Highway 1 north of Point Arena hangs on the bluffs above the ocean. Below it the coast breaks into small coves. Most are just rock and surf with a sliver of gravel at the back. A century ago many of them were ports.
Too small for a dog
The Redwood Coast ran from San Simeon up to the Chetco River in Oregon. Only a handful of its harbors could take large ships. Caspar, Crescent City, Humboldt, Noyo and Mendocino were the big ones. About twenty more could handle medium-sized coasters.
The rest were what sailors called dog-hole ports. The story goes that a schooner there had a harbor barely big enough for a dog to turn around in. Mendocino County alone once had about thirty shipping points. The trade ran from the mid-1800s into the 1930s.
The reason was redwood. Mills went up on the bluffs wherever there was timber and a creek. Roads were poor or missing. The schooners were often the only link between a mill town and the markets in San Francisco.
The schooners
Most doghole schooners were small two-masted ships with fore-and-aft sails. Many were later fitted with steam engines. Hulls were often built along the coast and towed down to San Francisco to be finished.
One builder, Matthew Turner, came to California in the Gold Rush. He opened his first San Francisco shipyard in 1875. He moved to Benicia in 1883 and kept building until 1902. He launched about two hundred vessels in all. His usual schooner ran eighty to ninety feet.
One of his larger ones was the J. C. Ford. Turner built her in 1882 for the Mendocino Lumber Company. She was a three-master, 123 feet long, and she loaded under the chute at Mendocino Harbor. Her luck was strange. About three hundred miles east of Honolulu, a falling meteor struck her mainmast and set a fire. The crew threw gear overboard to fight it and fished it back out afterward. She survived that. In 1893, near Grays Harbor in Washington, seawater got into a cargo of lime in her hold. The lime caught fire and she was lost.
Captains learned the coves by heart. Mills sat on the sheltered side of a point. A schooner tied up bow-first into the swell. She would pitch but not roll, and that made loading easier. Many tied up to a buoy that was nothing more than a log anchored to the bottom. Loading usually took about two days.
Chutes and wire
At first the lumber went out to the ships in small boats called lighters. It was slow work. By 1860 the mills were building apron chutes. A wooden slide ran down from a bluff that could stand 150 feet high. At the bottom a man called the clapperman worked a hinged brake to slow each load. Boards that got away could kill him or the crew on deck.
Some chutes ran six hundred feet down the cliff. A few carried live hogs.
Steel cable changed the work in the 1870s. Wire chutes ran from the bluff out over the water. A whole sling of lumber could ride down at once. Ships with deeper hulls could load farther from the rocks.
A hard coast
The coves hid rocks under the surface. Cross currents and shifting sandbars made them worse. When a storm blew in, ships at a landing had to run for open sea. Sailing ships often could not get clear in time.
The State Lands Commission lists 160 shipwrecks off the Mendocino coast between 1850 and 1900. One storm in November 1865 wrecked ships at Noyo, Caspar, Little River and Mendocino in the same week. The schooner Sue Merrill wrecked in 1866, four hours after her launch. Nobody died.
Steam schooners began working the coast around 1900. They could run from a storm under power. They fared better than the sailing ships.
The end of the trade
The wire chutes in the north were gone by the start of World War II. Along the central coast they lasted until the coast highway opened. A local writer, Walter Jackson, later tracked down the history of nearly three hundred doghole schooners. He published it himself in 1969. In 2016 California State Parks and NOAA surveyed old doghole sites on the Sonoma coast.
Why it stayed with me
I've ridden Highway 1 north of San Francisco more times than I can count. I first learned of the coves as I drove through the area on my way to Humboldt State University in the 80s. For years those coves were just scenery to me. Years later I stopped into the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino. Its archives hold the records of the old doghole ports and the shipbuilders like Matthew Turner. Now I look down at every one I pass. I try to picture the cable strung out over the water and a schooner pitching on her mooring below the bluff.