By Ron Brown
 
September 3, 2010
 
BROOKINGS-HARBOR, Ore. - Brookings-Harbor on the Southern Oregon coast is a quiet town with a long history of sport and commercial fishing.
 
On August 16th, 1972, it was a cool, drizzly day with dozens of small boats heading out for the start of the sport salmon season. Little did they know what trouble was just over the horizon.
 
"This has always been the safest bar on the Oregon Coast since it was built. People get lulled into a sense of security and life jackets and buoyant cushions. They're on-board. But you don't think you're gonna need them, because it looks so calm out there when the morning started," Harbor Commissioner Kathy Lindley said.
 
Calls started coming in a little after 8 a.m. from boats near Crescent City that the winds and seas were picking up. No warnings had been issued and, according to a board of inquires report issued two years later, the only communications about what was blowing up came from boats talking to other boats.
 
"One of our fishermen's wives was parked at the front door with the CB. She was monitoring CB and Jayne was doing relays from what she could hear to Peggy, so the Peggy could report it to the station," Lindley said.
 
Winds were reported from between 50 and 80 miles-an-hour. It soon became a life and death struggle as the storm moved across the St. George Reef towards Brookings and Gold Beach.
 
"It was just one of the freak storms that happened. And the National Weather Service was responsible for making those declarations of unsafe seas," Lindley said.
 
"What impresses me about this is it was a very cloudy day to start. The pressure was falling rapidly, which is an indication that there is a storm coming. The low came through. It had to be low pressure because it was so windy. We had reports. I read reports of 86-mile-an-hour gusts. Rain was falling horizontally. They had trees down, power lines down. So it was an intense storm, but it was intense on a very local level," KDRV Meteorologist Scott Lewis said.
 
The local radio station was off the air and power was out all over the Brookings area. Communication was spotty, except for the CB traffic between the boats in distress.
 
It's estimated that 69 small boats were caught in the storm. Many could not navigate in the high winds and capsized. Many sank and were never seen again. Wreckage of several washed up on the beaches. For days, searchers looked for survivors or bodies. In all, 13 people died or were never found, including most of the members of a Grants Pass family, the Friend family, in a boat called the "Karen-I".
 
"They had one son that did no go out sport fishing that day. And, his family was wiped out. His mother, his father, and two brothers were taken," Lindley said.
 
A memorial was put up a couple years after the incident to recognize those who died, many of whom whose bodies were never found. Additional names have been added as others have lost their lives at sea in this area.
 
"We needed to remember all the people that were lost, especially when some of the bodies were not recovered. This is the headstone for a number of the people, and the only headstone that I'm aware of," Lindley said.
 
For the Coast Guard, it was mayhem trying to get to as many of the struggle boats as possible. But many people did survive as a result of their valiant efforts. One fishing captain, who had not gone out, fired up his 50-foot boat, and went out to the bar. He placed his vessel between the crashing waves and the struggling smaller boats so they could turn about and return safely to the harbor.
 
In the months following the storm and boating disaster, fishing groups worked out an arrangement with the Coast Guard that allowed the agency to utilize CB radios to communicate with small sport fishing boats.