The Union Steamship Company of British Columbia ordered Catala from a Scottish shipyard to serve the isolated communities scattered along Vancouver Island's west coast and the mainland inlets reaching north toward Alaska. Named after Catala Island at the entrance of Esperanza Inlet -- itself named for Father Magin Catala, a Catholic missionary who had served at Santa Cruz de Nuca in 1793 -- the ship was licensed to carry 267 passengers: 120 in staterooms, 48 in steerage bunks, and the rest on deck. Captain James Findlay delivered her from Scotland to Vancouver, navigating the long voyage around the Americas that was routine for ships joining the Pacific fleet. At 229 feet long with a beam of 37 feet, she was compact enough to work the tight channels but sturdy enough for open water. For the communities she served -- Port Simpson, Stewart, Prince Rupert -- the Union Steamship fleet was a lifeline, not a luxury.

On November 8, 1927, at one in the afternoon, Catala was southbound from Stewart with Chief Officer Ernest Sheppard on the bridge. She was navigating the southern channel inside Finlayson Island, headed for Prince Rupert, when she struck Sparrowhawk Reef. Captain Alfred E. Dickson ordered the lifeboats lowered immediately. Local First Nations people arrived in canoes and helped evacuate every passenger to Port Simpson. No one was lost. The grounding was severe enough that Catala was declared a total loss, but the Union Steamship Company was not ready to give up on her. Salvagers refloated the ship, repaired her, and returned her to the coastal routes she had served. It was a second life that would last another three decades -- an improbable rescue that made her survival on Damon Point all the more ironic.

Catala was retired from Union Steamship service in 1958, but retirement did not mean the scrapyard. She was converted into a floating hotel, a second career that lasted until 1965, when she was towed to Damon Point on the Washington coast and deliberately grounded. Whatever plans her owners had for the beached hull never materialized. The ship sat on the sand while vandals stripped what they could carry and weather stripped the rest. In the late 1980s, a girl fell through a rusted section of deck and broke her back. Her family sued the State of Washington, and the state ordered the wreck cut down to sand level and buried. That should have been the end of the story.

Winter storms in the late 1990s began uncovering the hull. Each season exposed more steel, more structure, more evidence that burying a 229-foot ship in beach sand is a temporary solution at best. The wreck became a landmark of sorts -- a rusted skeleton emerging from the surf at Damon Point State Park, near Ocean Shores. Then in April 2006, a beachcomber spotted oil sheening on the water around the wreck. The Washington Department of Ecology cordoned off the site and discovered that Catala still held 34,500 gallons of heavy fuel oil in her bunkers -- fuel loaded decades earlier that the sea had finally breached. Cleanup crews pumped out the oil and scrapped what remained of the hull. The area around Damon Point is nesting habitat for the snowy plover, an endangered shorebird, making the fuel leak a threat not just to the beach but to one of the coast's most vulnerable species.

Fragments of Catala's hull may still surface after heavy storms. The ship spent forty years as a fixture of the Damon Point shoreline, longer than she spent in active service. Her story tracks the arc of the entire Union Steamship era: the Scottish-built ships that connected British Columbia's roadless coast, the groundings and rescues that came with navigating reef-strewn channels in all weather, and the slow decay that followed when diesel engines and highways made the coastal steamers obsolete. Catala was not the most famous Union Steamship vessel, but she may be the most persistent -- a ship that survived a reef, a retirement, and a burial, and kept reappearing until the state finally hauled her out for good.