Walking Lincoln City's Siletz Bay and Its Oddities: Oregon Coast Video

Published 07/27/2018 at 9:52 PM PDT
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Lincoln City, Oregon) – Much is going on at Lincoln City’s Siletz Bay, often in ways you can’t always see. Or at least you have to look hard in some circumstances. Sure, it’s known as the crabbing and clamming hotspot in this bustling central Oregon coast town. Of course, it’s excellent for sun bathing, sea gazing – and even star gazing.

But the bay has its surprises. Stuff just below the surface – literally. This video takes you on a brief walk around the bay’s famed dock and some of the driftwood-laden beach, letting you stroll around the more obvious delights. There’s more than meets the eye to this intriguing and calming bit of Oregon coast, and that you can read about below.

Odd Colored Rocks at the Bend. As you round the bend from Siletz Bay to the beaches of Lincoln City, some unique objects may present themselves just beneath the waves. It’s rarely seen, and it will depend greatly on how far the tide is out and how low sand levels have become, but it’s a puzzling yet wondrous sight.

Brightly colored rocks sometimes show up in this section of Lincoln City. And they’re not just bright colors – they’re unusual forms of greens and reds. They’re like streaks in these intertidal slabs, appearing in a way that’s almost crystal-like. As if you might be able to see through them. But you can’t. They’re simply either sea life that’s clinging to these rocks or they could be veins of rock material that help create the agates you find in the area.

There is one such jasper vein near the SW 35th St. access, buried deep beneath the sands.

Seals and Sea Lions in Siletz Bay. Sometimes as you’re gazing out into the soft splash of this central Oregon coast pleasant spot, you might see little heads bobbing up and down in the water – watching you. Yes, sometimes the wildlife here checks out the humans.

Seals and sea lions like to haul out on the edge of the Salishan Spit across the bay here – mostly harbor seals. You can see gobs of the slovenly creatures lounging around the sand on the other side and sometimes even hear them barking and carrying on.

At times, they frolic in the water, splashing and diving and flopping around again in the current. It’s then when you might spot one looking back at you.

Ghost Ship Legend. There have long been legends here of a ghost ship that appears in Siletz Bay, poking briefly out of a fog bank and then disappearing again. These paranormal legends have gone on for generations. There was even a documentary made around 2000 about the ghost legends of Lincoln City which had some purported witnesses to these spooky sights.

Even stranger: there is a ghost of a shipwreck here. A large sailing ship crashed in these waters more than 150 years ago and parts of it managed to lodge in the middle of the bay for a long time. Then chunks of it disappeared in the mid-century, however.

Shipwreck of the Blanco. Buried in the mud and muck of the bay is a brig named the Blanco, which wrecked in – presumably – sometime in 1864. It was bound for Coos Bay after leaving San Francisco late that year, but it was another year before a newspaper story in Salem recounted the wreckage in the bay. The masts were gone and its hull was essentially split in two. Its cargo vanished.

Its crew were missing as well.

There are not even really legends about what happened to them. It’s possible some local tribesmen might have killed them for their goods: some natives around the time were seen with clothing and equipment clearly salvaged from the wreckage in one way or the other. What local tribes are left on the central Oregon coast are not usually direct descendants of the indigenous peoples at the time because of forced movement elsewhere. More than likely they were killed in the wreck mishap itself.

What happened to the ship after its skeleton sank was a bit of a mystery still to this day. Its remains have popped up now and again, but apparently not since the '80s.

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