Qualla: MV Diamond Knot

MV Diamond Knot: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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MV Diamond Knot: Built for a War That Was Ending

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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MV Diamond Knot: Quarter Past One, in Fog

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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MV Diamond Knot: The Run for the Beach

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Diamon...

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MV Diamond Knot: Getting It Back

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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MV Diamond Knot: A Dive Site Now

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, an...

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