The ship that died as Coast Trader had already lived under two other names. Built as the SS Holyoke Bridge in 1920 by the Submarine Boat Company in Newark, New Jersey, she was one of 118 identical Design 1023 ships rushed into production by the Emergency Fleet Corporation for World War I. She arrived too late for the war, delivered in May 1920 when the fighting was already done. The United States Shipping Board operated her for six years before selling her to Swayne & Hoyt Lines of San Francisco, who rechristened her Point Reyes in 1926. A decade later she changed hands again, becoming Coast Trader under the Coastwise Line Steamship Company, homeported in Portland, Oregon. Powered by Westinghouse steam engines and two boilers, the 324-foot vessel could manage 10.5 knots. When Pearl Harbor shattered the peacetime illusion on December 7, 1941, the Coast Trader was pressed into service as a contract cargo ship for the U.S. Army just fifteen days later.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy dispatched five submarines to prowl the West Coast of the United States. Among them was I-26, commanded by Minoru Yokota. By June 1942, I-26 had participated in the opening stages of the Aleutian Islands campaign before sailing south to patrol off Washington State. On that clear June afternoon, the Coast Trader departed Port Angeles for San Francisco carrying blank newsprint. She had just cleared the Strait of Juan de Fuca when I-26 found her. The submarine had been shadowing the ship for four miles at periscope depth, tracking her since Neah Bay. The Coast Trader's lookouts were scanning for exactly this threat, but I-26 was already beneath them and closing.

The torpedo struck below cargo hatch number four in the stern. Captain Lyle G. Havens ordered the crew to abandon ship, and all 56 aboard -- nine officers, 28 seamen, and 19 Army armed guards manning the deck guns -- scrambled into a lifeboat and two life rafts. The radio was damaged; no SOS went out. The Coast Trader sank in 40 minutes. Then the real ordeal began. A nighttime storm brought 60-knot winds and heavy seas, snapping the tow line between the lifeboat and the rafts. By morning, the lifeboat crew raised their sail and pressed on, unable to find the rafts in the heaving ocean. Two days later, at four in the afternoon, the fishing schooner Virginia I spotted the lifeboat and called in a distress signal. A Coast Guard aircraft located the two rafts by their flare the following day, and a Canadian corvette recovered those survivors on June 9. They had spent 40 hours soaked and shivering on open water. One crew member died of exposure.

The U.S. Navy initially refused to acknowledge that Japanese submarines were operating off the West Coast. With German U-boats already ravaging Atlantic shipping during what submariners called the Second Happy Time, admitting a Pacific threat as well was too much. Officials attributed the Coast Trader's loss to an internal explosion. The truth emerged only when Commander Yokota returned to Yokosuka on July 7, 1942, and reported torpedoing a merchant vessel at the exact date and location. He also reported shelling the Estevan Point lighthouse on June 20, making it the only place on Canadian soil attacked during the war. I-26 itself was sunk during the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944. The Coast Trader lay undisturbed on the sea floor at 148 meters until 2016, when the research vessel EV Nautilus sent remotely operated vehicles Hercules and Argus down to the wreck. They found her sitting upright, encrusted with marine life that had turned a wartime grave into an artificial reef. NOAA maritime archaeologist Dr. James P. Delgado began studying the site, noting one lingering concern: an estimated 8,088 barrels of fuel oil still aboard.