The timbers turned up at Point of Breakers after resident David DeHart spotted them and tipped off Jason Graziadei, editor-in-chief of the Nantucket Current, who was covering the storm. Graziadei told NPR he drove out with his son Owen and found the wreckage right where DeHart said it would be. The wood juts out of the sand in a shape that suggests the outline of a ship's hull.
Heavy winds and seas battered the island over the weekend. Storms like that have a habit of rearranging Nantucket's beaches enough to expose things that have stayed buried for more than a century. For an island whose history runs thick with shipwrecks, a find like this pulls a piece of that past back into the open, at least for as long as the tide allows.
Nobody has confirmed yet which ship the timbers belonged to, though an 1884 wreck is the leading guess. Sand has a way of taking things back just as fast as it gives them up, so anyone curious about Point of Breakers might not want to wait too long to go look.