The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
On Christmas Eve morning, I was walking along the shore of Mountain Island Lake with my dog, Millie, when we came across an odd sight, a hollowed-out pumpkin in remarkably good condition that had floated ashore. I didn’t think much about it at first, as stuff washes ashore all the time; I’ve found everything from life preservers to baby bottles. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how weird my find was.
Most flotsam falls from boats, and it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which anyone would take a pumpkin on a boat. At Halloween, maybe, but this pumpkin was in too good of shape to have been floating around for two months. It is perhaps a little easier to see how a pumpkin might have been placed at the end of a dock as decoration, but again, that would have been weeks ago, and why would someone have hollowed it out but not carved it? And why was the top just a few feet away up the beach? I suppose it could have been some wildlife thing where people leave pumpkins along the shore as a habitat for … well, honestly, I don’t know of anything that lives along the beach and makes it home in a pumpkin. If you have a theory, I’d love to hear it.
When I say that stuff washes ashore all the time, I’m not just talking about my experiences on Mountain Island Lake and Lake Norman. My childhood home was located a half-mile from Sandusky Bay, and I spent a lot of time fishing and walking the rocky shore. One day when I was 9 or 10, my school bus was navigating the twisty road that mirrored the shoreline for a few hundred yards before angling inland toward town when I came upon a strange sight; an aluminum jon boat washed up high onto the rocks. From the glance I got as we passed, it appeared to be in good shape, and I excitedly told my father about it when I got home.
Dad wasn’t the most “nautical” of people, but free was free, so we packed into the old Chrysler and drove down to the bay. It didn’t take a naval engineer to discern that the boat, which had appeared more or less intact from the road, was far from it. It was riveted construction, as opposed to welded, and the force of the waves pounding against it had popped a good number of the rivets and bent the keel, making it unsalvageable. I was disappointed, but probably not as disappointed as the owner who woke up one morning to find his boat gone.
The wreck of that jon boat sat on those rocks for years, slowly pummeled into an unrecognizable hunk of twisted metal, and eventually buried under the stone beach. However, just a few miles away, the remnants of a much older and more impressive wreck are still visible when the wind and waves are just right.
The “Success” was a 120-foot sailing ship that arrived in Port Clinton in 1945. Built 100 years earlier, she had a long and storied history plying the South Pacific as an armed merchantman, prison ship and floating museum. In the early 1900s, she sailed to the United States, where she was a popular attraction at events along the Eastern Seaboard and the Great Lakes, including a stop at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
A few years later and nearing the end of her useful life, she was sold for scrap and towed to Port Clinton, where she grounded while attempting to enter the harbor. For more than a year, the massive ship sat stuck near the harbor entrance until, on July 4, 1946, a fire broke out, and she burned to the waterline as hundreds of spectators watched from shore. Her skeletal remains are still there, in 15 feet of water, a half-mile from City Beach, and when there is a strong wind from the south and the water level drops on the American side of the lake, you can still catch the faintest glimpse of her ribs poking above the surface.