The Great Doritos Shipwreck of 2006

Amanda McGowan: The seas off of the Outer Banks of North Carolina can be a sailor’s nightmare. The winds whip in every direction, the weather is unpredictable, and the sands and the seafloor are constantly shifting underneath you. And that’s not even mentioning all the hurricanes. For the last 500 years, thousands of ships have met their doom here, bestowing on this place the ominous nickname. The graveyard of the Atlantic. And in 2006, this treacherous stretch of coastline saw one of its most unusual cargoes ever wash up.

Joseph Schwarzer: Let’s face it, it’s not every day that you have thousands of bags of Doritos washed ashore anywhere.

I’m Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, we’re taking you to Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks to tell you the story of the 2006 Doritos shipwreck. Or, as the locals call it, the chipwreck.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Amanda: Stories about shipwrecks often start in the same way: with a storm. In November 2006, that storm was a nor’easter off the coast of North Carolina, and a container ship called the Courtney L found itself caught right in the middle of it. The Courtney L was on its way from Wilmington, Delaware to Costa Rica when it happened. It’s unclear exactly what caused this mishap—maybe a huge wave or a stormy gust of wind knocked against the ship—but four of its containers, giant tractor-trailer-sized containers, fell off into the ocean. Along the waves, they bobbed like forlorn, forgotten sailors. Three were lost, but one ended up near the shore, where it was spotted by a crew of charter boat fishermen.

Joseph: And they went over to investigate and opened it up, and it was filled with Doritos.

Amanda: That’s Joseph Schwarzer. He’s the director of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras Village on the Outer Banks. And yes, he said, Doritos, as in the cheesy, triangular corn chips. And once the fishermen cracked open that container full of Doritos …

Joseph: Well, the Doritos just spilled out all over the beaches of Frisco, literally thousands of bags of Doritos.

Amanda: Specifically, red bags of nacho cheese flavor and blue bags of cool ranch flavor were spread all up and down the beach, like sparkling metallic jellyfish. Now, before we get any further here, there’s a reason why shipwrecks—or in this particular case, chipwrecks—happen along the Outer Banks to begin with. And that has to do with their geography.

Joseph: It’s been described as a ribbon of sand.

Amanda: The Outer Banks are a thin stretch of land, really just a collection of peninsulas and islands that have been connected over the years by bridges and ferries. This little ribbon starts up in Virginia and then extends halfway down the length of North Carolina for almost 200 miles.

Joseph: They’re very narrow islands. On one side you have the Atlantic Ocean, on the other side you have the Pamlico Sound. There are times when you can stand on the dune and you can see the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pamlico Sound on the other.

Amanda: Today, the Outer Banks are a tourist’s dream. You’ve got endless sandy beaches, fresh crab shacks, I mean, come on. But, in the days before engines and satellite navigation, these waters often spelled disaster for sailors. This is also the place where warm water from the Gulf Stream heading up north and cold water from the Labrador Current heading down south collide in the middle, creating rough seas and unpredictable weather with severe storms like hurricanes and nor’easters all over the place. And then on top of that, there’s the shoals. Essentially, these are underwater sand dunes that extend for miles off the coast. And if you’re wondering, well, where are these shoals? That’s tricky too, because the exact location can be really difficult to pinpoint.

Joseph: And because they are sand, and because they are susceptible to the force of water, weather, etc., they will shift. So even if you think you know where it is one time, it may be someplace else the next time.

Amanda: So it makes sense that thousands of ships have sunk off of this coast. The oldest known wreck dates all the way back to 1585. And many of these are kind of mysterious. In 1814, Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia, who you may know from that one song in Hamilton the musical, was traveling to visit her father on a schooner called the Patriot. And one of the things she was carrying with her was a portrait of herself to give to her father as a gift. But at some point during their voyage, the ship just vanished without a trace. And so did everybody on board, including poor Theodosia. Only one object from the ship ever surfaced.

Joseph: And the portrait actually did turn up in Nags Head, it’s known as the Nags Head Portrait. How it got to Nags Head, what happened to Theodosia, what happened to the Patriot, we have no idea. And there are a lot of stories like that.

Amanda: But what happens when a shipwreck yields much more than just a single portrait? Say a whole cargo load washes up on the beaches of the Outer Banks. What happens then? Go to California and everybody kind of knows what to do if an earthquake hits. It’s something that you have to know and you soon learn through experience just from living in a place where earthquakes happen all the time. And on the Outer Banks, storms and shipwrecks are kind of similar. They’re so common that a kind of routine got established among people who lived there. First of all, the life or death questions were settled.

Joseph: Everyone on the island, when there was a wreck, their first concern was helping the survivors as much as they can; food, clothing, shelter, warmth, whatever they could do. And they had a reputation for that.

Amanda: But once survivors were taken care of, another question would present itself.

Joseph: After that, it was, okay, what are we going to do with this ship? What’s going to happen with the cargo?

