Westport Maritime Museum, Westport, Washington
2013.09.09
On this final day of our trip, we left Ocean Shores and made our way down the southern Washington coast. While our rescheduling had brought us mostly sunny weather, the Pacific coast can be overcast any day of the year, and so it turned out to be for the remainder of our drive down the coast, until we reached Astoria on our way back to Portland.
In 1792, American Captain Robert Gray discovered and entered a large estuarine bay about 45 miles north of the Columbia River (he would also be the first explorer known to sail into that river just a few days later). He named it Bullfinch Harbor. The English Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver, whose contemporaneous explorations were more publicized, recorded the discovery as Grays Harbor.
Grays Harbor is considered to be a ria, a partially-submerged river valley open to the sea. At the end of the last ice age, as sea levels rose, the Pacific filled the lower portion of the Chehalis River valley. While the bay spans twelve miles at the widest point, the mouth is restricted down to three miles by two peninsulas.
This geography gave it appeal as a port relatively protected from Pacific storms, but it was considered too shallow for larger ships. In 1916, the Army Corps of Engineers completed a jetty at the harbor entrance, and by a decade later a channel had been dredged. Seventeen miles from the coast, the connected towns of Aberdeen and Hoquiam host the Port of Grays Harbor. Though it seems isolated compared to the ports in Puget Sound or Portland, the relatively short distance from the sea saves a day of sailing for the slow-moving ships.
We left Ocean Shores on the north peninsula, and drove all the way around Grays Harbor to Westport on the south peninsula. After crossing the bridge over the Chehalis River, we left US-101 and took WA-105 along the south side of the bay. Westport, Washington is the westernmost Westport in the world, beating Westport, California by less than a degree.
The Westport Maritime Museum occupies the 1939 Coast Guard station. The main building contains various artifacts of local seafaring and other history, arranged throughout several rooms on the first and second floors. Photography is not permitted inside.
A separate building contains the original first-order Fresnel lens from the Destruction Island lighthouse. It was constructed by the French clockwork and lens firm of Henry–Lepaute and installed on Destruction Island in 1891. The lens shines and slowly revolves, throwing patterns of light around the room.
Back outside on the grounds, in some relatively small, long glass enclosures are skeletons of a couple whales and other sea mammals.
Grays Harbor NWR