The cargo is what makes this shipwreck strange. When the Diamond Knot went down off Tongue Point on the morning of 12 August 1947, she took seven million cans of salmon with her — an entire Alaska season's pack, the summed labour of canneries and fishing fleets, sitting in 135 feet of cold green water at the western entrance to Puget Sound. It was the largest cargo loss from a collision in Pacific coast waters up to that time. And then salvage crews went down and got most of it back. The cans were recovered, repackaged, and sold. Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest in 1948, people opened tins of salmon that had spent weeks on the floor of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and never knew it.
The Diamond Knot was a C1-M-AV1, one of the small, plain, diesel-powered cargo ships the United States Maritime Commission ordered by the hundred in the last years of the Second World War. Consolidated Steel Corporation built her, and she was commissioned on 23 December 1944 — a Christmas-week delivery into a war that had less than a year to run. She measured 388 feet 8 inches long and displaced 7,450 long tons fully loaded. Ownership rested with the War Shipping Administration, and United States Lines ran her from 1944 to 1947 under a bareboat charter. These ships were never meant to be beautiful or famous. They were meant to carry things across oceans in quantity, quickly, and then be disposed of. In 1947 the Alaska Steamship Company took over her operation, and she went into the northern trade — hauling canned fish south from Alaska at the end of each season.
The Strait of Juan de Fuca is a funnel. Everything bound for Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, and the Fraser passes through it, and in August the strait fills regularly with thick marine fog that reduces visibility to a few hundred feet. At 1:15 in the morning, during the night of 12 August 1947, the Fenn Victory — a Victory-class ship, partly loaded, outbound from Seattle — came out of that fog and struck the Diamond Knot on her starboard side. The bow drove in more than fourteen feet. The two vessels locked together and stayed locked, held in place by the wound itself, and for a time neither could move. That was the last moment when anything could have been done. When they finally came apart, the sea had a fourteen-foot opening into the Diamond Knot's hull.
What followed was nearly eight hours of a crew trying to save their ship by putting it aground. A vessel taking water can sometimes be beached — driven into the shallows so that she settles on the bottom with her cargo still reachable rather than sinking in deep water. The Diamond Knot turned for shore and made the attempt. She did not get there. At 8:57 that morning, in daylight, she went down in about 135 feet of water just off Tongue Point on the Washington shore, about twenty kilometres west of Port Angeles. The Fenn Victory was repaired and returned to service, as damaged ships usually are. The Diamond Knot stayed where she fell.
The salvage of the salmon was the part that made the story worth telling. Seven million sealed cans do not spoil quickly in cold salt water, and they were worth enough that recovering them from a hundred and thirty-five feet down was economically sensible — barely, and only if it happened fast. Most of the cargo was brought up, cleaned, relabelled, and put back into the market. Set against the record of maritime disasters on this coast, that is an unusual ending: a total loss of the ship, and something close to a full recovery of what she was carrying.
The wreck is still there, lying on a sloping bottom between roughly 70 and 130 feet, west of what is now Salt Creek Recreation Area. It has become one of the best-known recreational dive sites on the Washington coast — structurally interesting, shallow enough for sport divers, and swept by the fierce tidal currents of the strait, which means the timing of a dive is dictated by the tide tables rather than by anyone's convenience. Those currents also feed the wreck. Seventy-nine years of anemones, rockfish, and kelp have made the hull into reef. Of the cargo there is nothing left to find, which is the strangest part: the ship remains, and the seven million cans of salmon are long gone.
The Diamond Knot wreck lies at 48.1717 degrees north, 123.7173 degrees west, roughly 500 metres offshore of Tongue Point on the Washington side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, just west of Salt Creek Recreation Area and about 20 km west of Port Angeles. Best viewed from 1,500 to 3,000 feet on an east-west track along the Olympic Peninsula shoreline — the wreck itself is not visible, but Tongue Point is a distinct rocky knuckle projecting from an otherwise straight bluff coast, with the Crescent Bay shoreline curving away to the west. Vancouver Island fills the horizon 20 km north across the strait. Nearest airports: William R. Fairchild International (KCLM) at Port Angeles, about 20 km east; Victoria International (CYYJ) across the strait to the north; and Victoria Harbour water aerodrome (CYWH). This stretch of the strait is notorious for dense summer marine fog, often forming overnight and burning off by midday, and for strong westerlies funnelling in from the open Pacific; the shipping lanes carry heavy commercial traffic year-round.