A Desperate Three-Hour Struggle in Willapa Bay
A mother fighting the tides and the wind after her sailboat capsized managed to save both her young children before rescue arrived.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
News has reached here of the narrow escape from death by drowning on Saturday afternoon last of Mrs. Charles Axford and two children, residing on Bone River, near Bay Center. This was her third escape from death in the waters of Willapa Bay. She was out on the bay in a sailboat with her two children, one a boy of 2½ years and a girl aged 13 months, when a gust of wind capsized the boat. She clung to the overturned boat and by superhuman effort succeeded in placing her children on the boat, and then she called for help. Three hundred yards away were two men in a boat, but the flapping of their sail drowned the sound of her voice. Her husband returned home from work at 6 o'clock, and as he reached the house a faint cry of distress reached his ear. Knowing his wife was on the bay, he ran to his boat and pulled along the river to where he could look out over the marshes, and then he beheld his wife's and babies' perilous position. He ran across the muddy marsh, swam the sloughs, and reaching the bay he threw off his clothes, and swimming out to the boat brought ashore his wife and babies, who had been in the water for three hours.
“She clung to the overturned boat and by superhuman effort succeeded in placing her children on the boat.”
Willapa Bay remains a rugged and unforgiving landscape for small craft, much as it was in 1892. While modern communication and rescue technology have changed the odds, the dangerous intersection of shallow marshes and erratic winds continues to claim vessels in this region.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.