"Disaster at Honda Point: The U.S. Navy's Largest Peacetime" Topic

… Loss of Ships

"Honda Point, also known as Point Pedernales, is located just north of the entrance to the Santa Barbara Channel in Santa Barbara County, California. The area has been known to be hazardous as far back as the 16th century, when Spanish explorers coined the area the "Devil's Jaw" due to its treacherous and plentiful rocky outcroppings. Local mariners have long known to avoid the area at all costs, and the sailors involved on the 8 September 1923 incident were no exception. However, a perfect storm of radio and navigational errors, irregular currents, and poor visibility all came together at just the right time to result in the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships, and the tragic deaths of 23 men.

The story of the Honda Point disaster finds its beginning seven days earlier and some 5,000 miles away, when the Great Kantō earthquake tore through the main Japanese island of Honshū on 1 September 1923. With a magnitude of 7.9 on the moment magnitude scale, the earthquake shattered the cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, and the much of the surrounding prefectures. Well over 100,000 lives were lost in the quake, and the damage to Japan's infrastructure was estimated to have exceeded $15 USD billion dollars in today's currency. As a result of the mighty earthquake, unusually large swells and powerful currents swept through Pacific Ocean, reaching as far as the California coastlines…."

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Amicalement
Armand

To elaborate on what is going on here… this is where 9 out of 14 US destroyers steaming in column in a fog at 20kts piled up on rocks and were lost.

Lockwood and Adamson's "Tragedy at Honda" is a good read on this, describing the actions and fate of each destroyer in turn.

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand