COOS BAY — It was the perfect day for the beginning of the end of the shipwrecked New Carissa.

The sea was flat Tuesday, the wind was gentle and the waves crashing into the New Carissa didn’t pack much of a punch.

Those perfect conditions came about a week too soon.

 Titan’s two jackup barges, the Karlissa A and Karlissa B, sitting at the city docks in Coos Bay, were not quite ready.

“This is a jacking day — had we had been ready,” Titan Salvage Managing Director David Parrot said.

Titan is a Florida-based salvage firm hired by the state to remove the shipwreck from the surf on the North Spit.

Parrot looked out over the ocean where the beach site connector tower will soon rise about 30 feet above the foredune on the North Spit.

Parrot said there have been just a few suitable days to tow the massive barges to sea and plant them in the surf of the North Spit in the last few weeks. Titan needs calm seas, with swells of 3 feet or less and a high tide that pushes the breaking waves farther up the beach, to position the barges and begin jacking them up.

Titan will have to wait for another perfect day.

Once all the pieces are in place, Titan will waste no time getting the process going. The six jacks on each of the barges will push huge metal legs 30 feet into the sand for stabilization. The work and storage platforms will be next to the shipwreck, about 30 or 40 feet above the water. Jets on the legs will force either air or water into the sand to blast a path. Once the jacking process begins, it will take four or five days to get the right depth and connect the tower and cable car, which will transport crews and equipment to and from the beach.

 After that, it will be an around-the-clock process with salvors cutting, removing and arranging pieces of the New Carissa on the decks of the barges.

But first, a few finishing touches are needed on the barges.

Crews spent weeks welding the huge legs, which arrived in pieces at the end of March, together. Titan’s engineering director, Phil Reed, estimated by the end of this week or the weekend, two of the 12 legs needed to support the barges will be installed into the jacks. Foredune Road’s bumpy, sandy, uneven terrain leads to the bypass road, which, in contrast, is covered in smooth 4-inch-thick mats a few shades darker than the sand on the North Spit. The bypass leading around the beach work site is ready, too. All the permits required from state agencies, Coos County and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, are in place.

Prepping the Karlissas and beach site is taking just a little longer than anticipated, but Reed isn’t too concerned about the timeline.

“There’s been no big, major show stoppers,” he said.

The barges should be ready on the 20th or 21st, Reed said. The tower, perhaps by the end of this week, will be ready for installation.

Reed is sure the Karlissas still will be hauling the New Carissa’s stern back into port — in pieces — sometime in August.

“It will be a challenge, but we feel pretty confident,” Reed said.

His confidence his buoyed by a new discovery about the position of the ship.

Titan’s load may have been lightened — quite literally. Parrot said when he took a closer look at the wreck on a recent low tide, he discovered less of the ship than previously thought is submerged in sand. As bulky as it is, what remains of the New Carissa is much smaller than the wrecks Titan typically salvages. Both of those peculiarities will help with Titan’s plans to use pullers connected to the wreck with three-inch thick anchor chains to lift it out of the sand.

But in keeping with its stubborn legacy, the New Carissa isn’t offering any more favors. Working in the surf zone and having to travel 1,000 feet by cable car from beach to barge will be a considerable challenge, Reed said.

 Another challenge, not just for Titan, but for the county and state agencies, is access to the North Spit. Titan’s bypass road will allow people to get out to the spit, except for a few brief closures to move equipment. In those cases, a flagger will direct pickup trucks until the road opens again.

Dennis Turowski, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management Umpqua Office field manager, said his agency expects a traffic jam just like when people came out in droves this winter to see the rediscovered remains of the shipwrecked George L. Olson.

“We are kind of gearing up for the same response,” Turowski said.

As the project extends into summer, the Foredune Road will dry out and sand become looser, making it likely visitors could get stuck. Any blockages in the road could create problems for work crews, especially in an emergency. Turowski said those planning to venture out by car should make sure they are in high clearance, four-wheel drive vehicles.

Once on the bypass road, the plastic mats will make driving around the site easy. But Reed said the same is not true for those on horseback. He said riders should try to avoid the mats, which can be slippery for horses.

Onlookers should be sure to watch for restricted snowy plover nesting zones while near the work site. The 240 acres of dry sand, starting just south of the wreck, are closed to public access. People can walk in the wet sand in those areas. Flying over the nesting site in planes or helicopters is a no-no, too, Turowski said.

Although the project most certainly won’t be easy, all involved in the process share the same opinion: The New Carissa will be removed.

“This is the only thing we do,” Reed said. “We work all over the world and this is what we do.”