On February 4th, 1999 a terrible storm was raging off the south Oregon coast. My mom and dad were at the beach celebrating my dad's birthday. The wind was so strong and the waves were so high that the 3rd floor windows of their hotel room were getting splashed with the waves. While my dad says that it was great fun to watch the huge waves crash against the hotel window (mom wasn't so excited about it!) there was other trouble just down the coast.     That same night the 639 foot long M/V New Carissa ran aground, never again to leave the sandy shore in one piece. And that is where our adventure begins.     Late last spring we were searching for a different sort of adventure, so we decided to try and find the wreck. We knew that it was near Coos Bay, Oregon, but we didn't know exactly where it was. We decided to try searching using Google Earth to see if the wreck might show up in a satellite picture. We were in luck because after a short search we found it! Using the latitude and longitude coordinates from Google Earth, we entered them into our GPS and set a date to go Adventuring!     We left at 4:00am one Saturday morning in June with our guest Adventurer, Trevor Taylor. This was Trevor's first adventure with us and it promised to be exciting. Trevor and I slept for the first two hours or so while my insomniac dad drove. After about 4 1/2 hours of driving our GPS told us that we were close, but the road ended about 2 miles from the wreck. We would have to walk.     2 1/2 miles of tall sand dunes later, we found the wreck! Only the stern of the ship was left as it had broken in two years before and the front 2/3's had been towed out to sea and sunk. After spending about an hour looking at the wreck and playing on the completely deserted beach we decided to head back to our car. I tried to find our way back by imagining that the dunes were a Camel's Humps, but we still got lost. Luckily my dad had saved the location of the car in the GPS so after a short 3 miles or so we were back at the car, cold, a bit hungry and wet, but very excited that we had found it. We had lots of sand in our shoes and our feet got pretty wet but even this didn't dampen our spirits. ***NEW CARISSA UPDATE!***   Work is currently underway to remove what is left of the shipwreck from the beach.  Crews are preparing to cut the stern into several sections and haul it out to sea and sink it.  I am very glad that we were able to see the wreck when we did.