The experiment that may have saved a Washington town from falling into the ocean

A dynamic revetment project, created from long berms of piled stones and sand, appears to be keeping the shoreline from eroding

When David Cottrell was about three, his father drove him down a short road toward the beach in their home town of North Cove.

It was the early 1960s. The Cottrells owned, worked and lived on a cranberry farm on this part of the south Washington coast. The small, unincorporated settlement, founded in 1884, sat along an embayment behind Cape Shoalwater, a claw-like spit that curled into the north end of Willapa Bay, where an estuary opens into the Pacific. Between this powerful inlet and forested uplands, the cranberry trade had thrived for nearly a century.