Still Waving Goodbye To a Ship Out of Luck

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

I N THE 19TH CENTURY, the Blue Point Beach on Fire Island was an equal opportunity wreck site. Raging gales drove ships of every type and nation onto the outer bar, some never to be seaborne again. One such luckless vessel was the German tanker-steamer Gluckauf, driven aground on March 25, 1892, or the same date in 1893 (accounts vary).

The ship, said to be the world's first bulk oil carrier (though, fortunately, nearly empty at the time), worked its way too far up the beach to be towed off. Hard-working surfmen from the Blue Point Life-Saving Station near the community of Water Island rescued the crew by breeches buoy.

Wrecking tugs managed to dislodge the ship on April 7 and were towing it out to sea when the hawser broke and the Gluckauf came permanently ashore, according to an eyewitness account in "Wrecks and Rescues on Long Island," by Van B. Field.

The unlucky Gluckauf, its stern sunk in the sand and its bow up, became a Fire Island tourist attraction. Visitors posed on or near the vessel, as seen in the Benjamin T. West photo above. In about 1900, junk dealers built a narrow-gauge railroad over the beach hills and, using horse-drawn carts, removed everything they could strip.

Today the waves break over what remains of the hull. Though fishing is good at the site, surfcasters like Stuart Greenbaum of Brooklyn say their hooks sometimes get entangled in the underwater wreckage.