[Scenario Seed] The Honda Point Affair.

[Catsmate]

A curious little incident that may fit into a AITAS campaign, or a Pulp or Call of Cthulhu game

The Honda Point Affair.

Honda Point (also known as Point Pedernales) is a spot on the rocky Gaviota Coast in the Santa Barbara County of California, about eight kilometres from the northern side of the Santa Barbara Channel off Point Arguello.
It’s a hazardous area, notorious for the off-shore rocks called the Devil's Jaw, and has been responsible for sinking ships since the Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century.

• There are more than sixty wrecks in the area bertween Point Arguello and Point Pedernales, less tha five kilometres.
  
• The location is now part of the US Air Force’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, which leads to all sorts of conspiratorial possibilities...
  

Honda Point is best remembered for ‘The Honda Point Disaster’, an incident in September 1923 which led to the loss of seven US Navy destroyers, and 23 deaths. It remains the largest peacetime loss of US Navy vessels.

On the evening of 08SEP1923 nine destroyers of a squadron of fourteen ran aground on the rocks of the Devils's Jaw, offshore Honda Point, while travelling at twenty knots. Two ships managed to manoeuvre free but seven were grounded and severely damaged.

The cause of the disaster is still rather contentious; a squadron of some fourteen reasonably modern warships of the Clemson class, fitted with radio communication and navigation equipment, were steaming at around twenty knots for their home port of San Diego, returning from San Francisco after war games off the coast of Washington.

• One wonders exactly what those 'war games' were cover for....

The group was commanded by a USN Captain, Edward Watson, from the USS Delphy. That ship was also acting as the principal navigator for the squadron; the ship’s captain Donald Hunter acted as navigator, over-riding the ship’s actual navigator, a lieutenant Lawrence Blodgett.

• Hunter had just returned to sea duties after a period as a navigation instructor at the US Naval Academy.

Watson had ordered the squadron to simulate wartime conditions; remaining close together, under radio silence, without more than the bare minimum of navigation lights, and moving at speed.

In addition, the ships, and especially Hunter, relied on Dead Reckoning navigation, basing calculations of the ship's position measurements of it's on speed and course. However, the speed measurements, based on engine revolutions, may have been out by 10-15%. Only one RDF station was available at Point Arguello and many officers still distrusted such techniques.

At 21:05 the USS Delphy collided with an underwater rock. This was followed by seven more ships; within ten minutes all seven were wrecked. A ninth vessel, USS Chauncey, ran around during rescue efforts and was one of the total losses.

Much loss of live was prevented by the quick actions of Southern Pacific railway staff who saw the ships’ searchlight and realised that a collision had happened. They used the rail network’s telegraphs and phone lines to summon help.

The court martial for the officers involved, Watson as commodore, the captain and navigators of the Delphy and the captains of the other destroyers, blamed poor navigation, though several officers suggested unusual ocean currents, perhaps caused by the earthquake in Japan, contributed to the groundings.

Once the error in navigation occurred the prevailing sea and weather conditions guaranteed the doom of the squadron; a combination of high winds and heavy fog, plus the currents and swells, forced the ships into the rocks once they entered the area.

Seven ships, valued at approximately fourteen million dollars, were stripped of equipment and sold for salvage for little more than one thousand dollars.

The grounding wasn't the only marine incident in the area around that time.

Earlier the same day, the mail steamship SS Cuba ran aground on a reef about 500 metres from Point Bennett on San Miguel Island. In fact, one of the squadron's destroyers, the USS Reno, had paused to rescue some survivors.

Four days after the loss of the destroyers, a collision between the battleship USS Texas and a cargo vessel named the Sea Farer was averted not far away.

Some attributed these incidents in the Santa Barbara Channel to unusual currents caused by the great Tokyo earthquake of the previous week.

Some sixteen years before, on 11MAY1907, a Southern Pacific passenger train had derailed not far away, killing 32 people.

• If you want to add some new flavour to your conspiracy theories, the train was a special excursion carrying Shriners from Buffalo in New York on an excursion.
  

In 1885 a side-wheel steamership named the Yankee Blade, carrying over 1,200 passengers to Panama, struck rocks at  Point Arguello. A crowd of unruly men pushed their way past women and children into lifeboats, only to have many of the boats capsize. About 420 people drowned.

In 1911 four men were lost at sea when the Santa Rosa broke in half on the rocks.

The next decade wasn't much better; the cruise ship Harvard operating between Los Angeles and San Francisco ran around on the night of 30MAY1931 and the Japanese tanker Nippon Maru sank on 28MAY1933.

That same year one of the keepers of Point Arguello mysteriously disappeared.

More recently, 04NOV2000, a research vessel, the R/V Ballena, was hit by a rogue wave and capsized near Point Conception. Ballena, operated by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the time, broke apart in the waves against the rocky shore and was a total loss.

Game Use.

An odd little incident, one that might be used as a cover for an attack on, or by, the US Navy on some extra-terrestrial or other threat. Perhaps a group of aquatic Reptilians had decided to strike at the 'Land Parasites'? Or were the incidents the effect of some automated defense system, triggered by the earthquake, on a starship long buried in the ocean?

Notes.

The disaster from the SPR perspective

Wiki

Haze of Gray

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?