Jerry Lewis's Yacht Pussycat Wrecked Near Gorda

On the morning of July 19, 1966, a comedian’s brand-new yacht was carrying him south along the Big Sur coast toward San Diego. By the end of that day she was firewood on a beach in Monterey County, and five people were standing on the sand in life jackets watching her come apart.

The wire services called the place Gorda. A sign salvaged off the vessel says Lopez Point. The Plaskett family, who lived on that coast and drove down to look, remembered something more exact than either: the wreckage lay a few hundred feet north of the mouth of Willow Creek.

This is what the record establishes, what the family remembers, and what is still unsettled.

The new yacht Pussycat

Pussycat was a 65-foot custom Chris-Craft — a cabin cruiser in the wire copy, a motor yacht in the auction catalog, and by any description an expensive object. The Associated Press put her at $250,000. Time, ten days later, called it $350,000. Nobody has produced the purchase paper that would settle it.

She was new, and this was Jerry Lewis’s first real cruise aboard her. Time’s account catalogues the fittings with obvious relish: crystal in the galley, mahogany paneling everywhere, and a pair of deck chairs stenciled Mr. Captain and Mrs. Captain. She had come south out of the San Francisco Bay Area, bound for San Diego, after Lewis finished an engagement at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos.

Aboard were five people: Lewis; his captain, Joe Proulx; his secretary, Carol Sarabino; and two more men whose names have not yet been established.

The leak, in fog and rough seas

The captain is the best witness to what happened next, and his account is the one that matters. Proulx recalled that the weather was rough and fog limited visibility. Then, as he put it plainly, the boat sprung a plank.

Water came in under the engines. Proulx tried to stuff a mattress into the place it was entering — the improvisation of a man who knows he is losing — and it had little effect. He called the Coast Guard. A Coast Guard aircraft came, and could not find them in the fog.

Time’s version, written for laughs but describing the same hours, has Pussycat “drifting helplessly” after she sprang her leak, until at last the table floated across the dining room. That is the moment a boat stops being a boat.

The precise time of the casualty has not yet been established. The surviving accounts indicate that the shoreline was visible to those aboard, although fog was heavy enough to interfere with an aerial Coast Guard search.

Abandoning ship

Proulx dropped anchor and the five of them got into a rubber life raft.

That anchor matters more than it first appears. It means the hull was left in one place, riding to its cable, while the people went another way — and it means that where Pussycat was abandoned and where she finally struck need not be the same stretch of coast at all.

The life raft overturns

They nearly made it. The raft came in close to the beach before the surf caught and turned it over. All five went into the water; all five reached land in their life jackets. The AP’s caption, filed within hours, records the whole of it in one flat sentence — a big wave overturned the raft, they reached land in their life jackets, nobody was hurt.

For a wreck on this coast, in fog, out of range of help, that is an extraordinary outcome. The Big Sur shore has drowned people for far less.

The yacht comes ashore

The anchor did not hold.

Pussycat dragged, came in, and broke up in the surf while the people who had been aboard her stood on the beach and watched — Time’s line is that they watched their status symbol break apart, which is unkind and probably accurate. Proulx called her a total loss. He lost a briefcase with cash and jewelry in her.

By the next day the wreckage was strung along the shoreline and the newspapers had a photograph of it, taken by the AP’s Dick Strobel, with people walking out to look at what was left.

The wreckage at Willow Creek: a Plaskett family memory

Contemporary reports generally identified the casualty as occurring near Gorda or Lopez Point. The Plaskett family remembered its aftermath more precisely.

Bill Alderson, then ten years old, recalls being taken to the beach shortly after the wreck by his grandfather, Edward Abbott Plaskett — then eighty-four — and, as best he now recalls, an aunt and some cousins. He remembers substantial remains of a yacht lying on the sand and still washing ashore a few hundred feet north of the mouth of Willow Creek: sections of the vessel herself, and with them bedding, mattresses, furniture and a scatter of objects that had floated out of her and come in on the tide. His family identified the wreckage at the time as belonging to Jerry Lewis’s Pussycat.

It is worth pausing on what that would have looked like to a ten-year-old. Not a news item — an actual beach, with a rich man’s bedding on it.

This is eyewitness oral history, recorded from Bill Alderson in 2026, sixty years after the fact. No contemporary newspaper we have found names Willow Creek. The account stands on the memory of someone who was there, which is a real kind of evidence and a different kind from a wire caption.

It is also a memory that can be checked, at least in part, and it survives the check. His grandmother, Mabel Eva Sans Plaskett, had died on October 16, 1964 — a year and nine months before Pussycat came ashore — so she cannot have been on that beach, and the recollection was corrected accordingly. The family record and the memory agree on who was standing there.

Gorda, Lopez Point, and Willow Creek: understanding the place names

Three place names attach to this wreck, and they are not interchangeable.

Gorda is what the newspapers said. The AP put the casualty “off the coast 60 miles south of Monterey,” and the next-day photograph of the wreckage was captioned at Gorda.
Lopez Point is what the salvaged sign says. A wooden sign taken off the vessel and later sold with the Jerry Lewis estate reads: “From the yacht ‘Pussycat’ which broke up off Lopez Point, Monterey County, California July 19, 1966.”
Willow Creek is what the family said, and no document yet says.

Gorda and Lopez Point are about 10.6 miles apart — a real discrepancy, not a rounding. And it can be tested against the wire’s own arithmetic: Gorda lies roughly 56 miles south of Monterey in a straight line, Lopez Point roughly 44. “About 60 miles south of Monterey” fits Gorda considerably better than it fits Lopez Point.