Amanda: Because where there’s a sunken ship, there’s often treasure. And treasure turns heads.

Joseph: There’s an old story about if the call of “ship ashore” went out, even during a church service, everyone would clear out of the church and go immediately to see what the ship was.

Amanda: From colonial times until the mid-1900s, the attitude toward wreck busting, that’s salvaging the goods from a shipwreck, could be summed up in two words: finders, keepers. That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but really not by much. Traditionally, whoever was the first person to find the wreck and report it to local authorities had first dibs on the cargo. A wreck commissioner would be on hand to smooth out any of the claims between insurance companies and the ship’s owners, if they were still around. And then they would hold a vendue, or a beach auction, of everything that was left.

Joseph: When a ship came ashore, it was kind of like a Walmart coming ashore all of a sudden. There’s a delightful story of, in the 1850s, that one ship came ashore, and it was carrying a shipment of French bisque porcelain dolls. All right, now that was a luxury item. Every little girl on Hatteras had at least two of those dolls. Another time, it was silk hats. And when these things came ashore, people took advantage of it.

Amanda: And they kind of had to take advantage of it. Until relatively recently, like, say, the 1950s or so, the Outer Banks were extremely difficult to get to. Bringing things in from outside was expensive, and most people on the Outer Banks were making their living through fishing or raising animals. So there wasn’t a lot of money to go around.

Joseph: Life was pretty bare bones right through the Second World War. There wasn’t a great deal of luxury involved in livelihoods here.

Amanda: So residents made use of everything that washed ashore. That could mean furniture, canned goods, rope, tar. People even reused the lumber from wrecks to build their homes. Schwarzer says that when he and his colleagues were working on an oral history project in the early 2000s, they interviewed a local woman named Ida O’Neal. And they asked her about the 1927 wreck of a Norwegian freighter called the Sibaio. And the thing about the Sibaio was that it had been carrying 17,000 bunches of bananas.

Joseph: And we said, Ms. Ida, do you remember the Sibaio wreck? And her head goes down and she starts saying, bananas for lunch, bananas for breakfast, bananas for dinner, banana cake, banana pie. I never want to see another banana as long as I live. People on the Outer Banks use everything up. So those bananas were being used as a foodstuff for months after the wreck.

Amanda: Today there are more rules in place than there used to be about wreck busting. Just an example, Joseph says that if cargo washes up on private land, then the owners get first dibs. And if it washes up on Park Service land, the Park Service decides what to do with it. There is also more guidelines around protecting historic shipwrecks off the coast. But the spirit of wreck busting is still very much alive on the Outer Banks. When the call of “ship ashore” goes out, the locals know what to do. All this takes us back to November 29, 2006: the shipwreck. That morning, one local tackle shop owner on Hatteras Island got a call from the charter boat fisherman who found the container. So the tackle shop owner asked him, how’s the catch today? And the fisherman said, two stripers and 35 bags of Doritos. From there, the word spread really fast. And just like they’ve done for hundreds of years, the residents of the Outer Banks went out and they salvaged the wreck.

Joseph: And people went out with their pickup trucks and snow shovels and shoveled up bags of Doritos and put them in the back of their pickup trucks.

Amanda: Technically speaking, some of these chips washed up on a beach controlled by the Park Service, meaning these Doritos were property of the U.S. government. Rangers did show up later with bulldozers to clear the beach. But Joseph tells us that they likely regarded this tasty cargo as beach litter and were probably pretty happy to have, quote—these are Joseph’s words—public spirited citizens around to help clean up. And it seems like the residents were pretty happy to, most of them, at least.

Joseph: One of my board of directors ran a grocery store. And what upset him was after that wreck, he didn’t sell another bag of Doritos for five months.

Amanda: Doritos for lunch, Doritos for breakfast, Dorito cake. Okay, maybe not Dorito cake. Joseph Schwarzer remembers the day the Doritos made landfall. He was sitting in his office tied up with work when he got the phone call.

Joseph: Somebody called me up and told me about it. I said, that’s amazing. What a story that we make. I said, I wish I could get out there and get a bag or two. And I said, but I can’t leave the office right now. And I went out later that night to my car and there was a bag of Doritos sitting on the car. Somebody left it for me.

Amanda: But this bag, at least, did not get eaten. So we have that bag on display in the museum, along with the story of that wreck.

Joseph: The bag in the museum, by the way, is cool ranch flavored, if you’re wondering. If you want to see the remains of the famous shipwreck, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is open to the public Monday through Saturday. Special thanks to Joseph Schwarzer for telling us the story of the shipwrecked Doritos.

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Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. Our production team includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Willis Ryder-Arnold, Sarah Wyman, Manolo Morales, Gianna Palmer, Tracy Samuelson, John DeLore, Peter Clowney, McKenna Smith, Guinevere Govea. Our technical director is Casey Holford. This episode was mixed by Luz Fleming and our theme and end credit music is by Sam Tyndall.

This story originally ran in 2021; it has been updated for 2025.