Truro men find shipwreck at Ballston Beach
- On 03/07/2009
- In Miscellaneous
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By Kevin Mullaney - Wicked Local Truro
The ocean is full of secrets and mysteries, but it doesn’t fork over all that many clues, and rarely ones as big as the piece of a shipwreck that washed ashore two Fridays ago in the midst of a long nor’easter.
Two local men who had the chance to see it believe it was a 17th-century vessel, a remarkably ancient relic that they were able to capture in photographs before it was swept away again by storm tides, disappearing like a ghost.
“I saw a couple of people near this big black shape,” said Truro writer Sebastian Junger of his first encounter with the mysterious artifact.
It was just south of Ballston Beach, in an area where Junger swims and had found what he now knows are ribs from the wreck. The big black shape was about 20 by 40 feet long.
The tourists had no idea what they were looking at, he said.
“I was immediately struck by the shape of the hull,” said Junger.
“It was completely different, a rounded re-curve.” That is a shape he connected with old ships such as Spanish galleons, maybe even “a tumblehome,” he speculated, referring to the old wooden warship shape.
“It had a bulge at the water line. It was almost the contour of the shape of a woman.”
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