Willow Creek enters the sea about 1.4 miles north of Gorda — close enough to be the same event in a wire reporter’s shorthand, and about ten miles from the headland named on the sign.

The likeliest explanation is the ordinary one. Local families name creeks, because a creek is where you park and where you walk down. Wire services and estate inventories name whatever appears on the chart at a scale a stranger can find. All three names can describe one afternoon without any of them being wrong — and the dragging anchor may account for the rest, if she was left off one place and came ashore near another.

That remains an interpretation. It is not established.

What happened to the wreckage?

The hull was a total loss and was never salvaged as a vessel. What survives is scattered:

A wooden sign cut from her, which passed through the Jerry Lewis estate and to auction, carrying the Lopez Point inscription.
A scale model of her, sold in the same estate lot with color photographs of the yacht and black-and-white photographs of the wreckage — quite possibly the best surviving images of what the Plaskett family saw on the sand.
The AP negatives from Dick Strobel’s take, if they are preserved in the AP archive.
Whatever the tide took, which on this coast is most of it.

Lewis went back to sea. Proulx’s account notes he bought Pussycat Too, and later Sam’s Place.

Photographs and surviving artifacts

This page carries no photograph of Pussycat, and that is deliberate.

The contemporary images are owned — the AP wirephoto by the Associated Press, the estate photographs by Julien’s Auctions, the newspaper page scans by their publishers and their digitizers. Being able to see a picture online is not permission to republish it. Rather than quietly help ourselves, we link to them and record what would have to be cleared:

View the contemporary AP photograph of the wreck — AP Photo/Dick Strobel
View the July 20, 1966 Roseville Press-Tribune page with the wreckage on the shoreline
View the Julien’s Auctions estate lot containing the model, the photographs and the salvaged sign

A modern photograph of the Willow Creek mouth and the beach immediately north of it belongs here, showing the ground the family walked. We do not hold one yet.

Sources

AP Photo/Dick Strobel, caption dated July 19, 1966 (Alamy image 525735099). Vessel length, value, persons aboard, the raft capsize. Rights-restricted — linked, not reproduced.
Oakland Tribune, July 19, 1966, p. 4, via the California Digital Newspaper Collection. Same-day report; voyage and vessel description.
Roseville Press-Tribune, July 20, 1966, p. 2, via CDNC. Photograph of the wreckage ashore at Gorda.
“People,” Time, July 29, 1966. The voyage, the fittings, the table across the dining room, the breakup watched from the beach.
“Book chronicles a life working for Jerry Lewis,” Sedona Red Rock News, January 8, 2016, reporting Joe Proulx, Journeys with Jerry. The captain’s own account: the plank, the mattress, the Coast Guard aircraft, the anchor.
Julien’s Auctions, item 38224, Jerry Lewis Pussycat Model Yacht (archived at WorthPoint). The salvaged sign and its Lopez Point inscription.
Bill Alderson, personal recollection, recorded August 3, 2026. The wreckage north of Willow Creek.
USGS Geographic Names Information System, feature 272210, Lopez Point.
Piedras Blancas Light Station history, Bureau of Land Management.

Two of these — the CDNC newspaper pages and the Julien’s lot description — have not been read directly by this project; both sites refuse automated access, and they are carried here on Bill Alderson’s own reading of them. Transcribing them properly is an outstanding task.

Research questions

What we would still like to know:

What was the exact time of the initial leak and of the abandonment?
Who were the two additional men aboard?
Where precisely did the yacht first touch bottom or break apart?
Was the hull first anchored offshore of Willow Creek, or of Lopez Point?
How soon after the casualty did the debris reach the beach north of Willow Creek?
Are Dick Strobel’s original negatives preserved in the AP archive?
Can Julien’s Auctions or the Lewis estate supply high-resolution wreckage photographs?
Does a Coast Guard casualty file survive?
Did the Monterey Peninsula Herald or the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune publish a more specific local account? Local papers name creeks; wire services name counties.
Did Jerry Lewis sue Chris-Craft over the loss, and what did the pleadings allege about the hull?

And one more, raised in the family

There are rocks standing well off this shore, far enough out to open a hull, and the coast between Point Sur and Piedras Blancas is a long unlit gap. Bill Alderson has asked whether any Coast Guard aid to navigation on this stretch had been discontinued or reduced before 1966 — and whether that might have had a hand in it.

Part of the question has an answer. The southern light, Piedras Blancas, was damaged by the earthquake of December 31, 1948; in 1949 its upper three levels including the lantern room were removed, cutting the tower to about 70 feet, and its first-order Fresnel lens was carried off to Cambria. It was a materially diminished light seventeen years before Pussycat came down this coast. It was not, however, extinguished: the station remained an active aid to navigation and was not automated and destaffed until 1975. What its characteristic and range actually were in July 1966, and whether it could be raised from off Gorda, would have to come from the Coast Guard Light Lists.

Set against that is the captain’s own account. Proulx describes a plank opening while the yacht was under way, followed by the mattress, the call to the Coast Guard and the raft. The flooding began before any grounding. On the evidence we have, offshore rocks are unlikely to explain the leak — though they remain very much relevant to where the hull finally broke apart, after the anchor let go.

The question stays open, and it is a good one. The Light Lists for 1955 through 1966 would settle the first half of it.

The surviving documentary record establishes that Jerry Lewis’s Pussycat was lost near Gorda and broke up off Lopez Point on July 19, 1966. The Plaskett family’s eyewitness memory preserves the more intimate local aftermath: sections of the yacht, bedding, furniture, and floating contents scattered along the beach immediately north of Willow Creek.

Contemporary reporting, the salvaged sign from the vessel, and the Plaskett family's eyewitness memory each name a different place. No exact wreck position exists, and none is shown here.