Lost 1956 - Ocean-racing sailing yacht (cutter)
Elda was a 46-foot ocean-racing yacht drawn by the American designer Philip L. Rhodes and built in 1937 by Anderson & Combs at New Haven, Connecticut. By 1956 she was a cutter owned and skippered by Henry M. Wise Jr. of Wilmington, Delaware, and sailed out of Gibson Island, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay.
In June 1956 she was one of the fleet in the biennial Newport-Bermuda Race, the ocean race that ends off St. David's Lighthouse after more than 600 miles of open Atlantic. At 1.38 a.m. on Wednesday 20 June, close to the finish, she struck the north-east reef about seven miles off the island - Wise blamed a failure to allow for the set of the current. Her crew of eight clung to the stern rail for nearly eight hours, and three of them were washed overboard and recovered. At dawn the head signalman at Fort George, Atholl Moulder, spotted the wreck; a rescue plane from Kindley Air Force Base dropped life rafts at its second attempt, and at 9.16 a.m. the men were picked up by Russell Young's charter boat Sea Wolfe, out as the press boat. A photograph of the time shows her going down with the crew gathered in the stern beside a life raft. The yacht, worth about $100,000, was the race's first loss since the Adriana in 1932; Teddy Gosling later dived on her and recovered money and gear, and Wise bought another yacht to race in 1958. The race organisers still list her as the only yacht lost by grounding in the race's history; the other boats lost were Adriana (fire, 1932) and two in recent years.
Her loss had an unexpected sequel. She came to rest almost on top of a far older wreck, the Eagle, an English merchantman lost on the North East Breakers in 1659 while carrying passengers and cargo from Plymouth to Jamestown. Finding the yacht led to the discovery of the 17th-century site, which Teddy Tucker later worked, recovering clay pipes, pewter spoons, candlesticks and other period finds.
According to Berg (1991), Elda lies in shallow water very close to the Eagle site, and her heavy lead keel (about 6,000 lb) and small engine could still be seen; the Eagle itself sits in a sand hole in about 35 ft (11 m) with two cannon visible. These are exposed reef sites on the north-east edge of the platform, so they need calm weather and a boat. Under the Historic Wrecks Act 2001 nothing may be disturbed or removed from any wreck without a licence.