On 19 November 1983, Blue Magpie was en route to Vancouver, to pick up lumber, after unloading a cargo of Salvadoran coffee in Long Beach, California.

[1] Caught up in a storm, the ship attempted to take shelter in Yaquina Bay, but smashed into a coastal rock jetty and broke apart, causing a major oil spill.

[3] It transpired from Coast Guard radio logs that the ship's captain, Kim Gap Bong, had been repeatedly warned of the danger of trying to enter the harbor.

[5] A study into the long-term effect of the oil spill on bird numbers found that certain species, in particular the American coot, had shown a significant decline.

However, this could have been due to external factors, such as that year's occurrence of El Niño, so the overall impact of the spill was deemed impossible to determine.