the last two centuries have sunk or split apart on the sands and rocks around what locals simply call “the bar.” At least 700 lives have been lost, as vessels attempted to find a way through the unmarked and often fog-shrouded crossing, known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Cape Disappointment itself was named by a sea captain in the late 1700s who searched in vain for a way through it.
