JAMES DUNSDON WAS DRIVING HIS truck through the darkness of a cold December night in the Cascade Range, almost 200 miles north of Sacramento. It was about to snow, and he was in a hurry. His headlights flashed on the vehicle in front of him, and for a moment, Dunsdon thought he was dreaming. There, gliding along the winding mountain road, was a World War II Allied landing craft. It was still wet, dripping as if it had just been lifted from the Mediterranean in 1943. “It just looked like the most surreal thing, this ghost boat,” he says.
Dunsdon wasn’t exactly surprised. After all, he had been the one to discover the boat on the shores of Shasta Lake in fall 2021, and he had been planning to retrieve it in the months since. That long and frigid December day, he and a small crew had resurrected the boat from its watery grave. But it was that knowledge that made the vision so remarkable. “The boat had gone from invading Sicily to being on a truck in the night in Northern California with an impending snowstorm,” he says. “That’s crazy.”
