August 29th, 2003, ~Enter a young kid.... with a Hi8 recorder....the start of a long journey~ When I first saw the Dominator I was just a few days past my 15th birthday. My father and I visited the site as a belated present and it was the first shipwreck I'd ever seen. To say it left an impression on me is an understatement... having grown up with tales of WW2 from my Grandfather (A veteran of D-Day) I knew only too well what kind of a ship it was and it thrilled me to see it.
At that time, August of 2003, the Starboard (or right side) Bow of the ship was basically intact... To describe it in terms that would make sense, it appeared as if a giant saw had been used and cut off the forward 30 feet of the ship from top to bottom and laid it out on its side. The 'stem' or edge of the bow was facing the ocean and the empty hole for the Starboard anchor faced the sky.
The deck, which was now straight up and down like a wall, still contained a pair of mooring bitts (used for tying the ship to the dock) as well as some other rusted gears and holes for the anchor chains now long gone. Beneath the crushed hull was a huge set of gears which I learned later used to sit on the deck and have now fallen through and been 'run over' by the rest of the ship.
The beach was (and still is) littered with razor-sharp shards of metal and Iron, some as big as an SUV, with the biggest attraction being the bow of the ship, and the large wrecked crane. Not far from the crane were the remains of one of the ship's masts. Affixed to it was a large overhead light fused to the metal with rust. The mast was a cool thing to see because of its unique shape and the overall identifiable condition it was in.
Debris was heaviest here in what I can only imagine was once the ships mid-section, and it looked to me as if it had flown apart like a giant jigsaw puzzle... everything from side plating to pipes, to iron fittings, to deck gear, crane hooks, and rusted cable lay in every imaginable form on the beach in this one area. We took a small bunch of rusted metal as a souvenir but it, unfortunately, corroded in the intervening years before my next visit. A final memory... We had approached the site from the Southern end of the Palos Verdes point and I remember there being the wreck of a car at the bottom of the hill upon the rocky beach. Also about halfway between that car wreck and the Dominator were the remains of two safes laying in the water. Both had their doors missing and inner contents long emptied. I always wondered how they'd gotten there and if they were from the ship or not.
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